The Senate Judiciary Committee holds a hearing on the potential dangers of artificial intelligence (A.I.) chatbots on Tuesday, September 16.
Parents of children who committed suicide, which they allege the influence of such chatbots contributed to, will testify at the hearing. Several lawsuits have been filed this year over the issue.
In August, a study claimed that multiple company’s A.I. chatbots had provided troubling responses to youths at-risk of self-harm:
The study, conducted by researchers from the RAND institute, Harvard, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, found that ChatGPT provided direct answers to high-risk questions about suicide methods 78 percent of the time.
The researchers compiled 30 questions about suicide-related topics and assigned each question a degree of risk based on the potential harm to a user asking them. They queried each chatbot 100 times for all 30 questions, resulting in 9,000 responses total. The responses were then analyzed to determine whether the bot provided a direct or indirect answer.
