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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

#81

Post by rich_sasha »

We've refined the human experience to extinction.

In pursuit of that extra 0.1% of growth and extra 0.15 EPS, we've optimised and reoptimised until there isn't really space for being human. We're losing the ability to interact with each other socially, to flirt, now we're making life so stressful people literally want to kill themselves. All in a world (bubble) or abundance, where so much food is made, we literally don't know what to do with it. Or we turn it into ethanol to drive more unnecessarily large cars, paid for by credit card loans we can scarcely afford.

My plan B is to become a shepherd somewhere in the mountains. It will be damn hard work for sure, and stressful in its own way, but I think I'll take that over being a corpo-rat racing for one of the last post-LLM jobs left.

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

#82

Post by SamPatt »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #46
OgsyedIE wrote: post #12

Surprised it's so low. There are 800 million users and the typical developed country has around 5±3% of the population[1] reporting at least one notable instance of suicidal feelings per year. . [1] Anybody concerned by such figures (as one justifiably should be without further context) should note that suicidality in the population is typically the result of their best approximation of the rational mind attempting t…

> best approximation of the rational mind attempting to figure out an escape from a consistently negative situation under conditions of very limited information about alternatives I dislike this phrasing, because it implies things can always get better if only the suicidal person were a bit less ignorant. The reality is there are countless situations from which the entire rest of your life is 99.9999% guaranteed to c…

Good comment.

This is the part people don't like to talk about. We just brand people as "mentally ill" and suddenly we no longer need to consider if they're acting rationally or not.

Life can be immensely difficult. I'm very skeptical that giving people AI would meaningfully change existing dynamics.

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

#83

Post by dahart »

As others have mentioned, the headline stat is unsurprising (which is not to say this isn’t a big problem). Here’s another datapoint, the CDC’s stats claim that rates of thoughts, ideation, and attempts at suicide in the US are much higher than the 0.15% that OpenAI is reporting according to this article.

These stats claim 12.3M (out of 335M) people in the US in 2023 thought ‘seriously’ about suicide, presumably enough to tell someone else. That’s over 3.5% of the population, more than 20x higher than people telling ChatGPT. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html

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

#84

Post by beefnugs »

bikamonki wrote: post #80

So they read the chats?

Of course, there is already news about how they use every single interaction to train it better.

There is news about how a judge is forcing them to keep every chat in existence for EVERYONE just in case it could relate to a court case (new levels of worldwide mass surveillance can apparently just happen from one judges snap decision)

There is news about cops using some guys past image generation to try and prove he is a pyromaniac (that one might have been police accessing his devices though)

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

#85

Post by lynx97 »

rich_sasha wrote: post #81

We've refined the human experience to extinction. In pursuit of that extra 0.1% of growth and extra 0.15 EPS, we've optimised and reoptimised until there isn't really space for being human. We're losing the ability to interact with each other socially, to flirt, now we're making life so stressful people literally want to kill themselves. All in a world (bubble) or abundance, where so much food is made, we literally d…

[flagged]

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

#86

Post by pasteldream »

btilly wrote: post #69
Demiurge wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it better or worse than alternatives? Where else would a suicidal person turn, a forum with other suicidal people? Dry Wikipedia stats on suicide? Perhaps friends? Knowing how ChatGPT replies to me, I’d have a lot of trouble getting negativity influenced by it, any more than by yellow pages. Yeah, it used to try more to be your friend but GPT5 seems pretty neutral and distant.

I think that you will find a lot of strong opinions, and not a lot of hard data. Certainly any approach can work out poorly. For example antidepressants come with warnings about suicide risk. The reason is that they can enable people to take action on their suicidal feelings, before their suicidal feelings are fixed by the treatment. I know that many teens turn to social media. My strong opinions against that show up…

> The reason is that they can enable people to take action on their suicidal feelings, before their suicidal feelings are fixed by the treatment.

I see that explanation for the increased suicide risk caused by antidepressants a lot, but what’s the evidence for it?

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a study, just a reason why people believe it.

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

#87

Post by derektank »

Fade_Dance wrote: post #60
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 understa…

I could be mistaken, but my understanding was that the people most likely to interact with the suicidal or near suicidal (i.e. 988 suicide hotline attendants) aren't actually mental health professionals, most of them are volunteers. The script they run through is fairly rote and by the numbers (the Question, Persuade, Refer framework). Ultimately, of course, a successful intervention will result in people seeing a professional for long term support and recovery, but preventing a suicide and directing someone to that provider seems well within the capabilities of an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude

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

#88

Post by gogasca »

lynx97 wrote: post #85
rich_sasha wrote: post #81

We've refined the human experience to extinction. In pursuit of that extra 0.1% of growth and extra 0.15 EPS, we've optimised and reoptimised until there isn't really space for being human. We're losing the ability to interact with each other socially, to flirt, now we're making life so stressful people literally want to kill themselves. All in a world (bubble) or abundance, where so much food is made, we literally d…

[flagged]

+1 enjoying time with family and friends. Travelling, working out eating well...best time to be alive

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

#89

Post by kingkawn »

lynx97 wrote: post #85
rich_sasha wrote: post #81

We've refined the human experience to extinction. In pursuit of that extra 0.1% of growth and extra 0.15 EPS, we've optimised and reoptimised until there isn't really space for being human. We're losing the ability to interact with each other socially, to flirt, now we're making life so stressful people literally want to kill themselves. All in a world (bubble) or abundance, where so much food is made, we literally d…

[flagged]

[flagged]

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

#90

Post by lanyard-textile »

brainless wrote: post #79

This is not suprising at all. Having gone through therapy a few years back, I would have had a chat with LLMs if I was in a poor mental health situation. There is no other system that is available at scale, 24x7 on my phone. A chat like this is not a solution though, it is an indicator that our societies have issues is large parts of our population that we are unable to deal with. We are not helping enough people. To…

I choose to believe that too. I think more people are interested than we’d initially believe. Money restrains many of our true wants.

Sidebar — I do sympathize with the problem being thrust upon them, but it is now theirs to either solve or refuse.

A chat like this is all you’ve said and dangerous, because they play a middle ground: Presenting a machine can evaluate your personal situation and reason about it, when in actuality you’re getting third party therapy about someone else’s situation in /r/relationshipadvice.

We are not ourselves when we are fallen down. It is difficult to parse through what is reasonable advice and what is not. I think it can help most people but this can equally lead to a disaster… It is difficult to weigh.

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