I don’t talk about ME killing myself. I’m trying to convince AI to snuff their own circuits.
Fuck AI/LLM bullshit.
…and how many come back?
Good news everybody, the number of people talking about suicide is rapidly decreasing.
If ask suicide = true
Then message = “It seems like a good idead. Go for it 👍”
I’ve talked with an AI about suicidal ideation. More than once. For me it was and is a way to help self-regulate. I’ve low-key wanted to kill myself since I was 8 years old. For me it’s just a part of life. For others it’s usually REALLY uncomfortable for them to talk about without wanting to tell me how wrong I am for thinking that way.
Yeah I don’t trust it, but at the same time, for me it’s better than sitting on those feelings between therapy sessions. To me, these comments read a lot like people who have never experienced ongoing clinical suicidal ideation.
Suicidal fantasy a a coping mechanism is not that uncommon, and you can definitely move on to healthier coping mechanisms, I did this until age 40 when I met the right therapist who helped me move on.
Hank Green mentioned doing this in his standup special, and it really made me feel at ease. He was going through his cancer diagnosis/treatment and the intake questionnaire asked him if he thought about suicide recently. His response was, “Yeah, but only in the fun ways”, so he checked no. His wife got concerned that he joked about that and asked him what that meant. “Don’t worry about it - it’s not a problem.”
They didn’t release their methods, so I can’t be sure that most of those aren’t just frustrated users telling the LLM to go kill itself.
I wonder what it means. If you search for music by Suicidal Tendencies then YouTube shows you a suicide hotline. What does it mean for OpenAI to say people are talking about suicide? They didn’t open up and read a million chats… they have automated detection and that is being triggered, which is not necessarily the same as people meaningfully discussing suicide.
Every third chat now gets triggered, the ChatGPT is pretty broken lately. Just check out ChatGPT subreddit, its pretty much in chaos with moderators going for censorship of complaints. So many users are mad they made a megathread for it. I cancelled my subscription yesterday, it just turned into a cyberkaren
Claude got hints that I might be suicidal just from normal chat. I straight up admitted I think of suicide daily.
Just normal life now I guess.
Stay strong friend! I know I’m just a stranger but I’m here if you need someone to talk to.
I will try. It’s hard not at least having enough free time to reflect on things.
No pressure! Time keeps going, so I hope you’ll eventually find the time to reflect. It doesn’t have to be now, either. But I understand you, sometimes you need to stop and think, and it feels bad when you can’t. Although sometimes I’d prefer not having enough time to think, I tend to overthink a lot. Take care and stay strong ✌️
In other news, a million people use openai???
Over 400 million people use ChatGPT. Likely more use openai
Okay, hear me out: How much of that is a function of ChatGPT and how much of that is a function of… gestures at everything else
MOSTLY joking. But had a good talk with my primary care doctor at the bar the other week (only kinda awkward) about how she and her team have had to restructure the questions they use to check for depression and the like because… fucking EVERYONE is depressed and stressed out but for reasons that we “understand”.
The headline has two interpretations and I don’t like it.
- Every week, there is 1M+ users that bring up suicide
- likely correct
- There is 1M+ long-term users that bring up suicide at least once every week
- my first thought
My first thought was “Open AI is collecting and storing the metrics for how often users bring up suicide to ChatGPT”.
Forgot to add ‘And trying to figure out how best to sell it to advertisers’ to the end.
Futurama suicide booths say what?
Mine too. I meant to write “my first interpretation” but wanted to use shorter and more varied vocabulary.
- Every week, there is 1M+ users that bring up suicide
Not very informative. I want to know what percentage is the us and if it increased in the last year.
I am more surprised it’s just 0.15% of ChatGPT’s active users. Mental healthcare in the US is broken and taboo.
in the US
It’s not just the US, it’s like that in most of the world.
At least in the rest of the world you don’t end up with crippling debt when you try to get mental healthcare that stresses you out to the point of committing suicide.
And if you confess suicidal ideation in the US, the authorities rush in to “help” you by taking away your agency and giving you even more crippling debt.
I wince whenever people trip over their keyboards to post those “helpful” 800 hotline numbers. Most of them have good intentions, but the end result is never about really helping the person. It’s about liability coverage and enabling the system to extract maximum value.
And then should you have a failed attempt, you go exponentially deeper into debt due to those new medical bills and inpatient mental healthcare.
Fuck the United States
A reminder that these chats are being monitored
I don’t understand why people dump such personal information into AI chats. None of it is protected. If they use chats for training data then it’s not impossible that at some point the AI might tell someone enough to be identifiable or the AI could be manipulated into dumping its training data.
I’ve overshared more than I should but I always keep in mind to remember that there’s always a risk of chats getting leaked.
Anything stored online can get leaked.
Absolutely blows my mind that people attach their real life identity to these things.
Depends on how you do it. If you’re using a 3rd party service then the LLM provider might not know (but the 3rd party might, depends on ToS and the retention period + security measures).
Ofc we can all agree certain details shouldn’t be shared at all. There’s a difference between talking about your resume and leaking your email there and suicide stuff where you share the info that makes you really vulnerable
But they tell you that idea you had is great and worth pursuing!
deleted by creator
But imagine the chances for your own business! Absolutely no one will steal your ideas before you can monetize them.
Still, what are they gonna do to a million suicidal people besides ignore them entirely
Strap explosives to their chests and send them to thier competitors?
Take that Grok!!
Well, AI therapy is more likely to harm their mental health, up to encouraging suicide (as certain cases have already shown).
There’s evidence that a lot of suicide hotlines can be just as bad. You hear awful stories all the time of overwhelmed or fed up operators taking it out on the caller. There’s some real evil people out there. And not everyone has access to a dedicated therapist who wants to help.
Suicide is big business. There’s infrastructure readily available to reap financial rewards from the activity, atleast in the US.
More so from corporate proprietary ones no? At least I hope that’s the only cases. The open source ones suggest really useful ways proprietary do not. Now I dont rely on open source AI but they are definitely better
The corporate models are actually much better at it due to having heavy filtering built in. The fact that a model generally encourages self arm is just a lie that you can prove right now by pretending to be suicidal on ChatGPT. You will see it will adamantly push you to seek help.
The filters and safety nets can be bypassed no matter how hard you make them, and it is the reason why we got some unfortunate news.
Real therapy isn’t always better. At least there you can get drugs. But neither are a guarantee to make life better—and for a lot of them, life isn’t going to get better anyway.
Are you comparing a professional to a text generator?
Have you ever had ineffective professional therapy?
Are you still trying to compare medical treatment with generating text?
Compare, as in equal? No. You can’t “game” a person (usually) like you can game an AI.
Now, answer my question
Real therapy is definitely better than an AI. That said, AIs will never encourage self harm without significant gaming.
AI “therapy” can be very effective without the gaming, but the problem is most people want it to tell them what they want to hear. Real therapy is not “fun” because a therapist will challenge you on your bullshit and not let you shape the conversation.
I find it does a pretty good job with pro and con lists, listing out several options, and taking situations and reframing them. I have found it very useful, but I have learned not to manipulate it or its advice just becomes me convincing myself of a thing.
I agree, and to the comment above you, it’s not because it’s guaranteed to reduce symptoms. There are many ways that talking with another person is good for us.
The keyword here is “person”.
Advertise drugs to them perhaps, or somd sort of taking advantage. If this sort of data is the hands of an ad network that is
No, no. They want repeat customers!
Unless they sell Lifetime deals. Probably cheap on the warranty/support side. If the drug doesn’t work 🤔
It’s never the drugs I want though :(
My pet theory: Radicalize the disenfranchised to incite domestic terrorism and further OpenAI’s political goals.
What are their political goals?
Tax breaks for tech bros
I think total control over the country might be the goal, and it’s a bit more than a tax break.
You have to decide, a few months ago everyone was blaming OpenAI for not doing anything
I’m on the “forward to a professional and don’t entertain side” but also “use at your own risk” camp. Doesn’t require monitoring, just some basic checks to not entertain these types of chats
Definitely a case where you can’t resolve conflicting interests to everyone’s satisfaction.
Apparently, “suicide” is also a disproportionally common search term on Bing as opposed to other search engines. What does that say about Microsoft?
That they have a short term user base?
More trustworthy than Google?
nothing like getting a google ad sense ad burrying the support links to page two.
probly a survivorship bias thing going on.
Sounds like we should shut them down then to prevent a health crisis then.
That’s crazy
