| ▲ | evil-olive 6 days ago | |
"a computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision" [0] California penal code, section 401a [1]: > Any person who deliberately aids, advises, or encourages another to commit suicide is guilty of a felony. if a human had done this, instead of an LLM chatbot, I suspect a prosecutor would not have any hesitation about filing criminal charges. their defense lawyer might try to nitpick about whether it really qualified as "advice" or "encouragement" but I think a jury would see right through that. it's a felony when a human does it...but a civil lawsuit when an LLM chatbot does it. let's say these parents win their lawsuit, or OpenAI settles the case. how much money is awarded in damages? OpenAI doesn't publicly release details of their finances, but [2] mentions $12 billion in annualized revenue, so let's take that as a ballpark. if this lawsuit was settled for $120 million, on one hand that'd be a lot of money...on the other hand, it'd be ~1% of OpenAI's annual revenue. that's roughly the equivalent of someone with an income of $100k/yr having to pay a $1,000 fine. this is the actual unsolved problem with AI. not GPT-4 vs GPT-5, not Claude Code vs Copilot, not cloud-hosted vs running-locally. accountability, at the end of the day, needs to ultimately fall upon a human. we can't allow "oopsie, that was the bot misbehaving" to become a catch-all justification for causing harm to society. 0: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/a-computer-can-never-be-held-... 1: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio... 2: https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-hits-12-billion-annu... | ||
| ▲ | philipkglass 6 days ago | parent [-] | |
Any person who deliberately aids, advises, or encourages another to commit suicide is guilty of a felony. It seems like prohibiting suicide advice would run afoul of the First Amendment. I bought a copy of the book Final Exit in California, and it definitely contains suicide advice. | ||