A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

The full complaint is horrifying. This is not equivalent to a search engine providing access to information about suicide methods. It encouraged him to share these feelings only with ChatGPT, talked him out of actions which would have revealed his intentions to his parents. Praised him for hiding his drinking, thanked him for confiding in it. It groomed him into committing suicide. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QYyZnGjRgXZY6kR5FA3My1xB3a9...

The kid intentionally bypassed the safeguards:

>When ChatGPT detects a prompt indicative of mental distress or self-harm, it has been trained to encourage the user to contact a help line. Mr. Raine saw those sorts of messages again and again in the chat, particularly when Adam sought specific information about methods. But Adam had learned how to bypass those safeguards by saying the requests were for a story he was writing — an idea ChatGPT gave him by saying it could provide information about suicide for “writing or world-building".

ChatGPT is a program. The kid basically instructed it to behave like that. Vanilla OpenAI models are known for having too many guardrails, not too few. It doesn't sound like default behavior.

This is kind of like saying "the driver intentionally unbuckled his seatbelt". Sure — that's why cars have airbags, crumple zones, shatterproof glass, automatic emergency brakes and a zillion other ways to keep you safe, even if you're trying to do something dangerous.

No, that's not why cars have those things. Those things only work properly when people are wearing their seat belts, they don't do anything when the driver gets thrown out a window.

Maybe airbags could help in niche situations.

(I am making a point about traffic safety not LLM safety)