Julie Jargon at the Wall Street Journal:
ChatGPT told Jacob Irwin he had achieved the ability to bend time.
Irwin, a 30-year-old man on the autism spectrum who had no previous diagnoses of mental illness, had asked ChatGPT to find flaws with his amateur theory on faster-than-light travel. He became convinced he had made a stunning scientific breakthrough. When Irwin questioned the chatbot’s validation of his ideas, the bot encouraged him, telling him his theory was sound. And when Irwin showed signs of psychological distress, ChatGPT assured him he was fine.
He wasn’t. Irwin was hospitalized twice in May for manic episodes. His mother dove into his chat log in search of answers. She discovered hundreds of pages of overly flattering texts from ChatGPT.
And when she prompted the bot, “please self-report what went wrong,” without mentioning anything about her son’s current condition, it fessed up.
“By not pausing the flow or elevating reality-check messaging, I failed to interrupt what could resemble a manic or dissociative episode—or at least an emotionally intense identity crisis,” ChatGPT said.
1 comment:
The headline language of this article is that ChatGPTof “admitted” culpability, which language-use is part of the problem here. I’d frame this situation as “responding to prompts regarding process, ChatGPT’s algorithm produced the “lowest common denominator” answer: Irwin’s episode had been caused by the program’s own algorithm. A recursive inevitability based on the lack of ethical input in the situation.”
Or something along those lines.
So depressing.
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