I've seen 12 people hospitalized after losing touch with reality because of AI

Re:I've seen 12 people hospitalized after losing touch with ... by gwbas1c on Monday August 11, 2025 @05:50PM (#44869866)

This is nothing new.

In ~2002 a person I knew in college was hospitalized for doing the same thing with much more primitive chatbots.

About a decade ago he left me a voice mail, he was in an institution, they allowed him access to chatbots and python, and the spiral was happening again.

I sent an email to the institution. Of course, they couldn't respond to me because of HIPPA.

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Re:I've seen 12 people hospitalized after losing touch with ... by amelius on Monday August 11, 2025 @05:56PM (#44869915)

I wonder how often the same thing happens when people have an inner conversation (rather than with a chatbot).

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Re:I've seen 12 people hospitalized after losing touch with ... by sadsicksacs on Monday August 11, 2025 @08:00PM (#44870858)

So, what you’re saying is that preventative safeguards should have been implemented since ~2002? Right? Right?

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Re:I've seen 12 people hospitalized after losing touch with ... by gwbas1c on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @09:07AM (#44875785)

Traditional software is unpredictable, as it gets more complicated, corner cases emerge that are difficult, if not impossible, to anticipate.

AI is so unpredictable that it's impossible to make effective preventable safeguards. For every use case that we want to protect against, there will be many more that we can't anticipate.

I don't think it's possible to build effective safeguards into AI for situations like this, because AI isn't the problem: Mentally ill people will just be triggered by something else.

Furthermore, someone who's going to sit and chat with AI for and endless amount of time will find the corner cases that aren't anticipated.

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