this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2026
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All the current deaths by AI are chatbots inadvertently convinced a human being to kill themselves or others, through insufficiently-goverened use of chatbot services known for their hazardous sycophancy.
(Hazadous sycophancy is a phrase I never expected to read or type, and it raises concern about the yes-men populated environments the ultra-wealthy like to put themselves in, which rapidly deteriorates judgment and consideration of ethical principles. In the tech sector elite, pure ruthless disregard of human concerns is celebrated, and these are the folks leading the hyperscale LLM industry.)
It will be another thing entirely if ever an agentic AI chooses to deliberately social-engineer harm. Two scenarios from fiction come to mind.
The first is in The Silence of the Lambs in which Hannibal Lecter deliberately talks Multiple Miggs (in the adjacent cell) to commit suicide over the course of a night.
The other is the opening of the X-Files episode Kill Switch in which a hacker in a diner is trying to access files of an AI system, which then calls a number of drug dealers to the restaurant, and then some US Marshalls. The hacker dies in the ensuing firefight.