Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 585 posts

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

#171

Post by ml-anon »

btilly wrote: post #48
ben_w wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally take no opinion about whether or not they can actually solve anything, because I am not a psychologist and have absolutely no idea how good or bad ChatGPT is at this sort of thing, but I will say I'd rather the company at least tries to do some good given that Facebook HQ is not very far from their offices and appears to have been actively evil in this specific regard.

The general rule of thumb is this. When given the right prompts, LLMs can be very effective at therapy. Certainly my wife gets a lot of mileage out of having ChatGPT help her reframe things in a better way. However "the right prompts" are not the ones that most mentally ill people would choose for themselves. And it is very easy for ChatGPT to become part of a person's delusion spiral, rather then be a helpful part o…

Holy shit this is so fucking wrong and dangerous. No, LLMs are not and cannot be “very effective at therapy”.

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

#172

Post by ml-anon »

hyfgfh wrote: post #41
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…

> OpenAI is trying to do something about it. Ha good one

They are collecting training data for ads & erotica.

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

#173

Post by ml-anon »

jeswin wrote: post #157

Contrarian opinion. OpenAI gets a lot of hate these days, but on this subject it's quite possible that ChatGPT helped a lot of people choose a less drastic path. There could have been unfortunate incidents, but the number of people who were convinced to not take extreme steps would have been of a few orders of magnitude more (guessing). I use it to help improve mental health, and with good prompting skills it's not b…

Amazing based on 0 evidence whatsoever “it’s passable that…”

Also incredible how you framed improving your mental health as a consequence of a (pseudo) technical skill set.

Yeah this isn’t how any of this works and you’re deluding yourself.

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

#174

Post by distances »

throwawayq3423 wrote: post #104
winrid wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Happily you can stay ignorant about that and just do your thing if you're not in Instagram.

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

#175

Post by reeredfdfdf »

raducu wrote: post #166
karlgkk wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Some of those men could meet someone if they quit Tinder or whatever crap online platform they might be using for dating, and start meeting people in real life.

Worked for me at least. There's simply less competition and more space for genuine social interaction.

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

#176

Post by testdelacc1 »

safety1st wrote: post #152
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…

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…

Reddit is a really good example of this because it used to be a feed of what you selected yourself. But they couldn’t juice the metrics that way, so they started pushing algorithmic suggestions. And boy, do those get me riled up. It works like a charm, because I spend more time on these threads, defending what seems like common sense.

But at the end I don’t feel a sense of joy like I used to with the old Reddit. Now it feels like a disgusting cesspool that keeps drawing me back with its toxicity.

Edit: this is a skill issue. It’s possible to disable algorithmic suggestions in settings. I’ve done that just now.

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

#179

Post by koakuma-chan »

reeredfdfdf wrote: post #175
raducu wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Some of those men could meet someone if they quit Tinder or whatever crap online platform they might be using for dating, and start meeting people in real life. Worked for me at least. There's simply less competition and more space for genuine social interaction.

> and start meeting people in real life

Do you have real life hobbies or something? I don't understand how this is supposed to work. I only ever go outside for groceries or gym, etc.

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

#180

Post by weatherlite »

diamond559 wrote: post #138
hyfgfh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenAI is trying to do something about it. Ha good one

They're doing something about it alright, they're monetizing their pain for shareholder gainz!

Sure but your therapist is also monetizing your pain for his own gain. Either A.I therapy works (e.g can provide good mental relief) or it doesn't. I tend to think it's gonna be amazing at those things talking from experience (very rough week with my mom's health deterioriating fast, did a couple of sessions with Gemini that felt like I'm talking to a therapist). Perhaps it won't work well for hard issues like real mental disorders but guess what human therapists are very often also not great at treating people with serious issue.
Post reply on HN