Maybe not you, but explicitly encouraging others to take harmful steps is a potential outcome.

For example, there's a clear safety issue with a conversational bot that tells you to kill yourself if you talk to it about feeling suicidal or depressed.

What if you talk to it about immigration and by picking commonly upvoted statements on certain online communities it starts to encourage violence?

There are clear ways to me that a chatbot can have safety issues.

That’s a decent argument but then should we go to Hollywood and sanitize their violence in their movies (even those wanting to teach us about the evil of violence) for fear they might incite the wrong people who see such as calls to violence?

What I mean is that that possibility exists in other media yet we don’t feel ambiguous about it.

First of all, Hollywood does occasionally sanitize films and TV shows. For example, the suicide scene was removed from "13 Reasons Why" after concerns from mental health experts that it might inspire copycats [1].

But even ignoring that, I think most people have a good understanding of what a movie is and that fictional characters are not real. Movies have been around for a long time, most people have been watching them their entire lives. I don't think at this point that most people have nearly as good an understanding of chatbots. If you can converse with one and it mostly delivers responses like a person would, some people will start treating it like a person and ascribe values to its statements, and that's where it potentially gets dangerous.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/arts/television/netflix-d...

So you’re saying people can tell fiction from reality in film (even if film re-enacts actual events), but can’t use that same construct to evaluate a “bot”?

Maybe... but it seems like a bit of a stretch.

People feel sad when their bomb disposal robots die. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/funer...

We're just not great at keeping what we know and how we feel in line.

People absolutely do alter their output based on how they think others may act, Hollywood is a prime example where this happens because films even get age ratings. It's more extreme really because it's outside agencies and governments putting the pressure on what is deemed allowable.

What we're talking about here isn't someone stopping others from releasing a bot but stopping themselves until they're happy with the potential risks.

"Our bot keeps asking for us to connect it to the internet and suggests that it'll be able to learn faster that way. We're really excited about this development, but a good fraction of our developers have started running around screaming about the apocalypse, so we're postponing public release until the chatbot tells us how to calm them down"