this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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So if someone is stupid, they deserve to be tricked by chatgpt. Got it.
Deserve? No. It seems like you are unaware that there is a difference between Darwinism and the Darwin Awards, because that's a wild jump to conclusions otherwise.
A toddler doesn't deserve to get burned because it sticks its hand in a campfire. But the solution isn't to ban campfires in some misguided attempt to stop all toddlers everywhere from getting burned. It's not the campfire's fault that a toddler lacks the mental capacity to understand that sticking a limb in an open fire is bad.
You could force everyone to put toddler proof gates around their fires, or ban toddlers from camping trips, or force people to make smaller fires that toddlers won't get as hurt by if they stick their hand in it... Or, you could recognize that it's up to the parents to prevent things like that; that the vast majority of toddlers won't stick their hand in fire.
Maybe you don't agree. Maybe you feel banning campfires is justified to prevent mentally deficient toddlers from hurting themselves. Just know that even if you succeed, toddlers will still find ways to hurt themselves, so you're not really preventing much of anything by banning the fires.
This is an appropriate response for something like a chainsaw or cigarettes, but it is not appropriate to describe chatgpt's relationship to consumers.
For most of society, your conclusion works; parents should indeed play an intermediary role between their toddler and a fire. But fire does not deceive the user in its potential to danger. It doesn't seek to glaze the user with compliments and hollow cheeriness.
ChatGPT is not fire. It leads people who can't make the distinction between various technologies and their own personal data or digital identity into false narratives pretty easily.
I'm not sure where exactly you hoped your argument would land, because the logical conclusion to it is that you don't really care that a person was convinced by chatgpt to kill themselves, which would have been clearer to point out than a contrived toddler argument.
Your take is a dangerous one.
The only sane take to have. Thank you for putting it out explicitly with an apt analogy.