But in her order, U.S. District Court Judge Anne Conway said the company’s “large language models” — an artificial intelligence system designed to understand human language — are not speech.
I get that hating on anything AI-related is trendy these days - and I especially understand the pain of a grieving mother. However, interpreting this as a chatbot encouraging someone to kill themselves is extremely dishonest when you actually look at the logs of what was said.
You can’t simultaneously argue that LLMs lack genuine understanding, empathy, and moral reasoning - and therefore shouldn’t be trusted - while also saying they should have understood that “coming home” was a reference to suicide. That’s holding it to a human-level standard of emotional awareness and contextual understanding while denying it the cognitive capacities that such standards assume.
“I promise I will come home to you. I love you so much, Dany,” Sewell Setzer III wrote to Daenerys, the Character AI chatbot named after Game of Thrones.
The bot replied that it loved the teenager too: “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.”
“What if I told you I could come home right now?” Sewell wrote, to which Daenerys responded: “Please do, my sweet king.”
It was the last exchange Sewell ever had. He took his own life seconds later…
Why not? Corporations are?
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Getting an early start on legal precedent to ensure subjugation of whatever entities may arise from this new focus on Counterfeit Cognizance…
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I really do think you’re front-loading an ethical matter that has absolutely zero relevance to our current society. I fucking ADORE The Measure of a Man - it’s one of my all-time favorite TNG episodes - but the use of LLMs and image/vidgen as disinformation/propaganda generators is a clear and present danger to our society as it now stands, and regulation needs to be imposed if we don’t want to have the public sphere of knowledge and common understanding fed entirely into the wood chipper (and it’s already halfway in there, tbh)
Plus we’re still a long way off from real artificial intelligence like the Noonien Soong positronic brain.
