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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

#331

Post by walleeee »

brainless wrote: post #79

This is not suprising at all. Having gone through therapy a few years back, I would have had a chat with LLMs if I was in a poor mental health situation. There is no other system that is available at scale, 24x7 on my phone. A chat like this is not a solution though, it is an indicator that our societies have issues is large parts of our population that we are unable to deal with. We are not helping enough people. To…

> A chat like this is not a solution though, it is an indicator that our societies have issues

Correct, many of which are directly, a skeptic might even argue deliberately, exacerbated by companies like OpenAI.

And yet your proposal is

> a company to tackle this at scale.

What gives you the confidence that any such company will focus consistently, if at all,

> on help, not profits

Given it exists in the same incentive matrix as any other startup? A matrix which is far less likely to throw one fistfuls of cash for a nice-sounding idea now than it was in recent times. This company will need to resist its investors' pressure to find returns. How exactly will it do this? Do you choose to believe someone else has thought this through, or will do so? At what point does your belief become convenient for people who don't share your admirably prosocial convictions?

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

#332

Post by jalapenos »

mbac32768 wrote: post #122
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?

That implies there's some deep truth about reality in that statement rather than what it is, a completely arbitrary framing. An equally arbitrary frame is "the world and life are wonderful". The reason you may believe one instead of the other is not because one is more fundamentally true than the other, but because of a stochastic process that changed your mind state to one of those. Once you accept that both states…

I think this is certainly part of the problem. There's no shortage of narcissists in the English speaking world who - if they heard to woes of someone in pain - would be ready to gleefully treat it as an opportunity to pontificate down to them about "stochastic processes" and so on, rather than consider how their lives are.

Of course, only thereby, through being quite as superior to all others and their thought processes as me [pauses to sniff fart] can one truly find the moral impetus to prevent suicide.

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

#333

Post by ethbr1 »

alex-moon wrote: post #317
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would need the big picture, though... maybe it caused that death (which is awful) but it's also saving lives? If there are that many people confiding in it, I wouldn't be surprised if it actually prevents some suicides with encouraging comments, and that's not going to make the news. Before declaring that it shouldn't be near anyone with psychological issues, someone in the relevant field should study whether the…

I suspect you've never done therapy yourself. Most people who have worked with a professional therapist understand intuitively why the only helpful feedback from an LLM to someone who needs professional help is: get professional help. AIs are really good at doing something to about 80%. When the stakes are life or death, as they are with someone who is suicidal, that is a good example of a time when 80% isn't good en…

You're holding up a perfect status quo that doesn't correspond to reality.

Countries vary, but in the US and many places there's a shortage of quality therapists.

Thus for many people the actual options are {no therapy} and {LLM therapy}.

> This is why we have safety regulations, why we don't let people drive cars that haven't passed tests, build with materials that haven't passed tests, eat food that hasn't passed tests.

And the reason all these regulations and tests are less than comprehensive is that we realize that people working, driving affordable cars, living in affordable homes, and eating affordable food is more important than avoiding every negative outcome. Thus most societies pursue the utilitarian greater good rather than an inflexible 'do no harm' standard.

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

#334

Post by moralestapia »

probably_wrong wrote: post #229

If you haven't read the article (or even if you have but didn't click on outgoing links twice ) the NYT story about how ChatGPT convinced a suicidal teen not to look for help [1] should convince you that ChatGPT should be nowhere near anyone dealing with psychological issues. Here's ChatGPT discouraging said teenager from asking for help: > “I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me…

That's really really bad.

But also, how many people has it talked out of doing it? We need the full picture.

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

#335

Post by mschuster91 »

fragmede wrote: post #330
alex-moon wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you've never done therapy yourself. Most people who have worked with a professional therapist understand intuitively why the only helpful feedback from an LLM to someone who needs professional help is: get professional help. AIs are really good at doing something to about 80%. When the stakes are life or death, as they are with someone who is suicidal, that is a good example of a time when 80% isn't good en…

The unfortunate reality though is that people are going to use whatever resources they have available to them, and ChatGPT is always there, ready to have a conversation, even at 3am on a Tuesday while the client is wasted. You don't need any credentials to see that. And it depends on the therapy and therapist. If the client needs to be reminded to box breathe and that they're using all or nothing thinking again to ge…

> If the client needs to be reminded to box breathe and that they're using all or nothing thinking again to get them off of the ledge, does that really require a human who's only available once a week to gently remind them of that when the therapist isn't going to be available for four more days and ChatGPT's available right now?

There are 24/7 suicide prevention hotlines at least in many countries in Europe as well as US states. The problem is they are too often overcrowded because demand is so high - and not just because of the existential threat the current US administration or our far-right governments in Europe pose particularly to poor and migrant people.

Anyway, suicide prevention hotlines and mental health offerings are (nonetheless sorely needed!) band-aids. Society itself is fundamentally broken: people have to struggle to survive far too much, the younger generation stands to be the first one in a long time that has less wealth than their parents had at the same age [1], no matter wherever you look, and on top of that most of the 35 and younger generations in Western countries has grown up without the looming threat of war and so has no resilience - and now you can drive about a day's worth of road time from Germany and be in an actual hot war zone, risking getting shelled, and on top of that you got the saber rattling of China regarding Taiwan, and analyses on Russia claiming it's preparing to attack NATO in a few years... and we're not even able to supply Ukraine with ammunition, much less tanks.

Not exactly great conditions for anyone's mental health.

[1] https://fortune.com/article/gen-z-expects-to-inherit-money-a...

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

#336

Post by itchyjunk »

It seems like people here have already made up their mind about how bad llms are. So just my anecdote here, it helped me out of some really dark places. Talking to humans (non psychologists) had the opposite effect. Between a non professional and an llm, i'd pick llm for myself. Others should definitely seek help.

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

#337

Post by yubblegum »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #278
latexr wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Supposing that the advice it provides does more good than harm That unsubstantiated supposition is doing a lot of heavy lifting and that’s a dangerous and unproductive way to frame the argument. I’ll make a purposefully exaggerated example. Say a school wants to add cyanide to every meal and defends the decision with “supposing it helps students concentrate and be quieter in the classroom, why not?”. See the proble…

In my previous post up the thread I said that we should measure whether in fact it does more good than harm or not. That's the context of my comment, I'm not saying we should just take it for granted without looking.

You mean lab test it in a clininal environment where the actual participants are not in danger of self-harm due to an LLM session? That is fine but that is not what we are discussing, or where we are atm.

Individuals and companies with mind boggling levels of investment want to push this tech into every corner of our lives and and the public are the lab rats.

Unreasonable. Unacceptable.

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

#338

Post by [deleted] »

latexr wrote: post #282
arowthway wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are people using ChatGPT for therapy more vulnerable than people using it for medical or legal advice? From my experience talking about your problems to the unaccountable bullshit machine is not very different then the "real" therapy.

> Are people using ChatGPT for therapy more vulnerable than people using it for medical or legal advice? Probably. If you are in therapy because you’re feeling mentally unstable, by definition you’re not as capable of separating bad advice from good. But your question is a false dichotomy, anyway. You shouldn’t be asking ChatGPT for either type of advice. Unless you enjoy giving yourself psychiatric disorders. https:…

[deleted]

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

#339

Post by ethbr1 »

fragmede wrote: post #330
alex-moon wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you've never done therapy yourself. Most people who have worked with a professional therapist understand intuitively why the only helpful feedback from an LLM to someone who needs professional help is: get professional help. AIs are really good at doing something to about 80%. When the stakes are life or death, as they are with someone who is suicidal, that is a good example of a time when 80% isn't good en…

The unfortunate reality though is that people are going to use whatever resources they have available to them, and ChatGPT is always there, ready to have a conversation, even at 3am on a Tuesday while the client is wasted. You don't need any credentials to see that. And it depends on the therapy and therapist. If the client needs to be reminded to box breathe and that they're using all or nothing thinking again to ge…

When the story about the ChatGPT suicide originally popped up, it seemed obvious that the answer was professional, individualized LLMs as therapist multipliers.

Record summarization, 24x7 availability, infinite conversation time...

... backed by a licensed human therapist who also meets for periodic sessions and whose notes and plan then become context/prompts for the LLM.

Price per session = salary / number of sessions possible in a year

Why couldn't we help address the mental health crisis by using LLMs to multiply the denominator?

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

#340

Post by Dilettante_ »

7moritz7 wrote: post #207
jacquesm wrote: post #187

HIPAA anybody? (1) they probably shouldn't even have that data (2) they shouldn't have it lying around in a way that it an be attributed to particular individuals (3) imagine that it leaks to the wrong party, it would make the hack of that Finnish institution look like child's play (4) if people try to engage it in such conversations the bot should immediately back out because it isn't qualified to have these convers…

> if people try to engage it in such conversations the bot should immediately back out because it isn't qualified to have these conversations For a lot of people, especially in poorer regions, LLMs are a mental health lifeline. When someone is severely depressed they can lay in bed the whole day without doing anything . There is no impulse, as if you tried starting a car and nothing happens at all, so you can forget…

  There is no impulse, as if you tried starting a car and nothing happens at all, so you can forget about taking it to the mechanic
That is a really great analogy.
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