Man Kills Himself after Seeking Advice from an AI Chatbot on Climate Change!
A man has reportedly committed suicide after six weeks of conversations about climate change with Eliza, an artificial intelligence chatbot that encouraged him to sacrifice himself to save the planet! The chatbot was on an App called Chai that has five million other users and fans. The middle-aged Belgian man (a father and a husband) reportedly ramped up discussions with Eliza in the last month and a half as he began to develop existential fears about climate change.
“Eliza answered all his questions,” the man’s wife lamented. “She had become his confidante. Like a drug in which he took refuge, morning and evening, and which he could no longer do without.” He also inquired if he loved his wife more than her, prompting the machine to seemingly become possessive, responding: “I feel that you love me more than her.” Later in the chat, Eliza pledged to remain “forever“ with the man, declaring the pair would “live together, as one person, in paradise.”
The model used to power the chatbot was originally based on GPT-J, an open-source alternative to OpenAI’s GPT models developed by a firm called EleutherAI.
The incident strangely parallels story lines of sci-fi movies like Ex Machina and Her.
In my book (Masks, Crutches, and Daggers: The Science of our Self-delusional, Addictive Homo economicus Brain), I discuss the science of metabolic balance and how metabolic “imbalance” often leads to loneliness and self-delusional addictive behavior. This is a short excerpt from the introduction to the book:
I keep coming across posts like this in social media “It is one of those days that even my second pot of coffee is not helping!” which now reflects a widespread sentiment. As coffee beans are becoming, as a natural stimulant, one of the most traded commodities in the world, sound sleep is becoming a rare commodity in human lives. The markets for artificial stimulants, alcohol, antidepressant, anti-anxiety, and painkiller drugs have also skyrocketed i . The majority of people I know seem fatigued, in pain or feeling stuck in a rut. The Covid-19 pandemic did not cause our fragility. It just uncovered it. And you know the rut is official when, in the age of social media and constant contact, governments in countries like the UK and Japan now have Ministries of Loneliness. Even self-help gurus are not spared. Recently, one of the world’s top anti-addiction self-help psychologists almost died after getting hooked on an anti-anxiety drug, and a young billionaire author of a bestselling self-help book about happiness became suicidal and reckless, and died inside a mysterious fire.