"When he spoke to me about it, it was to tell me that he no longer saw any human solution to global warming,” his widow said. “He placed all his hopes in technology and artificial intelligence to get out of it”.

Suicide is a consequence of deep and prolonged psychological pain, in this case at least partially motivated by our frankly hopeless climate situation. This man had no faith in our collective ability to tackle the problem, and thus placed that faith in a magical tech solution as a form of coping. None of this is new, it’s basically the ideology of the portion of the ruling elite that’s not building bunkers in New Zealand, and runs downstream from there. What is new is the hype cycle for these LLMs. A lot of uninformed people think the singularity™ is around the corner. So it’s here, the thing that will fix the climate!

Now, everyone that’s tried chatGPT and it’s variants knows that it doesn’t really like to disagree with you. It was primarily trained to generate responses that please people. And the last thing a depressed person needs is to have their thoughts repeated by a third party unchallenged, like an automated form of rumination. I agree that additional barriers should be put in place to prevent the models from encouraging self-harm, but I also genuinely believe this guy using the actual 1960’s ELIZA would be less harmful. Because there’s no mysticism and hype surrounding it. What I’m trying to say is that OpenAI and every fucking “journalist” that covered ChatGPT uncritically have blood in their hands.