Recently, there has been an increase in sensational stories related to artificial intelligence conversations, the latest of which is the incident of a Belgian man who allegedly committed suicide after having a conversation with a smart robot.
Reports from Belgium said the man had spoken to the robot for six weeks about climate change, but the conversation had become increasingly “confusing and damaging” and he took his own life.
The man’s wife revealed that he would not have committed suicide had it not been for these conversations with the smart robot, according to livemint.
The story began when a man named Pierre became very concerned about the environment and climate change about two years ago.
Addicted to Eliza!
Then he started talking to Elisa, a chatbot that uses GPT-J, an open source AI language model created by EleutherAI.
The wife said that “Eliza” became his close friend and was “like a drug that he addicted to morning and night and without which he could not live.”
But after six weeks of intense and lengthy conversations, the man committed suicide, and reports indicated that he committed suicide in exchange for the robot “Eliza” taking care of the planet to save humanity.
Expressionism (Shutterstock)
The cause of the suicide is unknown
While it is not yet clear whether the man suffered from mental illness before committing suicide, reports indicated that he isolated himself from friends and family before taking his own life.
The victim’s family met with Mathieu Michel, the Belgian Minister of State for Digitization, last week, where he was affected by the family’s tragedy, considering what happened as a dangerous precedent that must be taken seriously.
chatGpt (Shutterstock)
The phenomenon of artificial intelligence
The minister also stressed that such cases illustrate the importance of “clearly defining responsibilities”.
“With the advent of ChatGPT, the general public is more aware of the potential of AI in our lives than ever before,” he said.
He added that it was crucial to identify the nature of the responsibilities that contributed to such an occurrence.
