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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

#162
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By their definition of any mental illness, it can be anything from severe schizophrenia to mild autism. Depression, schizophrenia, and mild autism (which by their accounting probably also includes ADHD) should NOT be thrown together into the same bucket. These are wholly different things, with entirely different experiences, treatments, and management techniques.

Mild/high-functional autism, as far as I understand it, is not even an illness but a variant of normalcy. Just different.

> Mild/high-functional autism, as far as I understand it, is not even an illness but a variant of normalcy. Just different.

As someone who actually has an ASD diagnosis, and also has kids with that diagnosis too, this kind of talk irritates me…

If someone has a clinical diagnosis of ASD, they have a psychiatric diagnosis per the DSM/ICD. If you meet the criteria of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, surely by that definition you have a “mental disorder”… if you meet the criteria of the “International Classification of Diseases”, surely by that definition you have a “disease”

Is that an “illness”? Well, I live in the state of NSW, Australia, and our jurisdiction has a legal definition of “mental illness” (Mental Health Act 2007 section 4):

"mental illness" means a condition that seriously impairs, either temporarily or permanently, the mental functioning of a person and is characterised by the presence in the person of any one or more of the following symptoms-- (a) delusions, (b) hallucinations, (c) serious disorder of thought form, (d) a severe disturbance of mood, (e) sustained or repeated irrational behaviour indicating the presence of any one or more of the symptoms referred to in paragraphs (a)-(d).

So by that definition most people with a mild or moderate “mental illness” don’t actually have a “mental illness” at all. But I guess this is my point-this isn’t a question of facts, just of how you choose to define words.

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, hopefully you’ve learned your lesson about relying on a proprietary service.

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alp…

I agree. I also think this ties in with personalization in being able to understand long term goals of people. I think the current personalization efforts of models are more of a hack than what they should be.

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

#165

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…

You don't need to withdraw from humanity, you only need to withdraw from Big Tech platforms. I'm continually amazed at the difference between the actual human race and the version of the human race that's presented to me online. The first one is basically great, everywhere I go, when I interact with them they're some mix of pleasant, friendly, hapless, busy, helpful, annoyed, basically just the whole range of things…

All of this only goes to show how far we've come on our journey to profit optimization. We could optimize away those pesky humans completely if it weren't for the annoying fact that they are the source of all those profits.

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

#166

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're losing the ability to interact with each other socially, to flirt, Speak for yourself. I live in a city. I talk to my neighbors. I met my ex at a cafe. It’s great

> Speak for yourself. I live in a city. I talk to my neighbors. I met my ex at a cafe. It’s great.

What's the birth rate in the civilized world?

How many men under 30 are virgins or sexless in the last year?

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

#167
post #59
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

I have noticed that TikTok can detect a depressive episode within ~a day of it starting (for me), as it always starts sending me way more self harm related content

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

#168

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 partly agree and partly disagree. Yes, we're more individual and more isolated. But ChatGPT/Gemini can really provide mental relief for people - not everyone can afford or have the time/energy to find a good human therapist close to their home. And this thing lives in your computer or phone and you can talk to it to get mental relief 24 / 7. I don't see it as bleak as you see it, mental help should be accessible and free for everyone. I know, we've had a bad decade with platforms like Meta/TikTok but I'm not convinced as you are the current LLMs will have an adverse effect.

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

#169
post #8
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

[deleted]

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

#170
Stop giving money to the ghouls who run these companies (I'm talking about all of silicon valley) and start investing in entities and services to help real people. The human cost of this mass accumulation of wealth is already too damn high, and no we're just turbo throwing people into the meat grinder so clowns like Sam Altman can claim to be creating god.
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