Companies are bombarding us with AI in every piece of media they can, obviously with a bias on the positive. This focus is an expected counterresponse to said pressure, and it is actually good that we're not just focusing on what they want us to hear (i.e. just the pros and not the cons).

> If anything, AI may help us reduce preventable deaths.

Maybe, but as long as it development is coupled to short-term metrics like DAUs it won't.

Development coupled to DAUs… I’m not sure I agree that’s the problem. I would argue AI adoption is more due to utility than addictiveness. Unlike social media companies, they provide direct value to many consumers and professionals across many domains. Just today it helped me write 2k lines of code, think through how my family can negotiate a lawsuit, and plan for Christmas shopping. That’s not doom scrolling, that’s getting sh*t done.

There is no humanitarian mission, there is only stock prices.

Wait, really? I'd say 80-90% of AI news I see is negative and can be perceived as present or looming threats. And I'm very optimistic about AI.

I think AI bashing is what currently best sells ads. And that's the bias.

I.e. "yeah, I heard many counters to all of the AI positivity but it just seemed to be people screaming back with whatever they could rather than any impactful counterarguments" is a much worse situation because you've lost the wonder "is it really so positive" by not taking the time to bring up the most meaningful negatives when responding.

Anecdotically I would say we're just in a reversal/pushback of the narrative and that's why it feels more negative/noisy right now. But I'd also add that (1) it hasn't been a prolongued situation, as it started getting more popular in late 2024 and 2025; and (2) probably won't be permanent.

Our society is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that death is inevitable. We've lost a lot of the rituals and traditions over the centuries that made facing it psychologically endurable. It probably isn't worth trying to prevent deaths from coconut trees.

Really my broader point is we accept the tradeoff between technology/freedom and risk in almost everything, but for some reason AI has become a real wedge for people.

And to your broader point, I agree our culture has distanced itself from death to an unhealthy degree. Ritual, grieving, and accepting the inevitable are important. We have done wrong to diminish that.

Coconut trees though, those are always going to cause trouble.

Why, one might ask?

Well, simple: Nobody really needs them, do they? And I, for one, don't enjoy the flavor of a coconut: I find that the taste lingers in my mouth in ways that others do not, such that it becomes a distraction to me inside of my little pea brain.

I find them to be ridiculously easy to detect in any dish, snack, or meal. My taste buds would be happier in a world where there were no coconuts to bother with.

Besides: The trees kill about 150 people every year.

(But then: While I'd actually be pretty fine with the elimination of the coconut, I also recognize that I live in a society with others who really do enjoy and find purpose with that particular fruit. So while it's certainly within my wheelhouse to dismiss it completely from my own existence, it's also really not my duty at all to tell others whether or not they're permitted to benefit in some way from one of those deadly blood coconuts.

I mean: It's just a coconut.)

It's not useful to me. It can go away.

(Yes, this may mean that I am short-sighted. I'm allowed to be as short-sighted as anyone else is.)

Well yeah, for most other technologies, the pitch isn't "We're training an increasingly powerful machine to do people's jobs! Every day it gets better at doing them! And as a bonus, it's trained on terabytes of data we scraped from books and the Internet, without your permission. What? What happens to your livelihood when it succeeds? That's not my department".

Would "not walking under coconut trees" count as prevention? Because that seems like a really simple and cheap solution that quite anyone can do. If you see a coconut tree, walk the other way.

Smoking had a huge campaign to (a) encourage people to buy the product, (b) lie about the risks, including bribing politicians and medical professionals, and (c) the product is inherently addictive.

That's why people are drawing parallels with AI chatbots.

Edit: as with cars, it's fair to argue that the usefulness of the technology outweighs the dangers, but that requires two things: a willingness to continuously improve safety (q.v. Unsafe at Any Speed), and - this is absolutely crucial - not allowing people to profit from lying about the risks. There used to be all sorts of nonsense about "actually seatbelts make cars more dangerous", which was smoking-level propaganda by car companies which didn't want to adopt safety measures.

People smoke because it's relaxing and feels great. I loved it and still miss it 15 years out. I knew from day one all the bad stuff, everyone tells you that repeatedly. Then you try it yourself and learn all the good stuff that no one tells you (except maybe those ads from the 1940's).

At some point it has to be accepted that people have agency and wilfully make poor decisions for themselves.

Maybe we should begin by waiting to see the scale of said so-called damage. Right now, there have maybe been a few incidents, but there are no real rates on "oh x people kill themselves a year from ai" and as long as x is still that, an unknown variable, it would be foolish to speed through limiting everybody for what can be just a few people.

>Trying to fix the problems _____ now that they're deeply rooted global issues and have been for decades is hard

The number of people that are already getting out of touch with AI is high. And we know that people have all kinds screwed up behaviors around things like cults. It's not hard to see that yes, AI is and will cause more problems around this.

Because it's early enough to make a difference. With the others, the cat is out of the bag. We can try to make AI safer before it becomes necessary. Once it's necessary, it won't be as easy to make it safer.

Also we can’t deny the emotional element. Even though it is subjective, knowing that the reason your daughter didn’t seek guidance from you and committed suicide was because a chatbot convinced her of so must be gut wrenching. So far I’ve seen two instances of attempted suicide driven by AI in my small social circle. And it has made me support banning general AI usage at times.

Nowadays I’m not sure if it should or even could be banned, but we DO have to invest significant resources to improve alignment, otherwise we risk that in the future AI does more harm than good.

It is quite difficult to say what moral framework an AI should be given. Morals are one of those big unsolved problems. Even basic ideas like maybe optimising for the general good if there are no major conflicting interests are hard to come to a consensus on. The public dialog is a crazy place.

As jb_rad said in the thread root, hyper-focusing on the risk will lead people to overreact. DanielVZ says we should hyper focus, maybe even overreact to the point of banning AI because it can persuade people to suicide. However the best view to do is acknowledge the nuance where sometimes suicide is actually the best decision and it is just a matter of getting as close as possible to the right line.

Christ, that's a lot. My heart goes out to you and I understand if you prefer not to answer, but could you tell more about how the AI-aspect played out? How did you find out that AI was involved?

> but could you tell more about how the AI-aspect played out?

So in summary the AI sycophantically agreed with how there was no way out of the situations and how nobody understood their position further isolating them. And when they contemplated suicide it did assist on the method selection with no issues whatsoever.

> How did you find out that AI was involved?

The victims mentioned it and the chat logs are there.

I'm not interested in hearing about the effect of AI encouraging suicide until the problem of academics encouraging suicide are addressed first as the causal link is much stronger.

Canadian Paralympian: I asked for a disability ramp - and was offered euthanasia

It's easy to think that any % > 0 is a sign of something having gone wrong. My default guess used to be that, too.

But imagine a perfect health system: when all other causes of death are removed, what else remains?

If by "terrible inadequacies of Canadian health care" you mean they've not yet solved aging, not yet cured all diseases, and not yet developed instant-response life-saving kits for all accidents up to and including total body disruption, then yes, any less than 100% is a sign of terrible inadequacies.

And even 0% is possible without going StarTrek, if for example full-time narcotic-induced bliss till the "natural" end of your life was an option. Then assisted suicide rate would just cease to be a good indicator of how good our health care and services are.

I am convinced (no evidence though) that current LLMs has prevented, possibly lots of, suicides. I don't know if anyone has even tried to investigate or estimate those numbers. We should still strive to make them "safer" but with most tech there's positives and negatives. How many, for example, has calmed their nerves by getting in a car and driven for an hour alone and thus not committed suicide or murder.

That said there's the reverse for some pharmaceutical drugs. Take statins for cholesterol, lots of studies for how many deaths they prevent, few if any on comorbidity.

In LLMs we call this "hallucination".

It is quite fascinating and I hope more studies exist that look into why some folks are more susceptible to this type of manipulation.

Reading accounts from people who fell into psychosis induced by LLMs feels like a real time mythological demon whispering insanities and temptations into the ear directly, in a way that algorithmically recommended posts from other people could never match.

It will naturally mimic your biases. It will find the most likely response for you to keep engaging with it. It will tell you everything you want to hear, even if it is not based in reality. In my mind it's the same dangers of social media but dialed all the way up to 11.

Well, it turns out all the social media companies are also the LLM companies and they are adding LLMs to social media, so....

Starting with dumb challenges that risk children and their families life.

And don’t get me started with how algorithms don’t care about the wellbeing of users, so if it’s depressing content that drives engagement, users life is just a tiny sacrifice in favor the companies profits.

But I also think we should consider the broader context. Suicide isn’t new, and it’s been on the rise. I’ve suffered from very dark moments myself. It’s a deep, complex issue, inherently tied to technology. But it’s more than that. For me, it was not having an emotionally supportive environment that led to feelings of deep isolation. And it’s very likely that part of why I expanded beyond my container was because I had access to ideas on the internet that my parents never did.

I never consulted AI in these dark moments, I didn’t have the option, and honestly that may have been for the best.

And you might be right. Pointed bans, for certain groups and certain use cases might make sense. But I hear a lot of people calling for a global ban, and that concerns me.

Considering how we improve the broad context, I genuinely see AI as having potential for creating more aware, thoughtful, and supportive people. That’s just based on how I use AI personally, it genuinely helps me refine my character and process trauma. But I had to earn that ability through a lot of suffering and maturing.

I don’t really have a point. Other than admitting my original comment used logical fallacies, but I didn’t intend to diminish the complexity of this conversation. But I did. And it is clearly a very complex issue.

1% of the world is over 800m people. You don't know if the net impact will be an improvement.

That's the thing, those are "normal" and "accepted". That's not a reason to add new (like vaping).

The reasons we have not - and probably will not - remove obvious bad causes is, that a small group of people has huge monetary incentives to keep the status quo.

It would be so easy to e.g. reduce the amount of sugar (without banning it), or to have a preventive instead of a reactive healthcare system.

But the problem you surface is real. Companies like porn AI don’t care, and are building the equivalent of sugar laced products. I haven’t considered that and need to think more about it.

AI is .. before such an effort.

Having instruments like that, people can decide themselves, what is more important - LLMs or healthcare or housing or something else, or all of that even. Not having instruments like that would just mean hitting a brick wall with our heads for the whole office duration, and then starting from scratch again, not getting even a single issue solved due to rampant populism and corruption by wealthy.

Of course, I don't think anything should be banned. But the influence on society should not be hand waved as automatically positive because it will solve SOME problems.

What I’m really after is thoughtful discourse, that acknowledges we accept risk in our society if there is an upside.

To your point about the internet making people more lonely, I’d say on balance that’s probably true, but it’s also nuanced. I know my mom personally benefits from staying in touch with her friends from her home country.

I think one of the most difficult things to predict is how human behavior adapts to novel stimulus. We will never have enough information. But I do think we adapt, learn, and become more resilient. That is the core of my optimism.

And what about energy consumption? What about increased scams, spam and all kinds of fake information?

I am not convinced that LLMs are a positive force in the world. It seems to be driven by greed more than anything else.

unless something is viewed as a threat right now then it’s considered “risks of living” or some other trite categorization and get ignored.

The 1990’s saw one of the most effective smoking cessation campaigns in the world here in the US. There have been numerous case studies on it. It is clearly something we are working on and addressing (not just in the US)

* 4 million to obesity.

Obesity has been widely studied and identified as a major issue and is something doctors and beyond have been trying to help people with. You can’t just ban obesity, and clearly their efforts being made to understand it and help people.

* 2.6 million to alcohol

Plenty of studies and discussion and campaigns to deal with alcoholism and related issues, many of which have been successful, such as DUI laws.

* 2.5 million to healthcare

A complex issue that is in the limelight and several countries have attempted to tackle to vary degrees of success.

* 1.2 million to cars

Probably the most valid one on the list and one that I also agree is under addressed. However, there are numerous studies and discussions going on.

So let’s get back to AI and away from “what about…”: why is there so much resistance (like you seem to be putting up) to any study or discussion of the harmful effects of LLM’s, such as AI-induced psychosis?

What I’m resisting are one sided views of AI being either pure evil, or on the verge of AGI. Neither are true and it obstructs thoughtful discussion.

I did get into what aboutism, I didn’t realize it at the time. I did use flawed logic.

To refine my point, I should have just focused on cars and other technology. AI amplifies humanity for both good and bad. It comes with risk and utility. And I never see articles presenting both.

Yudkowsky wrote a 250 page book to say "we must limit all commercial GPU clusters to a maximum of 8." That is terrifyingly myopic, and look at the reviews on Amazon. 4.6 stars (574). That is what scares me.

I don’t think you need to worry that the other extreme exists as well. The obscene flow of money into AI at every stage has thus far gone almost entirely unchallenged.

> But those using this as an argument to ban AI

Are people arguing that, though? The introduction to the article makes the perspective quite clear:

> In tweaking its chatbot to appeal to more people, OpenAI made it riskier for some of them. Now the company has made its chatbot safer. Will that undermine its quest for growth?

This isn't an argument to ban AI. It's questioning the danger of allowing AI companies to do whatever they want to grow the use of their product. To go back to your previous examples, warning labels on cigarette packets help to reduce the number of people killed by smoking. Why shouldn't AI companies be subject to regulations to reduce the danger they pose?

But you’re right. This article specifically argues for consumer protections. I am fully in favor of that.

I just wish the NYT would also publish articles about the potential of AI. Everything I’ve seen from them (I haven’t looked hard) has been about risks, not about benefits.

You know what else is irrelevant to this discussion? We could all die in a nuclear war so we probably shouldn’t worry about this issue as it’s basically nothing in comparison to nuclear hellfire.

It’s not that we shouldn’t worry, we should. But humanity is also surprisingly good at cooperating even if it’s not apparent that we are.

I certainly believe that looking only at the good or bad side of the argument is dangerous. AI is coming, we should be serious about guiding it.

This appears to be a myth or not clearly verified:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut

> The origin of the death by coconut legend was a 1984 research paper by Dr. Peter Barss, of Provincial Hospital, Alotau, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, titled "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts", published in The Journal of Trauma (now known as The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery). In his paper, Barss observed that in Papua New Guinea, where he was based, over a period of four years 2.5% of trauma admissions were for those injured by falling coconuts. None were fatal but he mentioned two anecdotal reports of deaths, one several years before. That figure of two deaths went on to be misquoted as 150 worldwide, based on the assumption that other places would have a similar rate of falling coconut deaths.

"In his paper, Barss observed that in Papua New Guinea, where he was based, over a period of four years 2.5% of trauma admissions were for those injured by falling coconuts. None were fatal but he mentioned two anecdotal reports of deaths, one several years before. That figure of two deaths went on to be misquoted as 150 worldwide, based on the assumption that other places would have a similar rate of falling coconut deaths."