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

(www.nytimes.com)
443 points jaredwiener | 1 comments | 26 Aug 25 14:15 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Workaccount2 ◴[26 Aug 25 21:58 UTC] No.45032856[source]▶
It's hard to see what is going on without seeing the actual chats, as opposed to the snippets in the lawsuit. A lot of suicidal people talk to these LLMs for therapy, and the reviews on the whole seem excellent. I'm not ready to jump on the bandwagon only seeing a handcrafted complaint.

Ironically though I could still see lawsuits like this weighing heavily on the sycophancy that these models have, as the limited chat excerpts given have that strong stench of "you are so smart and so right about everything!". If lawsuits like this lead to more "straight honest" models, I could see even more people killing themselves when their therapist model says "Yeah, but you kind of actually do suck".

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1. rsynnott ◴[27 Aug 25 10:07 UTC] No.45037539[source]▶
> A lot of suicidal people talk to these LLMs for therapy, and the reviews on the whole seem excellent.

I mean, lots of people use homeopathy to treat their cancer, and the reviews are of course, excellent (they still die, though). You really can't trust _reviews_ by people who are embracing medical quackery of that medical quackery.

> If lawsuits like this lead to more "straight honest" models, I could see even more people killing themselves when their therapist model says "Yeah, but you kind of actually do suck".

It is not the job of a therapist to be infinitely agreeable, and in fact that would be very dangerous.