ChatGPT medical advice brought man 'to brink of death', lawsuit alleges(www.bbc.com)
16 pointsby dijksterhuis3 hours ago5 comments
  • heaney-5552 hours ago
    This was with GPT-4o (ancient now by AI standards). The reason OpenAI refuses to bring it back, despite all the demand, is that when the conversation gets long enough it starts doing weird things like this.

    Subsequent models have almost entirely eliminated this kind of thing.

    • siva7an hour ago
      Even GPT-5.4 is ancient compared to intelligence of 5.6 although those are only 4 months apart. We're talking about at least twice the capabilities and that's scary to achieve in such a short timeframe.
  • sheepscreek2 hours ago
    I really hope the lawsuit does not end in OpenAI tightening the “safety” and “security” of their models into oblivion. I hope they understand that a lobotomized model is as good as my Casio watch.

    I want my models to give it to me straight without patronizing me. I’m an adult and I take responsibility for my own actions.

    • lardosaurusrexan hour ago
      That's the issue here tho.

      You do not own the model; they do. Ergo it is their advice and so they can be held accountable fo it.

  • arm322 hours ago
    Why are people even allowed to dress up ChatGPT... an autoregressive transformer... as a faith-based holistic doctor? Anybody could see this going wrong from a hundred miles away.
    • throw310822an hour ago
      A few days ago a family member insisted to be brought to the ER because Claude told him. Result: he was immediately hospitalised and received surgery the following day to remove a tumour that was compressing his spine. Claude was very clear that he had to act as quickly as possible to lower the chances of permanent damage.
  • harvey92 hours ago
    All the chat bots have a very discreet disclaimer at the bottom of the page. I want to say it should be bigger text and more strongly worded but like most people I would just mentally tune it out regardless.
    • Arnt2 hours ago
      The LLM I use is fairly quick to retreat into extra disclaimers. "Not sure about this, this is from memory and you ought to check", etc. Don't they all do that? Is it just because of my prompt (which does say to push back if I appear to have bad ideas)?

      It seems possible that people tune out disclaimers and caveats in the middle of the answer, too.

  • lardosaurusrex3 hours ago
    The amount of times these LLMs randomly refuse to answer basic questions because "omg safety" only to turn around and do this f￭￭￭ing nonsense is obscene.

    I'm not blaming the LLM because it's just a pile of math glued together with hubris and anxiety but why is its default response not "I am not a medical professional and you should see a doctor right away if you have any concerns"?