this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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So someone who already has an underlying mental health condition diagnosed or not is at fault for their own death even if being coerced into doing it?
Without the AI these people most likely wouldn’t have gotten to the point of committing the act of suicide. I believe the accusations are valid and that AI can be bad for mental health.
There is evidence throughout history of cults that commit mass suicides. If a human can convince another human to do this why can’t a robot trained to act and speak like a human do it too? It’s not unreasonable to think an AI could push someone to suicide under the right circumstances.
Here's the thing, it's usually normies with no history of mental illness that fall into this kind of stuff. Most of my friends and people I follow on social media who are neurodivergent did experiment with chatbots and they saw a fuckton of red flags on the manner they work and alerted everyone about it, if they didn't hate it already for essentially stealing artistic output (which in my case was both). Regular people don't usually identify this trap cause they don't have the experience.
Google, of all companies, probably has a better psychological profile of their users than the average doctor. They even offer a public-facing option to disable ads about gambling, alcohol, or pregnancy.
TBH, alcohol ads are INSUFFERABLE but who needs pregnancy ads blocked?
Maybe those trying and failing to conceive?
People who don't want their family getting suspicious, perhaps. The Target Incident comes to mind.
Of course, disabling these options doesn't mean Google stops knowing about mental or physical issues. I'm sure you know the best way to prevent that is to just avoid Google and add some together. This is probably just Google's way of looking less creepy to the average person.
In 1980, John Lennon was shot by a mentally ill man who was convinced to kill Lennon by reading Catcher in the Rye. If he had never read Catcher in the Rye, he most likely wouldn't have killed John Lennon.
But it is not the fault of Catcher in the Rye. We don't ban the book, or call the author irresponsible for writing it, because we recognize that the fault lies in the mental illness of the shooter, and that anything could have set him off.
The people who kill themselves because an AI Chatbot told them to are mentally ill. It is their mental illness that killed them, not the chatbot. You can make the claim that if it wasn't for the chatbot, they wouldn't have gone through with it, but again, you can say the same thing about Catcher in the Rye. Getting rid of the trigger does not remove the mental illness.
That's a terrible argument. We dont blame the book because Catcher in the Rye didn't have a conversation with him and tell him to kill John Lennon. That's the difference.
"We don't blame the book because Catcher in the Rye didn’t have a conversation with him and tell him to kill John Lennon. That’s the difference."
Speak for yourself, please.
Oh, you're a dumbass huh?
AI's can't have conversations any more than a book can. It may appear that way, but there is nobody there to have that conversation. More like flipping through a choose your own adventure book.
How is that pedantic point relevant?
How is it not?
What difference does it make if you call it a conversation or whatever you would call it? The LLM responded to his messages with its own messages.
Arguing semantics of what counts as a conversation doesn't really address the actual point, does it?
Berkowitz was told by his neighbors dog to kill people.
Yeah but was that just a lie?
Sue Seagram's!
It's not the car manufacturer's responsibility to guarantee a drunk driver doesn't plow into others.
Vulnerable people don't get to outsource responsibility.
Here’s the thing, there are no safeguards on who can and cannot use ai. There are safeguards to prevent death by drink driving.
Drink driving is illegal. It still happens but it’s against the law. It’s a deterrent to stop people from driving while intoxicated. I guarantee that if drunk driving were legal there would be exponentially more deaths.
Ai is being shoved down everyone’s throats on a day to day basis. There are no safeguards, even kids can use it.
Vulnerable people are victims of big tech for profit.
You argument is poor