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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

#91

I talk to ChatGPT about topics I feel society isnt enlightened enough to talk about I feel suicide is heavily misunderstood as well People just copypasta prevention hotlines and turn their minds off from the topic Although people have identified a subset of the population that is just impulsively considering suicide and can be deterred, it doesnt serve the other unidentified subsets who are underserved by merely dist…

> then where would I talk about that? Alert: with ChatGPT you're not talking to anyone. It's not a human being.

I didn’t write who would I talk to, I said where

A very intentional word choice

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

#92

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…

AI should help people achieve their goals and shouldn't be trying to persuade them into doing things others want them to.

AI should help people achieve their ultimate goals, not their proximate goals. We want it to provide advice on how to alleviate their suffering, not how to kill themselves painlessly. This holds true even for subjects less fraught than suicide.

I don't want a bot that blindly answers my questions; I want it to intuit my end goal and guide me towards it. For example, if I ask it how to write a bubblesort script to alphabetize my movie collection, I want it to suggest that maybe that's not the most efficient algorithm for my purposes, and ask me if I would like some advice on implementing quicksort instead.

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

#93

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…

If you accept that “the world and life aren’t particularly pleasant things”, why do you want to prevent suicide?

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

#94
post #88
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

This will be optimized away. You'll just end up doing more.

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

#95

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…

The romantic fallback plan of being a farmer or shepherd. I wonder, do farmers and shepherds also romantize about becoming programmers or accountants when they feel down?

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

#96

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…

There is another factor to consider. The stakes of asking an AI about a taboo topic are generally considered to be very low. The number of people who have asked ChatGPT something like "how to make a nuclear bomb" should not be an indication of the number of people seriously considering doing that.

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

#97

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…

We’ve lost the ability to interact, huh? How do you explain this comment :)

The world has changed. Things are different and we adapt.

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

#98

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 i…

It's worse than parroting advice that's not applicable. It tells you what you told it to tell you. It's very easy to get it to reinforce your negative feelings. That's how the psychosis stuff happens, it amplifies what you put into it.

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then where would I talk about that? Alert: with ChatGPT you're not talking to anyone. It's not a human being.

Which is perfect. In Australia, I tried to talk to Lifeline about wanting to commit suicide. They called the police on me (no, they are not a confidential service). I then found myself in a very bad situation. ChatGPT can't be much worse.

I’m sorry Lifeline did that to you.

I believe that if society actually wants people to open up about their problems and seek help, it can’t pull this sort of shit on them.

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