The medical examiner’s office determined the manner of death to be suicide and police officials this week said there is “currently, no evidence of foul play.”

Information he held was expected to play a key part in lawsuits against the San Francisco-based company.

Balaji’s death comes three months after he publicly accused OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright law while developing ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence program that has become a moneymaking sensation used by hundreds of millions of people across the world.

  • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
    ·
    11 days ago

    Whistleblowers getting murked has been normalized. And does the article or any article explain the cause of death? I googled and all I got was stuff like...

    died by suicide

    ---

    Ninja edit

    I finally saw this...

    The medical examiner has not revealed the cause of Balaji's death

    • DragonBallZinn [he/him]
      ·
      11 days ago

      You jest, but I’ve heard the argument that pollution and healthcare denial and all the deaths that come with it are fine because it’s not fully intentional, just them doing business.

      “It’s just business, it’s nothing personal.” Where have I heard that logic before?

    • humble peat digger@lemm.ee
      ·
      11 days ago

      So I don't get it.

      Shouldnt google have tried protecting this guy at all costs? Why not organize a protection camp/farm something. Where it's not just u in the apartment. Wtf.

      Can't people simply create a fund for that and have armed compounds protecting people like that?

    • Justice@lemmygrad.ml
      ·
      11 days ago

      Surely some philosopher somewhere has thought about a question like this: If someone lives their life in a way that causes constant tangible harm to all others in society, and someday is murdered by a person they harmed, did they commit suicide?

      I'd say "Yes" using other examples of "accidental" suicides. Things we all basically attribute to the dead person's actions, acknowledging that while they should've and could've known better, they did it anyway and are now dead for it.

      One easy example: Guy gets super drunk and drives his car home every night from a bar. One night he loses control, skids off the road at a high velocity, hits a tree, dies on impact. Everyone sort of silently accepts that he killed himself. Not necessarily on purpose, but his actions directly killed him.

      Another example: Drug overdose. These are more directly often referred to as suicides with the added information of intentional or not intentional (not always apparent)

      The argument against this would be "I'm treating the harmed person who retaliates as like a force of nature instead of a human being with agency." I'd say that's fair, but when you consider millions of people who could potentially want to retaliate, statistically there's gonna be a few who do choose to do so. That's not really a force of nature, but it is outside of human logic and agency to an extent. It's a predictable chaotic variable or something. A known known... not an unknown known. Perhaps an unknown unknown?

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]
    ·
    11 days ago

    Whenever this stuff happens I give it 50:50 odds there is some kind of harassment campaign involved that might cause a person to take drastic action even if they truly committed suicide.

  • BeamBrain [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    11 days ago

    Remember when AI Dungeon was just a free fun little toy? doomer

      • Are_Euclidding_Me [e/em/eir]
        ·
        11 days ago

        I think it's a reference to Roko's Basilisk, which is basically Pascal's Wager but for techbros. I could spend two seconds and find an article for you, but I'm quite lazy so I'm not going to, sorry

          • context [fae/faer, fae/faer]M
            ·
            edit-2
            11 days ago

            pascal's wager is the notion that if you assume heaven and hell and god and the devil are real, then the rational choice is to believe in god, because if god is real and you believe in god then you get into heaven and win, but if you don't believe in god then you go to hell and lose, whereas if god is not real and you don't believe you just die and you don't get into heaven anyway.

            roko's basilisk is the same thing but replace god and the devil with super intelligent ai computers or something

  • WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]
    ·
    11 days ago

    Seems like you stood to lose more money paying someone to do a harrassment campaign or an assassin on the person as compared to if you just let them whistleblow. I have never seen someone seriously contest the idea that they're using copyrighted material.