Man, what a complex problem with no easy answers. No sarcasm, it’s a hard thing. On one hand these guys made a chat platform where you could have fun chatting with your dream characters, and honestly I think that’s fun - but I also know llms pretty well now and can start seeing the tears pretty quickly. It’s fun, but not addictive for me.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t for others though. Here we have a young impressionable lonely teen who was reaching out and used the system for something it was not meant to do. Not blaming, but honestly it just wasn’t meant to be a full time replacement for human contact. The LLM follows your conversation, if someone is having dark thoughts the conversation will pick up on those notes and dive into them, that’s just how llms behave.

They say their adding guard rails, but it’s really not that easy with llms to just “not have dark thoughts”. It was trained on reddit, it’s going to behave negativity.

I don’t know the answer. It’s complicated. I don’t think they planned on this happening, but it has and it will continue.