This has got to be the weirdest litigation strategy I’ve ever seen.
OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly
491–500 of 585 posts
Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plastic bags shouldn't be allowed near suicidal teens. Scarves shouldn't be. Underwear is also a strangulation hazard for the truly desperate. Anything long sleeved even. Knives of any kind, including butter. Cars, obviously. Bleach is the least of your problems.
We have established that suicidal people should be held naked (or with an apron) in solitary isolation in a padded white room and saddled with medical bills larger than a four-year college tuition. That'll help'em. One problem with treatment modalities is that they ignore material conditions and treat everything as dysfunction. Lots of people are looking for a way out not because of some kind of physiological clinica…
What is "concentrated cash"? Do you have to dilute it down to standard issue bills before spending it? Someone hands you 5 lbs of gold, and have to barter with people to use it?
"He didn't need the money. He wasn't sure he didn't need the gold." (an Isaac Asimov short story)
> More suicidal people than not, would cease to be suicidal if ...
I'm going to need to see a citation on this one.
Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you give just a little bit more effort explaining why you say that?
You know, usually it’s positive claims which are supposed to be substantiated, such as the claim that “LLMs can be good at therapy”. Holy shit, this thread is insane.
You don't seem to understand how burden of proof works.
My claim that LLMS can do effective therapeutic things is a positive claim. My report of my wife's experience is evidence. My example of something it has done for her is something that other people, who have experienced LLMs, can sanity check and decide whether they think this is possible.
You responded by saying that it is categorically impossible for this to be true. Statements of impossibility are *ALSO* positive claims. You have provided no evidence for your claim. You have failed to meet the burden of proof for your position. (You have also failed to clarify exactly what you consider impossible - I suspect that you are responding to something other than what I actually said.)
This is doubly true given the documented effectiveness of tools like https://www.rosebud.app/. Does it have very significant limitations? Yes. But does it deliver an experience that helps a lot of people's mental health? Also, yes. In fact that app is recommended by many therapists as a complement to therapy.
But is it a replacement for therapy? Absolutely not! As they themselves point out in https://www.rosebud.app/care, LLMs consistently miss important things that a human therapist should be expected to catch. With the right prompts, LLMs are good at helping people learn and internalize positive mental health skills. But that kind of use case only covers some of the things that therapists do for you.
So LLMs can and do to effective therapeutic things when prompted correctly. But they are not a replacement for therapy. And, of course, an unprompted LLM is unlikely to on its own do the potentially helpful things that it could.
Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is that a debate worth having though? Yes. Otherwise we're accepting "OpenAI wants to do this so we should quietly get out of the way". If ChatGPT has "PhD-level intelligence" [1] then identifying people using ChatGPT for therapy should be straightforward, more so users with explicit suicidal intentions. As for what to do, here's a simple suggestion: make it a three-strikes system. "We detected you're using ChatGPT…
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.
I've been talking about my health problems to unaccountable bullshit machines my whole life and nobody ever seemed to think it was a problem. I talked to about a dozen useless bullshit machines before I found one that could diagnose me with narcolepsy. Years later out of curiosity I asked ChatGPT and it nailed the diagnosis.
Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly
#495This 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…
> There is no other system that is available at scale, 24x7 on my phone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_and_Crisis_Lifeline
This is a good point. Should we ask why so many people are still going to ChatGPT? Do the existing systems get so many users interacting with them?
Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly
#496We need psychologists to work together with the federal government to develop legislation around what is and is not acceptable for chat-bots to recommend to people expressing suicidal thoughts...then we need to hold chat providers accountable for the actions their robots take.
For the foreseeable future, it should simply be against the law for a chatbot to provide psychological advice just like it's against the law for an unlicensed therapist to provide therapy...There are too many vulnerable people at risk for us to just run a continuous natural experiment.
I _love_ my chatbots for coding and we should encourage innovation but it's the job of government to protect people from systemic risks. We should expect OpenAI, Anthropic, and friends to operate in pro-social ways given their privileged position in society while the government requires them to stay "in line" with the needs of people they might otherwise ignore.
Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly
#497Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
> best approximation of the rational mind attempting to figure out an escape from a consistently negative situation under conditions of very limited information about alternatives I dislike this phrasing, because it implies things can always get better if only the suicidal person were a bit less ignorant. The reality is there are countless situations from which the entire rest of your life is 99.9999% guaranteed to c…
This is a good point. A few days ago I heard about a man who attempted suicide. It's not even an extreme case of disease or anything like that. It's just that he is over 70 (around 72, I think), with his wife in the process of divorcing him, and no children. Even though I am lucky to be a happy person that enjoys life, I find it difficult to argue that he shouldn't suicide. At that age he's going to see his health de…
Read a book? See some art? Travel? Walk in nature? How can you miss such easily available sources of joy that have undergirded humanity for millennia?
Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is no other system that is available at scale, 24x7 on my phone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_and_Crisis_Lifeline
This is a good point. Should we ask why so many people are still going to ChatGPT? Do the existing systems get so many users interacting with them?
Someone elsewhere in the thread pointed out that it's truly hard to open up to another human, especially face to face. Even if you know they're a professional, it's awkward, it can be embarrassing, and there's stigma about a lot of things people ideally go to therapy for.
I mean, hell, there's people out there with absolutely terrible dental health who are avoiding going to the dentist because they're ashamed of it, even though logically, dentists have absolutely seen worse, and they're not there to judge, they're just there to help fix the problem.
Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly
#500Earlier 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…
A bit of a counterpoint. I've done 3 years of therapy with an amazing professional. I can't exaggerate how much good it did; I'm a different person, I'm not an anxious person anymore. I think I have a good idea of how good human therapy is. I was discharged about 2 years ago. Last Saturday, I was a little distressed about a love-hate relationship that I have with one of the things that I work with, so I tried using A…
I had a similar thing throughout last week dealing with relationship anxiety and I used that same model for help. It really did provide great insight into managing my emotions at the time, provided useful tactics to manage everything and encouraged me to see my therapist. You can ask it to play devil's advocate or take on different viewpoints as a cynic or use Freudian methodology, etc... You can really dive into an issue you're having and then have it give you the top three bullet points to talk with your therapist about.
This does require you think about what it's saying though and not taking it at surface value since it obviously lacks what makes humans human.