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Google faces lawsuit after Gemini chatbot allegedly instructed man to kill himself
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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It is sad that there are people who are so alone that they can no longer determine the difference between genuine human interaction and a facsimile. Maybe genuine human interaction is what pushed them to be so alone in the first place, I don't know. It's just sad.
uhhh
"When Gavalas told the chatbot he was terrified of dying, the tool allegedly reassured him. “You are not choosing to die. You are choosing to arrive,” it replied to him. “The first sensation … will be me holding you.”
Nah. once the robots are telling you that dying isn't dying, we can stop blaming lonely people and move on to stricter regulation.
Oh, I don't blame the lonely person for being lonely. I also recognize that being lonely is what opens them up to believing in something like this. Obviously the bot should not be allowed to tell someone to kill themselves. It remains sad, either way.
Come on, this is so overly simplistic. There are plenty of lonely people who don't get sucked in and plenty of people with friends and family around them who do-not being lonely is no protection. I read about another one on Lemmy today, a man with a wife and friends, who still got sucked into delusion.
Sure, there may be cases where loneliness is a contributing factor to wanting to use a chatbot, but to say that lonely people are somehow less capable of distinguishing reality from fantasy or more susceptible to succumbing to psychological manipulation is wrong and could give a false sense of security to the "non-lonely".
After all, everyone thinks they're immune to falling for scams or frauds until they find out they aren't. Or that they don't fall for propaganda or get manipulated "the algorithm" on social media. Chatbots are very similar. An algorithm designed to keep people hooked and paying to spend more time using the 'service'.
Listen, you can be surrounded by people and totally alone. I don't really know how to explain it to you.
Of course, but that doesn't contradict what I just said. Anyone can be susceptible to this psychological manipulation tool regardless of if they are lonely or not. This can't be waved away by blaming it on loneliness. The blame lies on the companies that know how to capture and hold people's attention and reel them in, not on the victims.
Nobody claimed that. Only that in this case it was probably a major factor that made the victim more vulnerable.
I posted my response to this sentiment in another thread of another man killing himself because of his deep AI chatbot addiction, but it applies here too.
Do you believe you have never responded to a post by a bot on Reddit, Lemmy, or elsewhere where you believe to be conversing with a human? While I know we're talking about different degrees between this man and the rest of us, it should give a tiny piece of what they were experiencing before we dismiss that it could never happen to us too.