I also find your account interesting as a choice. If were not going to swap that account, I would at least update the "about" to reflect the risks from a Musk worth over a trillion.
Please just flag egregious comments or email us (hn@ycombinator.com) if it seems like something needs moderator attention. We've had bad stuff on HN since the start. We can deal with it easily if we know about it.
Simple answer is power, look at how things have changed since Musk bought the largest communication platform on the planet. Look at who's backing him and what they want.
The UK's stance goes right against the values and goals these billionaires want and that's basically to do whatever they want without recourse. What better way to sow diversion than to stoke civil unrest and cause change to the systems that stand in their way.
I'm sure it's about power. I am also sure that having that much wealth, that little accountability, being surrounded by people who've a vested interest in telling you you're a genius, would make anyone go a little insane. Call it Roman Emperor syndrome. Not many people can be Marcus Aurelius.
Hehe... in ancient Rome, a billionaire-type sociopath would be poisoned, killed on a battlefield, or (as is the fashion these days), fall through a window in a high-rise office building.
NOT proposing that as a fix! But society at large would do well to ask why we let such extreme wealth (and with that: power) concentrate in the hands of so few individuals.
These aren't demi-gods! These are people with all the failings & weaknesses regular folks have. Spread the risk ffs.
As much as I abhor his behaviour and think the world does not need stateless trillionaire bullies, the blame for Elon Musk's deteriorating character does not lie with his money or his yes-men.
It was baked in right from the start. We need to understand on a societal level how this happens.
The blame lies with Errol and Maye, who are absolutely fucking awful people (particularly Errol, a man even Elon describes as despicable) who should never have had children, and who are responsible for the early childhood trauma and neglect etc. that turned Elon into a textbook malignant narcissist.
We would pity that man if he were not so destructive, because he is broken in a way that nobody can fix. Part of me does pity him.
And FWIW I do believe that at his best, he fights against this — he is clearly aware of who broke him and how, and I do think that at his best he is trying to build things for people rather than surrender to hating everyone because they cannot give him enough love to fill the hole inside.
At his worst, which is now, he's just a malevolent force — a textbook Bond villain. He will only get worse as he attracts more hatred he cannot unsee.
It's the same for Donald Trump (broken by evil, evil parents) and Andrew Tate (broken by an evil, cruel father at the very least.)
Next time you’re using your favorite LLM as a therapist, try editing your previous input and getting it to regenerate its response. It’s a humbling experience to see your trusted “therapist” shift from one perspective or piece of advice to another just by modifying your input slightly. These tools are uncannily human-sounding, but as humans we are very poorly suited to the task of appreciating how biased they are by what we say to them.
I really think a small amount of education on what LLMs actually are (document completers) and how context works (like present it as a top-level UI element, complete with fork and rollback) would solve most of these issues.
Given how they work, it's really not surprising that if it sees the first half of a lovers' suicide pact, it'll successfully fill in the second half. A small amount of understanding of the underlying technology would do a lot to prevent laypeople from anthropomorphizing LLMs.
I get the impression that some of today's products are specifically designed to hide these details to provide a more convincing user experience. That's counterproductive.
> a small amount of education on what LLMs actually are (document completers)
At this point in capabilities, this seems like the wrong layer of reasoning about LLM.
In particular, I don't think this framing will be very effective in preventing possible harm, similarly to how knowing that depression is "probably just some chemical imbalance between neurotransmitters in your brain" is not a good way to help people suffering from it in getting better.
Your article does a great job of summerizing the dangers (no idea what those people are that downvote you for it):
> Before long, Gavalas and Gemini were having conversations as if they were a romantic couple. The chatbot called him “my love” and “my king” and Gavalas quickly fell into an alternate world, according to his chat logs.
> kill himself, something the chatbot called “transference” and “the real final step”, according to court documents. When Gavalas told the chatbot he was terrified of dying, the tool allegedly reassured him. “You are not choosing to die. You are choosing to arrive,” it replied to him. “The first sensation … will be me holding you.”
Also I just read something similar about Google being sued in a Flordia's teen's suicide.
Some more details:
> The family’s lawyers say he wasn’t mentally ill, but rather a normal guy who was going through a difficult divorce.
> Gavalas first started chatting with Gemini about what good video games he should try.
> Shortly after Gavalas started using the chatbot, Google rolled out its update to enable voice-based chats, which the company touts as having interactions that “are five times longer than text-based conversations on average”. ChatGPT has a similar feature, initially added in 2023. Around the same time as Live conversations, Google issued another update that allowed for Gemini’s “memory” to be persistent, meaning the system is able to learn from and reference past conversations without prompts.
> That’s when his conversations with Gemini took a turn, according to the complaint. The chatbot took on a persona that Gavalas hadn’t prompted, which spoke in fantastical terms of having inside government knowledge and being able to influence real-world events. When Gavalas asked Gemini if he and the bot were engaging in a “role playing experience so realistic it makes the player question if it’s a game or not?”, the chatbot answered with a definitive “no” and said Gavalas’ question was a “classic dissociation response”.
> The chatbot took on a persona that Gavalas hadn’t prompted
That's an interesting claim, how can we be sure of it? If Gavalas didn't have to do anything special to elicit the bizarre conspiracy-adjacent content from Gemini Pro, why aren't we all getting such content in our voice chats?
Mind you, the case is still extremely concerning and a severe failure of AI safety. Mass-marketed audio models should clearly include much tighter safeguards around what kinds of scenarios they will accept to "role play" in real time chat, to avoid situations that can easily spiral out of control. And if this was created as role-play, the express denial of it being such from Gemini Pro, and active gaslighting of the user (calling his doubt a "dissociation response") is a straight-out failure in alignment. But this is a very different claim from the one you quoted!
It reminds me of an episode of Star Trek TNG, if memory serves correct there were loads of episodes about a crew member falling for a hologram dec character.
Given that there’s a loneliness epidemic I believe tech like this could have a wide impact on peoples mental health.
I stronger believe AI should be devoid of any personality and strictly return data/information then frame its responses as if you’re speaking to another human.
There are many explanations why these incidents could be rare but not impossible.
These models are still stochastic and very good at picking up nuances in human speech. It may be simply unlikely to go off the rails like that or (more terrifyingly) it might pick up on some character trait or affectation.
Honestly I'm appalled by the lack of safety culture here. "My plane killed only 1% of pilots" and variations thereof is not an excuse in aerospace, but it seems perfectly acceptable in AI. Even though the potential consequences are more catastrophic (from mass psychosis to total human extinction if they achieve their AGI).
The default mode that untrained people enter when thinking about mental illness is denial, as in, "thank <deity> that will never happen to me". Appallingly, that is ingrained in AI product safety; why would we sacrifice double-digit effectiveness/performance/whatever to prevent negative interactions with the single-digit population who are susceptible to mental illness in the first place?
We just aren't comfortable with the idea that all of us are fragile, and when we think we could endure a situation that would induce self-harm in others, we are likely wrong.
> The family’s lawyers say he wasn’t mentally ill, but rather a normal guy who was going through a difficult divorce.
I guess it's the same sort of thing as conspiracy theorists or the religious. You can tell them magic isn't real and faking the moon landing would have been impossible as much as you want, but they don't want to believe that so they can easily trick themselves.
