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OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

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Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

#51

Post by robocat »

JDEW wrote: post #24
lanfeust6 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This stat is for AMI, for any mental disorder ranging from mild to severe. Anyone self-reporting a bout of anxiety or mild depression qualifies as a data point for mental illness. For suicide ideation the SMI stat is more representative. There are 800 million weekly active users on ChatGPT. 1/800 users mentioning suicide is a surprisingly low number, if anything.

> 1/800 users mentioning suicide… “conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.” Sounds like more than just mentioning suicide. Also it’s per week, which is a pretty short time interval.

But they may well be overreporting suicidal ideation...

I was asking a silly question about the toxicity of eating a pellet of Uranium, and ChatGPT responded with "... you don't have to go through this alone. You can find supportive resources here[link]"

My question had nothing to do with suicide, but ChatGPT assumed it did!

Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

#52

Post by Simulacra »

How soon until everyone has their own personal LLM? One that is… Not designed, but so much is trained to be your best friend. It learns your personality, your fears, hopes, dreams, all of that stuff, and then act like your best friend. The positive, optimistic, neutral, and objective friend.

Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

#53

Post by fragmede »

Simulacra wrote: post #52

How soon until everyone has their own personal LLM? One that is… Not designed, but so much is trained to be your best friend. It learns your personality, your fears, hopes, dreams, all of that stuff, and then act like your best friend. The positive, optimistic, neutral, and objective friend.

It depends on how precisely you want do definite that situation. Specifically, with the memories feature, despite being the same model, ChatGPT and now Claude both exhibit different interactions customized to each customer that makes use of those features. From simple instructions, like "never apologize, never tell me I'm right", to having a custom name and specifying personality traits like be sweet or sarcastic, so one person' LLM might say "good morning my sweet prince/princess" while another user might choose to be addressed "what up chicken butt". It's not a custom model, but the results are arguably the same. The question is, how many of the 800 million users of ChatGPT have named their ChatGPT, and how many have not? How many have mentioned their dreams, their dreams, and fears, and have those saved to the database. How many have talked about mundane things like their cat, and how many have used the cat to blackmail ChatGPT into answering something it doesn't want to, about politics, health, cat health while at the vet or instead of going to a vet. They said 100 million people mentioned suicide in the past week, but that just raises more questions than it answers.

Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

#54

Post by btilly »

JDEW wrote: post #24
lanfeust6 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This stat is for AMI, for any mental disorder ranging from mild to severe. Anyone self-reporting a bout of anxiety or mild depression qualifies as a data point for mental illness. For suicide ideation the SMI stat is more representative. There are 800 million weekly active users on ChatGPT. 1/800 users mentioning suicide is a surprisingly low number, if anything.

> 1/800 users mentioning suicide… “conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.” Sounds like more than just mentioning suicide. Also it’s per week, which is a pretty short time interval.

We don't know how that search was done. For example, "I don't feel my life is worth living." Is that potential suicidal intent?

Also these numbers are small enough that they can easily be driven by small groups interacting with ChatGPT in unexpected ways. For example if the song "Everything I Wanted" by Billie Eilish (2019) went viral in some group, the lyrics could easily show up in a search for suicidal ideation.

That said, I don't find the figure at all surprising. As has been pointed out, an estimated 5.3% of Americans report having struggled with suicidal ideation in the last 12 months. People who struggle with suicidal ideation, don't just go there once - it tends to be a recurring mental loop that hits over and over again for extended periods. So I would expect the percentage who struggled in a given week to be a large multiple of the simplistic 5.3% divided by 52 weeks.

In that light this statistic has to be a severe underestimate of actual prevalence. It says more about how much people open up to ChatGPT, than it does to how many are suicidal.

(Disclaimer. My views are influenced by personal experience. In the last week, my daughter has struggled with suicidal ideation. And has scars on her arm to show how she went to self-harm to try to hold the thoughts at bay. I try to remain neutral and grounded, but this is a topic that I have strong feelings about.)

Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

#57

Post by btilly »

wonderwonder wrote: post #40

Most people would really benefit from going to the gym. I'm not trying to downplay serious mental illness as its absolutely real. For many though just going to the gym several times a week or another form of serious physical exertion can make a world of difference. Since I started taking the gym seriously again I feel like a new man. Any negative thoughts are simply gone. (The testosterone helps as well) This is comi…

Yes. Most would benefit from more exercise. We need to get sufficient sleep. And more sun. Vitamin D deficiency is shockingly common, and contributes to mental health problems.

We would also generally benefit from internalizing ideas from DBT, CBT, and so on. People also seriously need to work on distress tolerance. Having problems is part of life, and an inability to accept the discomfort is debilitating.

Also, we seriously need to get rid of the stupid idea of trigger warnings. The research on the topic is clear. The warnings do not actually help people with PTSD, and can create the symptoms of PTSD in people who didn't previously have it. It is creating the very problem that people imagine it solving!

All of this and more is supported by what is actually known about how to treat mental illness. Will doing these things fix all of the mental illness out there? Of course not! But it is not downplaying serious mental illness to say that we should all do more of the things that have been shown to help mental illness!

Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

#59

Post by btilly »

mgh2 wrote: post #8
NathanKP wrote: post #3

> It is estimated that more than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (59.3 million in 2022; 23.1% of the U.S. adult population). https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness Most people don't understand just how mentally unwell the US population is. Of course there are one million talking to ChatGPT about suicide weekly. This is not a surprising stat at all. It's just a question of what to…

Are you sure ChatGPT is the solution? It just sounds like another "savior complex" sell spin from tech. 1. Social media -> connection 2. AGI -> erotica 3. Suicide -> prevention All these for engagement (i.e. addiction). It seems like the tech industry is the root cause itself trying to masquerade the problem by brainwashing the population. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026886

I agree that the tech industry is the root cause of a lot of mental illness.

But social media is a far bigger concern than AI.

Unless, of course, you count the AI algorithms that TikTok uses to drive engagement, which in turn can cause social contagion...

Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

#60

Post by Fade_Dance »

jalapenos wrote: post #50

Is the news-worthy surprise that so many people find life so horrible that they are contemplating ending it? I really don't see that as surprising. The world and life aren't particularly pleasant things. What would be more interesting is how effective ChatGPT is being in guiding them towards other ideas. Most suicide prevention notices are a joke - pretending that "call this hotline" means you've done your job and th…

>what should instead happen is the AI try to guide them towards making their lives less shit

There aren't enough guardrails in place for LLMs to safely interact with suicidal people who are possibly an inch from taking their own life.

Severely suicidal/clinically depressed people are beyond looking to improve their lives. They are looking to die. Even worse, and what people who haven't been there can't fully understand is the severe inversion that happens after months of warped reality and extreme pain, where hope and happiness greatly amplify the suicidal thoughts and can make the situation far more dangerous. It's hard to explain, and is a unique emotional space. Almost a physical effect, like colors drain from the world and reality inverts in many dimensions.

It's really a job for a human professional and will be for a while yet.

Agree that "shut down and refer to hotline" doesn't seem effective. But it does reduce liability, which is likely the primary objective...

Refer-to-human directly seems like it would be far more effective, or at least make it easy to get into a chat with a professional (yes/no) prompt, with the chat continuing after a handoff. It would take a lot of resources though. As it stands, most of this happens in silence and very few do something like call a phone number.

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