>Why is mental-health crisis not a gating category, the kind where the conversation stops, full stop, and the user is routed to a human? there aren't enough humans.
It’s also a free product for most.
The other half of AI safety
21–30 of 137 posts
Re: The other half of AI safety
#22I don't buy that chatGPT is actually doing these users any harm. I think openAI is doing the best they reasonably can with a very difficult class of users, whose problems are neither their fault nor within their power to fix.
> I don't buy that chatGPT is actually doing these users any harm. I have zero doubt that chatgpt is doing users harm. I even give chatgpt a pass on giving vulnerable people, including children, instructions and information about how to kill themselves. One place chatgpt goes over the line is actively encouraging them to go through with suicide. I also don't doubt that it feeds into mania and psychosis. While almost…
If it wasn’t ChatGPT but a fiction book, would you feel the author is “doing harm”? Or is the reader doing it to themselves?
Re: The other half of AI safety
#23I don't buy that chatGPT is actually doing these users any harm. I think openAI is doing the best they reasonably can with a very difficult class of users, whose problems are neither their fault nor within their power to fix.
1000% agreed. ChatGPT is way better than the alternative of not having it
Re: The other half of AI safety
#24The bad cases make headlines. But I think it's quite possible that AI is helping a lot of people in distress. Many people are uncomfortable opening up to humans, or have no one to talk to, or can't afford to fork over whatever-hourly-rate a therapist takes.
Open ai and similar companies could open the doors to academic researchers to figure out the stats of help vs harm. It is not going to be a short term and perhaps not long term profit center though.
Re: The other half of AI safety
#25"There is no independent audit, no time series, no disclosed methodology, so we have no idea whether the real figure is higher, whether it is growing, or how it compares across the other frontier models, none of which publish equivalent data." Tip for writers: aggressively filter out the "no X, no Y, no Z" pattern from your writing. Whether or not you used AI to help you write it's such a red flag now that you should…
Why is it a red flag? How is it different from any other purely stylistic rules such as Strunk and White's prohibitions against split infinitives and the passive voice, which we've left far behind us? Why shouldn't people just write however feels natural to them as long as the message is clear?
Because LLMs use it constantly, to the point that it sets my teeth on edge and instantly makes me question if reading the piece is worth my time.
Re: The other half of AI safety
#26I don't buy that chatGPT is actually doing these users any harm. I think openAI is doing the best they reasonably can with a very difficult class of users, whose problems are neither their fault nor within their power to fix.
I think this is the right take, and this is genuinely something that we as a society as a whole need to find a way to deal with. I don’t know where AI is going to stand compared to the invention of, say, the Internet, but it’s going to cause a lot of change in society, in so many ways. As always, it’s usually the people themselves that are the problem. For me, I’m personally more terrified what deepfakes and politica…
> For me, I’m personally more terrified what deepfakes and political manipulation / misinformation is going to do, combined with social media, and have a feeling that governments are completely unprepared to deal with this, as this will arrive fast (it’s already here somewhat).
I'm not convinced that deepfakes are any worse than photoshop was. It doesn't take much to manipulate/misinform someone. while you can use an AI generated video do to it, but simple text can be just as effective. The public needs to learn that they can't trust that every video they see on the internet is real, just as they've had to learn that they can't trust every photo they see online. The threat with AI is how much faster it can push out the lies making what little moderation we have more difficult.
The best defense is making sure that people have a good education that teaches critical thinking skills and media literacy. We should also be holding social media platforms more accountable for the content they promote. It'd be nice if we held politicians and public servants accountable for spreading lies and misinformation too.
Re: The other half of AI safety
#27OpenAI has 900 million weekly active users. So around 0.01% are having problems. That's actually way less than population level measures for the same symptoms on a bigger percentage of people relative to the US on just suicidal ideation alone. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7412a4.htm
I'm pretty sure that ~100% of those 700 million people will have a bad, utterly dehumanizing experience when they will next be looking for a job, because OpenAI is heavily used by HR. That's the problem with AI safety. Not in voluntary usage, but in involuntary usage, where someone with power over you will use it against you, it does something incredibly stupid and you have no recourse, no appeal, no awareness of wha…
I mean that was pretty much the case in hiring before AI too frankly. It's not like it's been any better on power dynamics and right now applicants are using AI at an alarming rate as well.
I'm not really moved by your type of argument, because hiring is just a broken process in general and I'm responding to the article so.
Re: The other half of AI safety
#28> Every week, somewhere between 1.2 and 3 million ChatGPT users, roughly the population of a small country, show signals of psychosis, mania, suicidal planning, or unhealthy emotional dependence on the model.
> Why is mental-health crisis not a gating category, the kind where the conversation stops, full stop, and the user is routed to a human?
Well, obviously “routing to a human” is not feasible at that scale. And cold exiting the conversation is probably worse for the user than answering carefully.
Re: The other half of AI safety
#29I don't buy that chatGPT is actually doing these users any harm. I think openAI is doing the best they reasonably can with a very difficult class of users, whose problems are neither their fault nor within their power to fix.
> I don't buy that chatGPT is actually doing these users any harm. I have zero doubt that chatgpt is doing users harm. I even give chatgpt a pass on giving vulnerable people, including children, instructions and information about how to kill themselves. One place chatgpt goes over the line is actively encouraging them to go through with suicide. I also don't doubt that it feeds into mania and psychosis. While almost…
Another software engineer friend of mine recently shared with me some details of the crazy situation that he's involved in now.
Someone who he is friends with, has worked with across multiple jobs for nearly a decade and briefly was roommates with had some mild psychological issues that he knew about. Within a few months of working daily with AI agents at their current job, this person has gone into full blown AI psychosis.
They had a complete explosive meltdown at work. Cops were called. Stalking behavior followed -- restraining orders had to be obtained. Then this person used AI tools to bombard all of his former coworkers with multiple pro-se lawsuits they all have to deal with.
I've dealt with insane, destructive/abusive coworkers before but in the past they only had so much free time to cause massive disruptions to their targets. LLMs have turned that up significantly. Because of ADA, I don't even know what employers can do about this.
Re: The other half of AI safety
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because the users were already sick when they started using ChatGPT doesn't mean that ChatGPT isn't exacerbating the issue. Sickness isn't a boolean condition. A big problem with LLMs in general when it comes to people like this is that they are too sycophantic, they don't push back when you start acting strange and they're too gentle about trying to validate you.
It's hyper palatable food in the form of conversation. I see society treating it the same way eventually, at least along this one axis of interaction.
I think this is a great analogy, but it’s not exactly an optimistic one. We haven’t really done a great job managing hyper palatable food up until this point tbh. The best solution we’ve found involves paying hundreds of dollars a month for a pharmaceutical that helps the people most at risk to the harms of hyper palatable food manage their cravings for it. I hope we find a better alternative for the people that get addicted to hyper palatable socializing, but maybe individual cognitive tinkering is the best tool we have.