There are some important truths here but it misses some nuances.
The truths are related to how grossly irresponsible some of the AI companies have been in how they manage their offerings, and specifically in how weak or non-existent their guardrails sometimes are. Sam Altman recently wrote an apology about how ChatGPT was complicit in the suicide of a youth in BC – an apology that was deemed proper but sorely inadequate. That wasn’t the only instance of this happening.
But once again, that’s not intrinsically an AI problem, it’s a problem with how the systems are trained and configured. By way of a very close analogy, many violent criminals have a history of abusive childhoods with little parenting and the wrong kind of life guidance. That’s not a reason to condemn all humans as likely violent criminals!
Your quote also neglects to mention some nuances, either. I think this summary at the end of the article is a balanced view:
Ben didn’t try to oversimplify what happened: “I don’t want to overstate my case,” he wrote. “I don’t think A.I. killed my father.”
In a world where A.I. didn’t exist, maybe Joe — who was skeptical of doctors by default — would have refused treatment anyway. He had taken some convincing to try lung cancer treatment, too.
“Some of what was happening was about my father’s own psychology,” Ben said in an interview with the Times.
But A.I. wasn’t entirely blameless either. Joe was making decisions based on bad information packaged with the veneer of scientific expertise. It was the kind of misinformation that was virtually impossible for a lay person to spot, even for someone like Joe, who by all accounts was an ideal user.