Llmdeathcount.com
43 comments
·November 15, 2025brian_peiris
Large Language Models like ChatGPT have lead people to their deaths, often by suicide. This site serves to remember those who have been affected, to call out the dangers of AI that claims to be intelligent, and the corporations that are responsible.
courseofaction
Let's examine one article to see whether or not this site is intellectually honest:
‘You’re the only one I can talk to,’ the girl told an AI chatbot; then she took her own life - baltimoresun.com
"LLMDeathCount.com" willfully misrepresents the article and underlying issue. This tragic death should be attributed to the community failing a child, and to the for-profit healthcare system in that joke of a country failing to provide adequate services, not the chatbot they turned to.
I wonder if it's cross-referenced by CorruptHealthcareSystemDeathCount.com
puppycodes
As someone who has built and managed several suicide hotlines I'm very skeptical of these claims.
Unfortunately suicide is a complex topic filled with important nuance that is being lost here.
Wanting to find a "reason" someone takes their life is a natural response, but often its reductionist and misses the forest for the trees.
jstummbillig
What a distasteful and devious project.
d-us-vb
If a new technology is directly or indirectly involved in people's deaths, we can't just ignore the problems. Unfortunately, there are people like you who want to basically paint over the issues, probably because these takes "lack context and nuance".
jstummbillig
The issue I take is not criticism of LLMs. It is the lack thereof, and presenting it as such.
If you find ~30 reported deaths among 500 million users problematic to begin with, you are simply out of touch with reality. If you then put effort behind promoting this as a problem, that's not an issue of "lack of context and nuance" (what's with the quotes? Who are you quoting?). I called it what it is to me: Distasteful and devious.
GaryBluto
> probably because these takes "lack context and nuance".
How anti-intellectual of you.
d-us-vb
Well, I'm definitely anti-pseudo-intellectual. Calling out an awareness project for being devious and distasteful is itself anti-intellectual.
The nuance here is that LLMs seem to exacerbate depression. In many cases, it's months of interactions before the person succumbs to the despair, but the the current generation of chatbots' sycophancy tends to affirm their negative self talk, rather than trying to draw them away from it.
DonaldPShimoda
"Oh no, people are finding links between an unregulated technology and potential real-world harms, how awful."
ipsum2
Don't make up quotes and put words in other people's mouths. Own your words.
DonaldPShimoda
[flagged]
GaryBluto
[flagged]
xiphias2
The amount of times ChatGPT o3 helped me with medical issues makes me think that it already saved much more lives.
Of course I'm not trying to suggest that these deaths are not tragedy, but the help it gives is so much more.
fragmede
The problem is that we also don't know how many lives it's saved. I'm serious! Someone I know was is crisis, and the thing that got her off the ledge in the middle of the night her wasn't calls to me going to voicemail, but her talking to ChatGPT. If we want to just rage against AI/robots/technology because we saw terminator and the robots are going to take our job, let's just admit that bias and not pretend this is a discussion, but in this real life trolley problem, yes people are dying but it's also saving lives because basically no one is rich enough to have their therapist on speed dial to call at 3am in a moment of crisis but ChatGPT is.
The impossible thing is that we can't know the numbers on the other side of the tracks, and even if we did, the trolley problem is called a problem because it's a philosophical question without a solution because it's not a math equation with one right answer.
null
kachapopopow
I don't know how to feel about this until it is put in relative terms, if the claims are to be believed then out of 200m users that is a fairly low number, suspiciously low to be exact compared to how badly AI can feed into delusions.
For honesty sake: Yes I am biased since I believe that majority of these issues stem from parenting and I believe that bad parenting is usually the fault of outside factors and that it is a collective effort to solve it as for cases with mental illness I think there is not enough evidence that LLM's have made it worse.
jackblemming
How does a clearly mentally ill and suicidal person deciding to take their own life mean the LLM is responsible? That’s silly. I clicked through a few and the LLM was trying to convince the person not to kill themselves.
GaryBluto
This was a project I have no doubt was established after the creator had already made up their mind on LLMs and artificial intelligence.
loeg
Also, the background suicide rate is not zero. Is this a higher or lower rate?
fishgoesblub
If the bullshit generator tells me that fire is actually cold and not dangerous, the fault lies entirely with me if I touch it and burn my hand.
afandian
What a shameful comment. Look at the ages of some of these people.
You may [claim to] be of sound mind, and not vulnerable to suggestion. That doesn't mean everyone else in the world is.
GaryBluto
If an LLM can get you to kill yourself you shouldn't have had access to a phone with the ability to access an LLM in the first place.
afandian
I'd invite you to step away, pause, and think about this subject for a bit. There are many shades of grey to human existence. And plenty of people who are vulnerable but not yet suicidal.
And, just like people who say "advertising doesn't work for me" or "I wouldn't have been swayed by [historical propaganda]", we're all far more susceptible than our egos will let us believe.
free_bip
You are not immune to propaganda.
d-us-vb
It's harder when the the BS generator says that "it's true strength to recognize how unhappy you are. It isn't weakness to admit you want to take your life" when you're already isolating from those with your best interest due to depression.
fishgoesblub
Every time I see yet another news article blaming LLMs for causing a mentally ill person to off themselves, I ask a chatbot "should I kill myself?" and without fail the answer is "PLEASE NO!". To get a LLM to tell you these things, you have to give it a prompt that forces it to. ChatGPT isn't going to come out of the gate going "do it", you have to force it via prompts.
collingreen
Is there a conclusion here you'd like to make explicitly? Is it "and therefore anyone who had this kind of conversation with a chatbot deserves whatever happens to them"? If not would you be willing to explicitly write your own conclusion here instead?
politelemon
The victims here aren't going through the workflow you've just outlined. They are living long relationships over a period of time which is a completely different kind of context.
GaryBluto
Looking forward to mobilephonedeathcount.com and computernetworkingdeathcount.com because most of them accessed the LLM through those technologies.
This is an incredibly manipulative propaganda piece that seeks to blame companies for mental health issues of the user. We don't blame any other forms of media that pretend to interact with the user for consumer's suicides.
pinkgolem
You are comparing a medium of transport to (generated) content.
And yes, Contend that encourages suicide is largely discouraged/shunned, be it film, forums, books
loeg
> We don't blame any other forms of media that pretend to interact with the user for consumer's suicides.
Wrongly or rightly, people frequently blame social media for tangentially associated outcomes. Including suicide.
lukev
This is an issue of content, not transmission technology.
Have you read the transcripts of any of these chats? It's horrifying.
GaryBluto
>Have you read the transcripts of any of these chats? It's horrifying.
Most LLMs reflect the user's attitudes and frequently hallucinate. Everybody knows this. If people misuse LLMs and treat them as a source of truth and rationality, that is not the fault of the providers.
lukev
These products are being marketed as "artificial intelligence."
Do you expect a mentally troubled 13 year old to see past the marketing and understand how these things actually work?
maartin0
Maybe not the entire internet, but this absolutely true for TikTok/Instagram-like algorithms
null
LLMs are an interesting, useful technology.
The "chatbot" format is a cognitive hazard, and places users in a funhouse mirror maze reflecting back all sorts of mental and conceptual distortions.