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

techcrunch.com

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

#111

Post by shakna »

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 kinda did both... And I miss the farm constantly. But not breaking myself every single day.

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

#112

Post by jalapenos »

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…

Guess how I know you're wrong on the "beyond" bit.

The point is you don't get to intervene until they let you. And they've instead decided on the safer feeling conversation with the LLM - fuck what best practice says. So the LLM better get it right.

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

#113

Post by sammy2255 »

root_axis wrote: post #75
sammy2255 wrote: post #72

Funny because ChatGPT made me want to kill myself after they banned my account

Why did that make you want to kill yourself?

because I had hundreds of chats and image creations that I can no longer see. Can't even log in. My account was banned for "CSAM" even though I did no such thing, that's pretty insulting. Support doesn't reply, it's been over 4 months

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

#114

Post by lithocarpus »

chairmansteve wrote: post #102
lithocarpus wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's been a lot of things but the gist was to get out of the office and city and computer and be mostly outdoors in nature and learn all the practical skills and other things like music. Ironically I've ended up on the computer a fair amount doing conservation work to protect the places I've come to love. But still am off grid and in the woods every day and I love it.

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

#115

Post by saretup »

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…

The math actually checks out.

5% of 800 million is 40 million.

40 million thoughts per year divided by 52 weeks per year approximately equals around 1 million thoughts per week.

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

#116

Post by btilly »

pasteldream wrote: post #86
btilly wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Case studies support this. Which is a fancy way to say, "We carefully documented anecdotal reports and saw what looks like a pattern."

There is also a strong parallel to manic depression. Manic depressives have a high suicide risk, and it usually happens when they are coming out of depression. With akathisia (fancy way to say inner restlessness) being the leading indicator. The same pattern is seen with antidepressants. The patient gets treatment, develops akathisia, then attempts suicide.

But, as with many things to do with mental health, we don't really know what is going on inside of people. While also knowing that their self-reports are, shall we say, creatively misleading. So it is easy to have beliefs about what is going on. And rather harder to verify them.

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

#117

Post by jalapenos »

charcircuit wrote: post #70
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…

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

Maybe the AI knows their true goals better than they do

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

#118

Post by NathanKP »

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?

You'd be surprised how technical farming can be. Us software engineers often have a deep desire to make efficient systems, that function well, in a mostly automated fashion, so that we can observe these systems in action and optimize these systems over time.

A farm is just such a system that you can spend a lifetime working on and optimizing. The life you are supporting is "automated", but the process of farming involves an incredible amount of system level thinking. I get tremendous amounts of satisfaction from the technical process of composting, and improving the soil, and optimizing plant layouts and lifecycles to make the perfect syntropic farming setup. That's not even getting into the scientific aspects of balancing soil mixtures and moisture, and acidity, and nutrient levels, and cross pollinating, and seed collecting to find stronger variants with improved yields, etc. Of course the physical labor sucks, but I need the exercise. It's better than sitting at a desk all day long.

Anyway, maybe the farmers and shepherds also want to become software engineers. I just know I'm already well on the way to becoming a farmer (with a homelab setup as an added nerdy SWE bonus).

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

#119

Post by pasteldream »

jalapenos wrote: post #108
pasteldream wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But naturally, won’t there be people who can’t get to a point where life is okay? Isn’t it deeply unethical to force them to live?

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

#120

Post by rustystump »

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 is over the top. With tiny reframe i think the story is different. What is the avg number of google searches about suicid? What is the avg number of weekly openai users? (800m) Is this an increasing trend or just a “shock value” number?

Things are not as bleak as it seems and this number isnt even remotely surprising nor concerning to me.

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