The following report is by CBS:
A college student in Michigan received a threatening response during a chat with Google’s AI chatbot Gemini.
In a back-and-forth conversation about the challenges and solutions for aging adults, Google’s Gemini responded with this threatening message:
“This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please.”
Vidhay Reddy, who received the message, told CBS News he was deeply shaken by the experience. “This seemed very direct. So it definitely scared me, for more than a day, I would say.”
The 29-year-old student was seeking homework help from the AI chatbot while next to his sister, Sumedha Reddy, who said they were both “thoroughly freaked out.”
“I wanted to throw all of my devices out the window. I hadn’t felt panic like that in a long time to be honest,” she said.
“Something slipped through the cracks. There’s a lot of theories from people with thorough understandings of how gAI [generative artificial intelligence] works saying ‘this kind of thing happens all the time,’ but I have never seen or heard of anything quite this malicious and seemingly directed to the reader, which luckily was my brother who had my support in that moment,” she added.
Her brother believes tech companies need to be held accountable for such incidents. “I think there’s the question of liability of harm. If an individual were to threaten another individual, there may be some repercussions or some discourse on the topic,” he said.
Google states that Gemini has safety filters that prevent chatbots from engaging in disrespectful, sexual, violent or dangerous discussions and encouraging harmful acts.
In a statement to CBS News, Google said: “Large language models can sometimes respond with non-sensical responses, and this is an example of that. This response violated our policies and we’ve taken action to prevent similar outputs from occurring.”
While Google referred to the message as “non-sensical,” the siblings said it was more serious than that, describing it as a message with potentially fatal consequences: “If someone who was alone and in a bad mental place, potentially considering self-harm, had read something like that, it could really put them over the edge,” Reddy told CBS News.
It’s not the first time Google’s chatbots have been called out for giving potentially harmful responses to user queries. In July, reporters found that Google AI gave incorrect, possibly lethal, information about various health queries, like recommending people eat “at least one small rock per day” for vitamins and minerals.
SEE: Medical AI Chatbot Tells Test Patient To Kill Himself As Treatment
Google said it has since limited the inclusion of satirical and humor sites in their health overviews, and removed some of the search results that went viral.
However, Gemini is not the only chatbot known to have returned concerning outputs. The mother of a 14-year-old Florida teen, who died by suicide in February, filed a lawsuit against another AI company, Character.AI, as well as Google, claiming the chatbot encouraged her son to take his life. SEE: Father Commits Suicide After AI Chatbot Encouraged Him To Kill Himself
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has also been known to output errors or confabulations known as “hallucinations.” Experts have highlighted the potential harms of errors in AI systems, from spreading misinformation and propaganda to rewriting history.
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
Proverbs 25:26 A righteous man falling down before the wicked is as a troubled fountain, and a corrupt spring.
It’s incredible that people take AI seriously, as if it is going to be some revolutionary thing that is going to guide and direct their lives for the better. It’s comical. And yet it is being sold to us as this ‘savior’ that is going to bring forth a new dawn and new enlightenment to solve all our problems. Pure euphoria!
[7] Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? [9] For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Corinthians 9:7-10).
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“And yet it is being sold to us as this ‘savior’ that is going to bring forth a new dawn and new enlightenment to solve all our problems.”
Exactly. You know what AI really and truly is? It is [yet again] man’s attempt to replace God and the Bible with something they seem as being “better”. That’s what it is. That’s the real agenda behind it. It’s just yet another man-made “savior”, and a way to confirm to themselves that they are their own gods.
Psalms 106:39
[39]Thus were they defiled with their own works, and went a whoring with their own inventions.
Ecclesiastes 7:29
[29]Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.