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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

#101

Post by lithocarpus »

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…

This trend and direction has been going a long time and it's becoming increasingly obvious. It is ridiculous and insane.

Go for your plan B.

I followed my similar plan B eight years ago, wild journey but well worth it. There are a lot of ways to live. I'm not saying everyone should get out of the rat race but if you're one, like I was, who has a feeling that the tech world is mostly not right in an insidious kind of way, pay attention to that feeling and see where it leads. Don't need to be brash as I was, but be true to yourself. There's a lot more to life out there.

If you have kids and they depend on an expensive lifestyle, definitely don't be brash. But even that situation can be re-evaluated and shifted for the better if you want to.

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

#102

Post by chairmansteve »

lithocarpus wrote: post #101
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…

This trend and direction has been going a long time and it's becoming increasingly obvious. It is ridiculous and insane. Go for your plan B. I followed my similar plan B eight years ago, wild journey but well worth it. There are a lot of ways to live. I'm not saying everyone should get out of the rat race but if you're one, like I was, who has a feeling that the tech world is mostly not right in an insidious kind of…

What was/is your plan B?

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

#103

Post by lanyard-textile »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #4
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…

I am one of these people (mentally ill - bipolar 1). I’ve seen others others via hospitalization that i would simply refuse to let them use ChatGPT because it is so sycophantic and would happily encourage delusions and paranoid thinking given the right prompts. > At least OpenAI is trying to do something about it. In this instance it’s a bit like saying “at least Tesla is working on the issue” after deploying a dange…

This is precisely the case.

I thought it would be limited when the first truly awful thing inspired by an LLM happened, but we’ve already seen quite a bit of that… I am not sure what it will take.

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

#104

Post by throwawayq3423 »

winrid wrote: post #94
gogasca wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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.

already has if you're not visiting the instagrammable places your travels aren't worth it

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

#106

Post by transcriptase »

ggm wrote: post #67

I have long believed that if you are the editor of a blog, you incur obligations by right of publishing other people's statements. You may not like this, but it's what I believe. In some economies, the law even said it. You can incur legal obligations. I now begin to believe if you put a ChatGPT online, and observe people are using it like this, you have incurred obligations. And, in due course the law will clarify w…

Out of curiosity, are you the type of person who believes that someone like Joe Rogan has an obligation to argue with his guests if they stray from “expert consensus”, or for every guest that has a controversial opinion, feature someone with the opposite view to maintain balance?

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

#107

Post by maplethorpe »

robocat wrote: post #51
JDEW wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

I got a suicide warning message on Pinterest by searching for a particular art style.

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

#108

Post by jalapenos »

pasteldream wrote: post #93
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…

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

Because that's on the whole, but the world isn't uniformly bad - hence the right approach is navigating to where it's at least OK

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

#109

Post by lithocarpus »

unglaublich wrote: post #95
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…

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?

I'm close with a number of people living a relatively hard working life producing food and I've not seen this at all personally, no. It can be very rough but for these people at least it is very fulfilling and the idea of going to be in an office would look like death. People joke about it a bit but no way.

That said there probably are folks who did do that and left to go be in an office, and I don't know them.

Actually I do know one sort of, but he was doing industrial farm work driving and fixing big tractors before the office, which is a different world altogether. Anyway I get the sense he's depressed.

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

#110

Post by NathanKP »

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…

I'm right behind you on the escape to the mountains idea. I've actually already moved from the US to New Zealand, and the next step is a farm with some goats lol.

That said... I don't necessarily hate what AI is doing to us. If anything, AI is the ultimate expression of humanity.

Throughout history humans have continually searched for another intelligence. We study the apes and other animals, we pray to Gods, we look to the stars and listen to them to see if there are any radio signals from aliens, etc. We keep trying to find something else that understands what it is to be alive.

I would propose that maybe humans innately crave to be known by something other than ourselves. The search for that "other" is so fundamentally human, that building AI and interacting with it is just a natural progression of a quest we've already been on for thousands of years.

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