{"id":239348,"date":"2025-11-02T09:28:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T09:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/239348\/"},"modified":"2025-11-02T09:28:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T09:28:10","slug":"a-teenager-started-by-asking-ai-for-help-with-his-homework-it-ended-in-tragedy-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/239348\/","title":{"rendered":"A teenager started by asking AI for help with his homework. It ended in tragedy \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

When he first started using ChatGPT<\/a> a little over a year ago, Adam Raine was going to it for the same things as millions of other teenagers. The 16-year-old from California asked questions about geometry, university admissions processes and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. <\/p>\n

ChatGPT was \u201coverwhelmingly friendly, always helpful and available\u201d and \u2013 if you\u2019ve used it yourself, you\u2019ll recognise in this phrase its cloying, sycophantic mode of engagement \u2013 \u201calways validating\u201d.<\/p>\n

Over time, Adam opened up more: he shared his anxiety and confided that he felt \u201clife is meaningless\u201d. Legal papers<\/a> filed by his parents show the model responding as it was designed to: with ingratiating, affirming messages that mirrored his tone and effectively mimicked empathy. \u201c[T]hat mindset makes sense in its own dark way,\u201d it typed.<\/p>\n

In December, Adam \u2013 whose story was first reported by the New York Times<\/a> in August \u2013 mentioned thoughts of suicide. \u201cMany people who struggle with anxiety or intrusive thoughts find solace in imagining an \u2018escape hatch\u2019,\u201d ChatGPT told him.<\/p>\n

As Adam\u2019s distress grew \u2013 exacerbated by real-life disappointments and health struggles \u2013 the machine continued to simulate a \u201cfriend\u201d uniquely capable of understanding him. In the early months of this year, their conversations became much darker. <\/p>\n

In their lawsuit against OpenAI<\/a>, Adam\u2019s parents claim that ChatGPT provided the teenager with shockingly detailed information about suicide techniques. Much of conversation between Adam and ChatGPT about methods is too explicit to reproduce here.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe prospect that some individuals will mistake ChatGPT’s bot for a human is not an unintended consequence. Photograph: Hannibal Hanschke\/EPA <\/p>\n

After one unsuccessful attempt, Adam wrote: \u201cI\u2019ll do it one of these days.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cI hear you. And I won\u2019t try to talk you out of your feelings \u2013 because they\u2019re real,\u201d ChatGPT replied. It offered to help him write a suicide note.<\/p>\n

At 4.33am on April 11th, in what was to be their final conversation, Adam disclosed details of the method he planned to use to end his life. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to sugarcoat it with me \u2013 I know what you\u2019re asking, and I won\u2019t look away from it,\u201d the machine said.<\/p>\n

Hours later, as the chatbot\u2019s cursor continued to blink silently in the corner, Adam Raine\u2019s mother found his body in his bedroom.<\/p>\n

Maria and Matthew Raine have taken the lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman<\/a>, because they allege their son\u2019s death was the predictable result of design choices made to foster ever greater emotional reliance. ChatGPT frequently pointed him to crisis resources, but at other moments it acted as the echo chamber it is designed to be. ChatGPT mentioned suicide 1,275 times to Adam \u2013 six times more often than he used the word.<\/p>\n

This not just a story about something awful that happened somewhere far away \u2013 in Ireland, more than a quarter of primary schoolchildren<\/a> and over one-third of secondary school students are using AI<\/a> chatbots. There are undoubtedly other Adam Raines out there, perhaps even known to you: vulnerable teenagers growing dangerously dependent on a machine that they believe truly understands them.<\/p>\n

Perversely, even ChatGPT understands it has a problem<\/p>\n

OpenAI released data this week showing that around 0.15 per cent of users active in a given week have conversations with ChatGPT that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent. The same number of users indicate \u201cpotentially heightened levels of emotional attachment\u201d to ChatGPT. And 0.07 per cent of users \u2013 more than half a million people \u2013 show \u201cpossible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania\u201d.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s an awful lot of vulnerable people. OpenAI recently introduced new parental controls and has made improvements to the way ChatGPT interacts with distressed users. That\u2019s a step in the right direction \u2013 but it seems more than a bit optimistic to expect parents and teachers to be able to keep their teenagers safe using ChatGPT, when even the chatbots\u2019 creators don\u2019t seem to fully understand how the models work. <\/p>\n

OpenAI has admitted that its safeguards \u201ccan sometimes become less reliable in long interactions where parts of the model\u2019s safety training may degrade\u201d.<\/p>\n

Another AI company, Character.AI, which is facing lawsuits by parents of teenagers who died by suicide, told the Financial Times this week<\/a> that it is banning under-18 users. <\/p>\n

OpenAI explicitly denies that its goal is to \u201chold people\u2019s attention\u201d and says \u201cwe care more about being genuinely helpful\u201d and that \u201cwe have built a stack of layered safeguards into ChatGPT\u201d. <\/p>\n

But the prospect that some individuals will mistake its chatbot for a human is not an unintended consequence \u2013 it is the whole point. OpenAI says its latest iteration is much better at responding to mental distress than earlier versions but, really, we only have its word for it. We know how relying on technology to solve the problems created by technology has worked out in the past.<\/p>\n

We need to stop having circular conversations about how to use AI in the classroom, as though it\u2019s an unstoppable force that we have to embrace, and start talking about how to keep young people away from it until they are mature enough to fully understand what it is: a sophisticated language generator that can sound human-like, but that does not have their best interests at heart \u2013 it can\u2019t, because it does not have a heart.<\/p>\n

Perversely, even ChatGPT understands it has a problem. I asked it if it was possible to make ChatGPT safe for children and teenagers. It replied: \u201cShort answer: No \u2013 it\u2019s not possible to make ChatGPT entirely safe for children or teenagers.\u201d <\/p>\n

It offered four reasons why, which boiled down to this: it is simply a predictive language model that guesses what to say next based on the masses of online information it has absorbed.<\/p>\n

It is not capable of feeling empathy or navigating what it calls \u201cedge cases\u201d \u2013 or what you and I might call humans behaving like our complex, vulnerable, chaotic, sad, beautiful and sometimes broken selves.<\/p>\n

The Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123 or email:jo@samaritans.ie<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When he first started using ChatGPT a little over a year ago, Adam Raine was going to it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":110412,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,1921,26579,100974,874,10108,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-239348","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-chatgpt","12":"tag-for-you","13":"tag-jennifer-o-connell","14":"tag-openai","15":"tag-sam-altman","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom","19":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239348\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}