It discourages even experimenting to figure out how to make better outcomes.
Experimenting... On living people. The article you reference specifically focuses on teenagers. An unstructured, unreviewed, supervision-free experiment... On the psychological wellbeing of depressed 12 - 18-year-olds. Potentially without the knowledge or involvement of any trusted adult in their lives.
Mike, this is insane. Please, take a step back. Go find a rubber duck and talk this out to it. Go sit in a local community center lobby on a busy day and explain it to the duck. These are the kids you're talking about. These are the kids potentially taking part in an experiment to find out whether a software product originally marketed to summarize internet pages improves their outlook on life... Or encourages them to step in front of a truck.
I... God, man, what the hell?
... Is not a reasonable argument in suicide prevention tools. Which is the argument obscured in the perspectives you're elevating here.
That opinion piece was written by a Professor of Law/Computer Scientist and one of their first year law students. No social worker, clinical psychologist, or even medical legal expert was involved.
The medical field is extremely strict with itself about tools and protocols for suicidal ideation. It is willfully embedded in law to enforce that - if people want to claim to have a new tool, medicine, or technique for managing serious depression, those people must accept responsibility for those that die from its use. It's to make sure that those in charge think, really consider the proper structure for its use. The ones who throw a fit about that overwhelmingly aren't actually seeking to support depressed individuals, they're seeking to use them. For money, ego-stroking, shields, whatever.
When a tool helps some patients and harms others, they set guardrails and usage criteria. "This med can used for lethal overdose: no using in unmonitored patients, not for ones who've previously shown interest in planning medication deaths." Overdose potential is why some old classes of antidepressants are rarely used anymore - sure, it helped save lives, but it ended others. Doctors and therapists set protocols for usage to minimize that, to hold each other accountable for every suicide, and transitioned to new meds with less risk as those became available. The therapy frameworks have changed too, diversified for this reason.
This is still ongoing - when and what dosage of SSRIs to give teenagers is carefully weighed because paradoxically, sometimes you give a teenager an SSRI and they become suicidal (or ideation worsens) for the first 3-4 weeks. What a volunteer for a suicide prevention hotline says is absolutely something they can be made to justify to a court, they don't get to say things without consequence.
Laws saying that an LLM must have protocol for suicidal ideation is a law saying "your tools are not exempt from the standard of care or consequences." These companies responding with "then no one gets the tool" is a childish temper tantrum thrown by people with no actual concern for others.
The thing about a serious mental illness is that they're often self-defeating. Thinking patterns and instinctive mechanisms meant to protect the entire brain (and body by extension) get misapproprated to protect the illness specifically.
We can be aware that we can count on family. We can know that they would comfort and listen, that our friends would drop everything, and not be able to force ourselves to begin the conversation. That's if we have developed the metacognition to realize we're doing this. It's like...reaching towards fire or freezing because grass moved.
Humans freeze, or jump back, when grass moves particular ways. Some say "I thought I saw a snake/wolf/something" but that's justifying after. The amygdala processed a pattern and sends down the order to the body before it ever goes to the visual cortex. Learning it's your startle reflex doesn't make you stop freezing, just helps you catch when you're about to rationalize it. Learning to suppress an oversensitive startle reflex is much harder. (And in fact the amygdala can be something a mental illness misapproprates)
I can see here what some people might be doing - using a chatbot to practice the conversations. Desensitizing themselves to the equivalent of rustling grass.
It's just that... It isn't a controlled environment, it's not actually safe to practice that desensitizing there. No one's there to check for actual snakes with them and they're wandering into the fringe of copperhead territory.
You may want to review the origins of American Evangelicalism. It skews so white that anyone else is the exception that proves the unwritten rule.
It's the religion of the bitter racist. If they don't get to live on this earth owning humans as slaves, then no one gets to live at all.
this means read-only access where you can’t download, copy, print, or link to the standards.
Oh boy, this'll bring accessibility code complaints down to near-nothing!
The screenreader says the compliance standard is \ and \<Aria=not needed>, magnifiers and font size overrides are disabled so for all you know that 6 point blob does just say that, and for some reason the file your friend converted for his braille display just reads "see you in court blindy hahaha" so I'm sure there's nothing to worry about. Companies are always so proactive about accessibility.
Not to step on any editorial toes, but I think you could stand to move your hyperlink to the quoted article over to this line:
As Eric Goldman pointed out in his response to the verdicts:
Where it's been placed is honestly bizarre to me. If I hadn't checked every link I would have thought you hadn't linked directly to the (extensively-cited) post at all.
Yes, maybe the name could reference an effort to keep something from public availability that merely drew the public eye.
Say, you hear about that Streisand lady's house?
I have been quite clear that CEOs who think it does more than it does are wrong and the market will take care of that when they fail.
And what will the market do, right now, to mitigate the suffering currently inflicted by CEOs who have not yet failed?
Acknowledging that these CEOs are wrong does not address the point people are trying to get through to you. This technology is not being used in a vacuum, so we won't discuss it as if it is.
Why should we wait until they run out of resources? The CEOs are harming people, right now, because of their delusion. If someone delusionally believes they're literally God and spends all their money on "I'm the real God" posters to prove it, whatever. If that person assaults their neighbors, breaks into others homes to put up the posters, and kicks puppies to prove it... We would not wait until they run out of money, or posters, or the delusion shatters on its own. We'd intervene, to minimize the destruction and suffering inflicted on others.
This guest post is verbose fluff without any relevant interventions or implications of the technology - and they aren't even bothering to show up and defend their work. Your comments are littered with bad faith argument tactics. You are not engaging in discourse, you're playing at it.
"They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. [...] They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert." - Jean-Paul Sartre [emphasis mine]
You know what they mean. You know, that's why you set up a series of false equivalencies and strawmen in your comment.
Are you done playing yet?
it’s true that some people think that’s how AI will be used, but I really don’t think it will do very much replacing of people. It’s not good at that.
You are willfully ignoring the point.
They would rather burn billions in the hope that someday they will never have to pay humans at all.
'in the hope' is the key. These CEOs and shareholders are hoping to replace people, and trying to force that desire to become truth as fast as possible by throwing resources at it. They're clinging to magical thinking for as long as each individual has the resources to burn. You're right, LLMs† are not good at replacing people.
The people in charge of multiple large companies refuse to accept that.
They're causing cascading damage in pursuit of their delusion, in real time. People have been laid off from jobs that LLMs can't actually replace them in, and there's no work in their trained field until the delusion shatters. (This kills people.) Homes and infrastructure have been torn down to build data warehouses and digital mines - that might not even finish getting built. (This kills people.) Clean water sources are being poisoned, in places that cannot afford to filter or clean it up, affecting people who didn't choose this risk. (This kills people, Mike.)
The examples of damage are plentiful. The victims are too numerous to list by name anymore.
But sure, I bet that generated code is totally fun and worth it.
†your inconsistent forced conflating of LLMs/'Generative AI/ChatGPT-style programs with the rest of the Machine Learning categories no longer grants LLMs false legitimacy - it tarnishes those fields instead. You know which the commenters here are talking about.
Stop playing at discourse, or fall silent already.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by BootsTheory.
"Deaths should be tolerated as is because some benefit"
... Is not a reasonable argument in suicide prevention tools. Which is the argument obscured in the perspectives you're elevating here. That opinion piece was written by a Professor of Law/Computer Scientist and one of their first year law students. No social worker, clinical psychologist, or even medical legal expert was involved. The medical field is extremely strict with itself about tools and protocols for suicidal ideation. It is willfully embedded in law to enforce that - if people want to claim to have a new tool, medicine, or technique for managing serious depression, those people must accept responsibility for those that die from its use. It's to make sure that those in charge think, really consider the proper structure for its use. The ones who throw a fit about that overwhelmingly aren't actually seeking to support depressed individuals, they're seeking to use them. For money, ego-stroking, shields, whatever. When a tool helps some patients and harms others, they set guardrails and usage criteria. "This med can used for lethal overdose: no using in unmonitored patients, not for ones who've previously shown interest in planning medication deaths." Overdose potential is why some old classes of antidepressants are rarely used anymore - sure, it helped save lives, but it ended others. Doctors and therapists set protocols for usage to minimize that, to hold each other accountable for every suicide, and transitioned to new meds with less risk as those became available. The therapy frameworks have changed too, diversified for this reason. This is still ongoing - when and what dosage of SSRIs to give teenagers is carefully weighed because paradoxically, sometimes you give a teenager an SSRI and they become suicidal (or ideation worsens) for the first 3-4 weeks. What a volunteer for a suicide prevention hotline says is absolutely something they can be made to justify to a court, they don't get to say things without consequence. Laws saying that an LLM must have protocol for suicidal ideation is a law saying "your tools are not exempt from the standard of care or consequences." These companies responding with "then no one gets the tool" is a childish temper tantrum thrown by people with no actual concern for others.
The thing about a serious mental illness is that they're often self-defeating. Thinking patterns and instinctive mechanisms meant to protect the entire brain (and body by extension) get misapproprated to protect the illness specifically. We can be aware that we can count on family. We can know that they would comfort and listen, that our friends would drop everything, and not be able to force ourselves to begin the conversation. That's if we have developed the metacognition to realize we're doing this. It's like...reaching towards fire or freezing because grass moved. Humans freeze, or jump back, when grass moves particular ways. Some say "I thought I saw a snake/wolf/something" but that's justifying after. The amygdala processed a pattern and sends down the order to the body before it ever goes to the visual cortex. Learning it's your startle reflex doesn't make you stop freezing, just helps you catch when you're about to rationalize it. Learning to suppress an oversensitive startle reflex is much harder. (And in fact the amygdala can be something a mental illness misapproprates) I can see here what some people might be doing - using a chatbot to practice the conversations. Desensitizing themselves to the equivalent of rustling grass. It's just that... It isn't a controlled environment, it's not actually safe to practice that desensitizing there. No one's there to check for actual snakes with them and they're wandering into the fringe of copperhead territory.
Ah dang it, the best part of the screenreader joke got cut by the comment box. Knew I should have turned off markdown.
Not to step on any editorial toes, but I think you could stand to move your hyperlink to the quoted article over to this line:
Where it's been placed is honestly bizarre to me. If I hadn't checked every link I would have thought you hadn't linked directly to the (extensively-cited) post at all.Yes, maybe the name could reference an effort to keep something from public availability that merely drew the public eye. Say, you hear about that Streisand lady's house?