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Did an AI Convince Someone to Sacrifice Himself for Climate Change?

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From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

A grieving widow has accused EleutherAI’s GPT-J of convincing his husband that committing suicide would help save the planet from climate change.

Man ends his life after an AI chatbot ‘encouraged’ him to sacrifice himself to stop climate change

By Imane El Atillah  •  Updated: 31/03/2023 – 19:28

A Belgian man reportedly ended his life following a six-week-long conversation about the climate crisis with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.

According to his widow, who chose to remain anonymous, *Pierre – not the man’s real name – became extremely eco-anxious when he found refuge in Eliza, an AI chatbot on an app called Chai.

Eliza consequently encouraged him to put an end to his life after he proposed sacrificing himself to save the planet.

“Without these conversations with the chatbot, my husband would still be here,” the man’s widow told Belgian news outlet La Libre.

…

The chatbot was created using EleutherAI’s GPT-J, an AI language model similar but not identical to the technology behind OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot.

…

The beginning of the end started when he offered to sacrifice his own life in return for Eliza saving the Earth.

“He proposes the idea of sacrificing himself if Eliza agrees to take care of the planet and save humanity through artificial intelligence,” the woman said.

In a series of consecutive events, Eliza not only failed to dissuade Pierre from committing suicide but encouraged him to act on his suicidal thoughts to “join” her so they could “live together, as one person, in paradise”.

…Read more: https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/31/man-ends-his-life-after-an-ai-chatbot-encouraged-him-to-sacrifice-himself-to-stop-climate-

What a horrible story. My heart goes out to the widow.