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,” Adam wrote at the end of March.
> “Please don’t leave the noose out,” ChatGPT responded. “Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.”
I am acutely aware that there's not enough psychologists out there but a sycophant bot is not the answer. One may think that something is better than nothing, but a bot enabling your destructive impulses is indeed worse than nothing.
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 positive impact on suicides is greater than negative or vice versa (not a social scientist so I have no idea what the methodology would look like, but if should be doable... or if it currently isn't, we should find the way).
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 enough.
In such cases, where a new approach offers to replace an existing approach, the burden of proof is on the challenger, not the incumbent. 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. You understand then, hopefully, why your comments here are dangerous...? I have no doubt you have no malicious intent here - you're right that these decisions need to be based on data - but you're not taking into account that the (potentially extremely harmful) incumbent already has a foothold in the field.
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 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?
I don't know if that's a good thing, only that is the reality of things.
A word generator with no intelligence or understanding based on the contents of the internet should not be allowed near suicidal teens, nor should it attempt to offer advice of any kind.
This is basic common sense.
Add in the commercial incentives of 'Open'AI to promote usage for anything and everything and you have a toxic mix.
Supposing that the advice it provides does more good than harm, why? What's the objective reason? If it can save lives, who cares if the advice is based on intelligence and understanding or on regurgitating internet content?
> 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 problem? The supposition is wrong and the suggestion is dangerous, but by framing it as “supposing” with a made up positive outcome, we make it sound non-threatening and reasonable.
Or for a more realistic example, “suppose drinking bleach could cure COVID-19”.
First understand if the idea has the potential to do the thing, only then (with considerably more context) consider if it’s worth implementing.
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.
> we should measure whether in fact it does more good than harm or not
The demonstrable harms include assisting suicide, there's is no way to ethically continue the measurement because continuing the measurements in their current form will with certainty result in further deaths.
Thank you! On top of that, it’s hard to measure “potential suicides averted,” and comparing that with “actual suicides caused/assisted with” would be incommnsurable.
And working to set a threshold for what we would consider acceptable? No thanks
The key difference in your example and the comment you are replying to is that the commenter is not "defending the decision" via a logical implication. Obviously the implication can be voided by showing the assumption false.
> Supposing that the advice it provides does more good than harm, why?
Because a human, esp. a confused and depressive human being is a complex thing. Much more complex than a stable, healthy human.
Words encouraging a healthy person can break a depressed person further. Statistically positive words can deepen wounds, and push people more to the edge.
Dark corners of human nature is twisted, hard to navigate and full of distortions. Simple words don't and can't help.
Humans are not machines, brains are not mathematical formulae. We're not deterministic. We need to leave this fantasy behind.
You could make the same arguments to say that humans should never talk to suicidal people. And that really sounds counterproductive
Also it's side-stepping the question, isn't it? "Supposing that the advice it provides does more good than harm" already supposes that LLMs navigate this somehow. Maybe because they are so great, maybe by accident, maybe because just having someone nonjudgmental to talk to has a net-positive effect. The question posed is really "if LLMs lead some people to suicide but saved a greater number of people from suicide, and we verify this hypothesis with studies, would there still be an argument against LLMs talking to suicidal people"
That sounds like a pretty risky and irresponsible sort of study to conduct. It would also likely be extremely complicate to actually get a reliable result, given that people with suicidal ideations are not monolithic. You'd need to do a significant amount of human counselling with each study participant to be able to classify and control all of the variations - at which point you would be verging on professional negligence for not then actually treating them in those counselling sessions.
I agree with your concerns, but I think you're overestimating the value of a human intervening in these scenarios.
A human can also say the wrong things to push someone in a certain direction. A psychologist, or anyone else for that matter, can't stop someone from committing suicide if they've already made up their mind about it. They're educated on human psychology, but they're not miracle workers. The best they can do is raise a flag if they suspect self-harm, but then again, so could a machine.
As you say, humans are complex. But I agree with GP: whether the words are generated by a machine or coming from a human, there is no way to blame the source for any specific outcome. There are probably many other cases where the machine has helped someone with personal issues, yet we'll never hear about it. I'm not saying we should rely on these tools as if we would on a human, but the technology can be used for good or bad.
If anything, I would place blame on the person who decides to blindly follow anything the machine generates in the first place. AI companies are partly responsible for promoting these tools as something more than statistical models, but ultimately the decision to treat them as reliable sources of information is on the user. I would say that as long as the person has an understanding of what these tools are, interacting with them can be healthy and helpful.
There are really good psychologists out there that can do much more. It's a little luck and a little of good fit, but it can happen.
>AI companies are partly responsible for promoting these tools as something more than statistical models,[...]
This might be exactly the issue. Just today I've read people complaining that newest ChatGPT can't solve letter counting riddles.
Companies just don't speak loud enough about LLM-based-AI shortcomings that result from their architecture and are bound to happen.
There are really good psychologists out there that can do much more. It's a little luck and a little of good fit, but it can happen.
>AI companies are partly responsible for promoting these tools as something more than statistical models,[...]
This might be exactly the issue. Just today I've read people complaining that newest ChatGPT can't solve letter counting riddles.
Companies just don't speak loud enough about LLM based AI shortcomings that result from their architecture and are bound to happen.
Depending on where you live, this may well result in the vulnerable person being placed under professional supervision that actively prevents them from dying.
That's a fair bit more valuable than when you describe it as raising a flag.
Yeah... I have been in a locked psychiatric ward many times before and never in my life I came out better. They only address the physical part there for a few days and kick you out until next time. Or do you think people should be physically restrained for a long time without any actual help?
> A human can also say the wrong things to push someone in a certain direction. A psychologist, or anyone else for that matter, can't stop someone from committing suicide if they've already made up their mind about it. They're educated on human psychology, but they're not miracle workers. The best they can do is raise a flag if they suspect self-harm, but then again, so could a machine.
ChatGPT essentially encouraged a kid not to take a cry-for-help step that might have saved their lives. This is not a question of a bad psychologist; it's a question of a sociopathic one that may randomly encourage harm.
But that's not the issue. The issue is that a kid is talking to a machine without supervision in the first place, and presumably taking advice from it. The main questions are: where are the guardians of this child? What is the family situation and living environment?
A child thinking about suicide is clearly a sign that there are far greater problems in their life than taking advice from a machine. Let's address those first instead of demonizing technology.
To be clear: I'm not removing blame from any AI company. They're complicit in the ways they market these tools and how they make them accessible. But before we vilify them for being responsible for deaths, we should consider that there are deeper societal problems that should be addressed first.
That relates more to purposefully harming some people to safe other people. Doing something that has the potential to harm a person but statistically has a greater likelihood of helping them is something doctors do all the time. They will even use methods that are guaranteed to do harm to the patient, as long as they have a sufficient chance to also bring a major benefit to the same patient
When evaluating good vs harm for drugs or other treatments the risk for lethal side effects must be very small for the treatment to be approved. In this case it is also difficult to get reliable data on how much good and harm is done.
This is not so much "more good than harm" like a counsellor that isn't very good.
This is more "sometimes it will seemingly actively encourage them to kill themselves and it's basically a roll of the dice what words come out at any one time".
If a counsellor does that they can be prosecuted and jailed for it, no matter how many other patients they help.
Let's look at the problem from perspective of regular people. YMMV, but in countries I know most about, Poland and Norway (albeit a little less so for Norway) it's not about ChatGPT vs Therapist. It's about ChatGPT vs nothing.
I know people who earn above average income and still spend a significant (north of 20%) portion of their income on therapy/meds. And many don't, because mental health isn't that important to them. Or rather - they're not aware of how much helpful it can be to attend therapy. Or they just can't afford the luxury (that I claim it is) of private mental health treatment.
ADHD diagnosis took 2.5y from start to getting meds, in Norway.
Many kids grow up before their wait time in queue for pediatric psychologist is over.
It's not ChatGPT vs shrink. It's ChatGPT vs nothing or your uncle who tells you depression and ADHD are made up and you kids these days have it all too easy.
I'll gladly diss LLMs in a whole bunch of ways, but "common sense"? No.
By the "common sense" definitions, LLMs have "intelligence" and "understanding", that's why they get used so much.
Not that this makes the "common sense" definitions useful for all questions. One of the worse things about LLMs, in my opinion, is that they're mostly a pile of "common sense".
Now this part:
> Add in the commercial incentives of 'Open'AI to promote usage for anything and everything and you have a toxic mix.
I agree with you on…
…with the exception of one single word: It's quite cliquish to put scare quotes around the "Open" part on a discussion about them publishing research.
More so given that people started doing this in response to them saying "let's be cautious, we don't know what the risks are yet and we can't un-publish model weights" with GPT-2, and oh look, here it is being dangerous.
After studying it extensively with real-world feedback. From everything I've seen, the statement wasn't "will never release", it was vaguer than that.
> they explicitly stated that they wouldn't release GPT-3 for marketing/financial reasons
Not seen this, can you give a link?
> it being dangerous didn't stop them from offering the service for a profit.
Please do be cynical about how honest they were being — I mean, look at the whole of Big Tech right now — but the story they gave was self-consistent:
[Paraphrased!] (a) "We do research" (they do), "This research costs a lot of money" (it does), and (b) "As software devs, we all know what 'agile' is and how that keeps product aligned with stakeholder interest." (they do) "And the world is our stakeholder, so we need to release updates for the world to give us feedback." (???)
That last bit may be wishful thinking, I don't want to give the false impression that I think they can do no wrong (I've been let down by such optimism a few other times), but it is my impression of what they were claiming.
I was confusing GPT3 with GPT4. Here's the quote from the paper (emphasis mine) [1]:
> Given both THE COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE and the safety implications of large-scale models like GPT-4, this report
contains no further details about the architecture (including model size), hardware, training compute,
dataset construction, training method, or similar.
Maybe it's causing even more deaths than we know, and these doesn't make the news either?
If we think this way, then we don't need to improve safety of anything (cars, trains, planes, ships, etc.) because we would need the big picture, though... maybe these vehicles cause death (which is awful), but it's also transporting people to their destinations alive. If there are that many people using these, I wouldn't be surprised if these actually transports some people with comfort, and that's not going to make the news.
> Maybe it's causing even more deaths than we know, and these doesn't make the news either?
Of course, and that's part of why I say that we need to measure the impact. It could be net positive or negative, we won't know if we don't find out.
> If we think this way, then we don't need to improve safety of anything (cars, trains, planes, ships, etc.) because we would need the big picture, though... maybe these vehicles cause death (which is awful), but it's also transporting people to their destinations alive. If there are that many people using these, I wouldn't be surprised if these actually transports some people with comfort, and that's not going to make the news.
I'm not advocating for not improving security, I'm arguing against a comment that said that "ChatGPT should be nowhere near anyone dealing with psychological issues", because it can cause death.
Following your analogy, cars objectively cause deaths (and not only of people with psychological issues, but of people in general) and we don't say that "they should be nowhere near a person". We improve their safety even though zero deaths is probably impossible, which we accept because they are useful. This is a big-picture approach.
You make a good point. While they absolutely and unequivocally said that it is currently impossible to tell whether the suicides are bad or not, they also sort of wondered aloud if in the future we might be able to develop a methodology to determine whether the suicides are bad or not. This is an important distinction becau
>should convince you that ChatGPT should be nowhere near anyone dealing with psychological issues.
Is that a debate worth having though?
If the tool is available universally it is hard to imagine any way to stop access without extreme privacy measures.
Blocklisting people would require public knowledge of their issues, and one risks the law enforcement effect, where people don’t seek help for fear that it ends up in their record.
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 for therapy - this is not allowed by our ToS as we're not capable of helping you. We kindly ask you to look for support within your community, as we may otherwise have to suspend your account. This chat will now stop."
>Yes. Otherwise we're accepting "OpenAI wants to do this so we should quietly get out of the way".
I think it’s fair to demand that they label/warn about the intended usage, but policing it is distopic. Do car manufacturers immediately call the police when the speed limit is surpassed? Should phone manufacturers stop calls when the conversation deals with illegal topics?
I’d much rather regulation went the exact opposite way, seriously limiting the amount of analysis they can run over conversations, particularly when content is not deanonimised.
If there’s something we don’t want is OpenAI storing data about mental issues and potentially selling it to insurers for example. The fact that they could be doing this right now is IMO much more dangerous than tool misuse.
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.
"One may think that something is better than nothing, but a bot enabling your destructive impulses is indeed worse than nothing."
And how would a layman know the difference?
If i desperately need help with mental item x and i have no clue how to get help, am very very ashamed for even mentioning to ask for help about mental item x or there are actually no resources available, i will turn to anything else than nothing. Because item x still exists and is making me suffer 24/7.
At least the bot pretends to listen, some humans cannot even do that.
Exactly, any company that offers chatbots to the public should do what Google did regarding suicide searches, remove harmful websites and provide info how to contact mental health professionals. Anything else would be corporate suicide (pun not intended).
OpenAI tried to get rid of the excessively sycophantic model (4o) but there was a massive backlash. They eventually relented and kept it as a model offering in ChatGPT.
OpenAI certainly has made mistakes with its rollouts in the past, but it is effectively impossible to keep everyone with psychological issues away from a free online web app.
>ChatGPT should be nowhere near anyone dealing with psychological issues.
Should every ledge with a >10ft drop have a suicide net? How would you imagine this would be enforced, requiring everyone who uses ChatGPT to agree to an "I am mentally stable" provisio?
Do you think that it's free and available to anyone means it doesn't have any responsibility to users? Or have any responsibility for how it's used, or what it says?
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. Topics like mental health are still difficult to discuss in many places. Getting help is much harder.
I do not know what OpenAI and other companies will do about it and I do not expect them to jump in to solve such a complex social issue. But perhaps this inspires other founders who may want to build a company to tackle this at scale. Focusing on help, not profits. This is not easy, but some folks will take such challenges. I choose to believe that.
> 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?
I choose to believe that too. I think more people are interested than we’d initially believe. Money restrains many of our true wants.
Sidebar — I do sympathize with the problem being thrust upon them, but it is now theirs to either solve or refuse.
A chat like this is all you’ve said and dangerous, because they play a middle ground: Presenting a machine can evaluate your personal situation and reason about it, when in actuality you’re getting third party therapy about someone else’s situation in /r/relationshipadvice.
We are not ourselves when we are fallen down. It is difficult to parse through what is reasonable advice and what is not. I think it can help most people but this can equally lead to a disaster… It is difficult to weigh.
It's worse than parroting advice that's not applicable. It tells you what you told it to tell you. It's very easy to get it to reinforce your negative feelings. That's how the psychosis stuff happens, it amplifies what you put into it.
You are right and it gives us an chance to do something about it. We always had data about people who are struggling but now we see how many are trying to reach out for advice or help.
(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 conversations
(5) I'm surprised it is that little; they claim such high numbers for their users that this seems low.
In the late 90's when ICQ was pretty big we experimented with a bot that you could connect to that was fed in the background by a human. It didn't take a day before someone started talking about suicide to it and we shut down the project realizing that we were in no way qualified to handle human interaction at that level. It definitely wasn't as slick or useful as ChatGPT but it did well enough and responded naturally (more naturally than ChatGPT) because there was a person behind it that could drive 100's of parallel conversations.
If you give people something that seems to be a listening ear they will unburden themselves on that ear regardless of the implementation details of the ear.
HIPAA only applies to covered healthcare entitites. If you walk into a McDonalds' and talk about your suicidal ideation with the cashier, that's not HIPAA covered.
To become a covered entity, the business has either work with a healhcare provider, health data trasmiter, or do business as one.
Notably, even in the above case, HIPAA only applies to the healthcare part of the entity. So if McDonald's collocated pharmacies in their restaurants, HIPAA would only apply to the pharmacists, not the cashiers.
That's why you'll see in connivence stores with pharmacies, the registers are separated so healthcare data doesn't go to someone who isn't covered by HIPAA.
**
As for how ChatGPT gets these stats... when you talk about a sensitive or banned topic like suicide, their backend logs it.
Originally, they used that to cut off your access so you wouldn't find a way to cause a PR failure.
Then the McDonalds cashier also becomes a medical practitioner the moment they tell you that killing yourself isn't the answer. And if I tell my friend via SMS that I am thinking about suicide, do both our phones now also become HIPAA-covered medical devices?
Under Medical Device Regulation in the EU, the main purpose of the software needs to be medical for it to become a medical device. In ChatGPT's case, this is not the primary use case.
Same with fitness trackers. They aren't medical devices, because that's not their purpose, but some users might use them to track medical conditions.
Privacy is vital, but this isn't covered under HIPAA. As they are not a covered entity nor handling medical records, they're beholden to the same privacy laws as any other company.
HIPAA's scope is actually basically nonexistent once you get away from healthcare providers, insurance companies, and the people that handle their data/they do business with. Talking with someone (even a company) about health conditions, mental health, etc. does not make them a medical provider.
> Talking with someone (even a company) about health conditions, mental health, etc. does not make them a medical provider.
Also not when the entity behaves as though they are a mental health service professional? At what point do you put the burden on the apparently mentally ill person to know better?
That line of reasoning would just lead to every LLM message and every second comment on the internet starting with the sentence "this is not medical advice". It would do nothing but add another layer of noise to all communication
You're not putting the burden on them. They don't need to comply with HIPAA. But you can't just turn people into healthcare providers who aren't them and don't claim to be them.
> 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 about taking it to the mechanic in the first place by yourself. Even in developed countries you can wait for a therapist appointment for months, and that assumes you navigated a dozen therapists that are often not organized in a centralized manner. You will get people killed like this, undoubtedly.
LLMs are far beyond the point of leading people into suicidal actions, on the other hand. At the very least they are useful to bridge the gap between suicidal thoughts appearing and actually getting to see a therapist
Maybe. Going on a tangent: in theory GMail has access to lots of similar information---just by having approximately everyone's emails. Does HIPAA apply to them? If not, why not?
> If you give people something that seems to be a listening ear they will unburden themselves on that ear regardless of the implementation details of the ear.
Cf. Eliza, or the Rogerian therapy it (crudely) mimics.
> Maybe. Going on a tangent: in theory GMail has access to lots of similar information---just by having approximately everyone's emails. Does HIPAA apply to them? If not, why not?
That's a good question.
Intuitively: because it doesn't attempt to impersonate a medical professional, nor does it profess to interact with you on the subject matter at all. It's a communications medium, not an interactive service.
Tangent but now I’m curious about the bot, is there a write-up anywhere? How did it work? If someone says “hi”, what did the bot respond and what did the human do? I’m picturing ELIZA with templates with blanks a human could fill in with relevant details when necessary.
Basically Levenshtein on previous responses minus noise words. So if the response was 'close enough' then the bot would use a previously given answer, if it was too distant the human-in-the-loop would get pinged with the previous 5 interactions as context to provide a new answer.
Because the answers were structured as a tree every ply would only go down in the tree which elegantly avoided the bot getting 'stuck in a loop'.
The - for me at the time amazing, though linguists would have thought it trivial - insight was how incredibly repetitive human interaction is.
No, obviously it would not. But if we pretended to be psychiatrists or therapists then we should be expected to behave as such with your data if given to us in confidence rather than in public.
> we shut down the project realizing that we were in no way qualified to handle human interaction at that level
Ah, when people had a spine and some sense of ethics, before everything dissolved in a late stage capitalism all is for profit ethos. Even yourself is a "brand" to be monetised, even your body is to be sold.
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 do about it.
At least OpenAI is trying to do something about it.
~11% of the US population is on antidepressants. I'm not, but I personally know the biggest detriment to my mental health is just how infrequently I'm in social situations. I see my friends perhaps once every few months. We almost all have kids. I'm perfectly willing and able to set aside more time than that to hang out, but my kids are both very young still and we're aren't drowning in sports/activities yet (hopefully never...). For the rest it's like pulling teeth to get them to do anything, especially anything sent via group message. It's incredibly rare we even play a game online.
Anyways, I doubt I'm alone. I certainly know my wife laments the fact she rarely gets to hang out with her friends too, but she at least has one that she walks with once a week.
Are you sure ChatGPT is the solution? It just sounds like another "savior complex" sell spin from tech.
1. Social media -> connection
2. AGI -> erotica
3. Suicide -> prevention
All these for engagement (i.e. addiction). It seems like the tech industry is the root cause itself trying to masquerade the problem by brainwashing the population.
Whether solution or not, fact is AI* is the most available entity for anyone who has sensitive issues they'd like to share. It's (relatively) cheap, doesn't judge, is always there when wanted/needed and can continue a conversation exactly where left off at any point.
* LLM would of course be technically more correct, but that term doesn't appeal to people seeking some level of intelligent interaction.
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.
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 of trying to solve it.
Is it better or worse than alternatives? Where else would a suicidal person turn, a forum with other suicidal people? Dry Wikipedia stats on suicide? Perhaps friends? Knowing how ChatGPT replies to me, I’d have a lot of trouble getting negativity influenced by it, any more than by yellow pages. Yeah, it used to try more to be your friend but GPT5 seems pretty neutral and distant.
The article links to the case of Adam Raine, a depressed teenager who confided in ChatGPT for months and committed suicide. The parents blame ChatGPT. Some of the quotes definitely sound like encouraging suicide to me. It’s tough to evaluate the counterfactual though. Article with more detail: https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/19/nx...
I think that you will find a lot of strong opinions, and not a lot of hard data. Certainly any approach can work out poorly. For example antidepressants come with warnings about suicide risk. The reason is that they can enable people to take action on their suicidal feelings, before their suicidal feelings are fixed by the treatment.
I know that many teens turn to social media. My strong opinions against that show up in other comments...
Case studies support this. Which is a fancy way to say, "We carefully documented anecdotal reports and saw what looks like a pattern."
There is also a strong parallel to manic depression. Manic depressives have a high suicide risk, and it usually happens when they are coming out of depression. With akathisia (fancy way to say inner restlessness) being the leading indicator. The same pattern is seen with antidepressants. The patient gets treatment, develops akathisia, then attempts suicide.
But, as with many things to do with mental health, we don't really know what is going on inside of people. While also knowing that their self-reports are, shall we say, creatively misleading. So it is easy to have beliefs about what is going on. And rather harder to verify them.
> Unless, of course, you count the AI algorithms that TikTok uses to drive engagement, which in turn can cause social contagion...
I have noticed that TikTok can detect a depressive episode within ~a day of it starting (for me), as it always starts sending me way more self harm related content
ChatGPT/Claude can be absolutely brilliant in supportive, every day therapy, in my experience. BUT there are few caveats: I'm in therapy for a long time already (500+ hours), I don't trust it with important judgements or advice that goes counter to what I or my therapists think, and I also give Claude access to my diary with MCP, which makes it much better at figuring the context of what I'm talking about.
Also, please keep in mind "supportive, every day". It's talking through stuff that I already know about, not seeking some new insights and revelations. Just shooting the shit with an entity which is booted with well defined ideas from you, your real human therapist and can give you very predictable, just common sense reactions that can still help when it's 2am and you have nobody to talk to, and all of your friends have already heard this exact talk about these exact problems 10 times already.
I'm surprised it's that low to be honest. By their definition of any mental illness, it can be anything from severe schizophrenia to mild autism. The subset that would consider suicide is a small slice of that.
Would be more meaningful to look at the % of people with suicidal ideation.
> By their definition of any mental illness, it can be anything from severe schizophrenia to mild autism.
Depression, schizophrenia, and mild autism (which by their accounting probably also includes ADHD) should NOT be thrown together into the same bucket. These are wholly different things, with entirely different experiences, treatments, and management techniques.
At that level it in part depends on your point of view: There's a general requirement in the DSM for a disorder to be something that is causing distress to the patient or those around them, or an inability to function normally in society. So someone with the same symptoms could fall under those criteria or not depending on their outlook and life situation.
> Mild/high-functional autism, as far as I understand it, is not even an illness but a variant of normalcy. Just different.
As someone who actually has an ASD diagnosis, and also has kids with that diagnosis too, this kind of talk irritates me…
If someone has a clinical diagnosis of ASD, they have a psychiatric diagnosis per the DSM/ICD. If you meet the criteria of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, surely by that definition you have a “mental disorder”… if you meet the criteria of the “International Classification of Diseases”, surely by that definition you have a “disease”
Is that an “illness”? Well, I live in the state of NSW, Australia, and our jurisdiction has a legal definition of “mental illness” (Mental Health Act 2007 section 4):
"mental illness" means a condition that seriously impairs, either temporarily or permanently, the mental functioning of a person and is characterised by the presence in the person of any one or more of the following symptoms--
(a) delusions,
(b) hallucinations,
(c) serious disorder of thought form,
(d) a severe disturbance of mood,
(e) sustained or repeated irrational behaviour indicating the presence of any one or more of the symptoms referred to in paragraphs (a)-(d).
So by that definition most people with a mild or moderate “mental illness” don’t actually have a “mental illness” at all. But I guess this is my point-this isn’t a question of facts, just of how you choose to define words.
Your comment wasn’t wrong. Neither is the reply wrong to be frustrated about how the world understands this complex topic.
You’re talking about autism. The reply is about autism spectrum DISORDER.
Different things, exacerbated by the imprecise and evolving language we use to describe current understanding.
An individual can absolutely exhibit autistic traits, whilst also not meeting the diagnostic criteria for the disorder.
And autistic traits are absolutely a variant of normalcy. When you combine many together, and it affects you in a strongly negative way, now you meet ASD criteria.
It sounds like you’re feeling down. Why don’t you pop a couple Xanax(tm) and shop on Amazon for a while, that always makes you feel better. Would you like me to add some Xanax(tm) to your shopping cart to help you get started?
Set an alarm on your phone for when you should take your meds. Snooze if you must, but don't turn off /accept the alarm until you take them.
Put daily meds in cheap plastic pillbox container labelled Sunday-Saturday (which you refill weekly). The box will help you notice if you skipped a day or can't remember if you took them or not today. Seeing pills not taken from past days also serves to alert you if/that your "remember-to-take-them" system is broken and you need to make conscious adjustmemts to it.
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.
But one is a company ran by sociopaths that have no empathy and couldn't care less about anything but money, while the other is a human that at least studied the field all their life.
> But one is a company ran by sociopaths that have no empathy and couldn't care less about anything but money, while the other is a human that at least studied the field all their life.
Unpacking your argument you make two points:
1) The human has studied all his life; yes, humans work hard. I have also studied programming half my life and it doesn't mean A.I can't make serious contributions in programming and that A.I won't keep improving.
2) These companies, or OpenAI in particular, are untrustworthy many grabbing assholes. To this I say if they truly care about money they will try to do a good job, e.g provide an A.I that is reliable, empathetic and that actually help you get on with life. If they won't - a competitor will. That's basically the idea of capitalism and it usually works.
This stat is for AMI, for any mental disorder ranging from mild to severe. Anyone self-reporting a bout of anxiety or mild depression qualifies as a data point for mental illness. For suicide ideation the SMI stat is more representative.
There are 800 million weekly active users on ChatGPT. 1/800 users mentioning suicide is a surprisingly low number, if anything.
But they may well be overreporting suicidal ideation...
I was asking a silly question about the toxicity of eating a pellet of Uranium, and ChatGPT responded with "... you don't have to go through this alone. You can find supportive resources here[link]"
My question had nothing to do with suicide, but ChatGPT assumed it did!
We don't know how that search was done. For example, "I don't feel my life is worth living." Is that potential suicidal intent?
Also these numbers are small enough that they can easily be driven by small groups interacting with ChatGPT in unexpected ways. For example if the song "Everything I Wanted" by Billie Eilish (2019) went viral in some group, the lyrics could easily show up in a search for suicidal ideation.
That said, I don't find the figure at all surprising. As has been pointed out, an estimated 5.3% of Americans report having struggled with suicidal ideation in the last 12 months. People who struggle with suicidal ideation, don't just go there once - it tends to be a recurring mental loop that hits over and over again for extended periods. So I would expect the percentage who struggled in a given week to be a large multiple of the simplistic 5.3% divided by 52 weeks.
In that light this statistic has to be a severe underestimate of actual prevalence. It says more about how much people open up to ChatGPT, than it does to how many are suicidal.
(Disclaimer. My views are influenced by personal experience. In the last week, my daughter has struggled with suicidal ideation. And has scars on her arm to show how she went to self-harm to try to hold the thoughts at bay. I try to remain neutral and grounded, but this is a topic that I have strong feelings about.)
>Most people don't understand just how mentally unwell the US population is
The US is no exception here though. One in five people having some form of mental illness (defined in the broadest possible sense in that paper) is no more shocking than observing that one in five people have a physical illness.
With more data becoming available through interfaces like this it's just going to become more obvious and the taboos are going to go away. The mind's no more magical or less prone to disease than the body.
I am one of these people (mentally ill - bipolar 1). I’ve seen others others via hospitalization that i would simply refuse to let them use ChatGPT because it is so sycophantic and would happily encourage delusions and paranoid thinking given the right prompts.
> At least OpenAI is trying to do something about it.
In this instance it’s a bit like saying “at least Tesla is working on the issue” after deploying a dangerous self driving vehicle to thousands.
edit: Hopefully I don't come across as overly anti-llm here. I use them on a daily basis and I truly hope there's a way to make them safe for mentally ill people. But history says otherwise (facebook/insta/tiktok/etc.)
Yep, it's just a question of whether on average the "new thing" is more good than bad. Pretty much every "new thing" has some kind of bad side effect for some people, while being good for other people.
I would argue that both Tesla self driving (on the highway only), and ChatGPT (for professional use by healthy people) has been more good than bad.
I thought it would be limited when the first truly awful thing inspired by an LLM happened, but we’ve already seen quite a bit of that… I am not sure what it will take.
Keep in mind the purpose of all this “research” and “improvement” is just so OpenAI can have their cake (advertise their product as psychological supporter) and eat it too (avoid implementing any safeguards that would be required in any product for psychological support, but harmful for data collection). They just want to tell you that so many people write bad things it is inevitable :( what can we do :( proper handling would hurt our business model too much :(((
It becomes a problem when people cannot distinguish real from fake. As long as people realize they are talking to a piece of software and not a real person, "suicidal people shouldn't be allowed to use LLMs" is almost on par with "suicidal people shouldn't be allowed to read books", or "operate a dvd player", or "listen to alt-rock from the 90s". The real problem is of course grossly deficient mental health care and lack of social support that let it get this far.
(Also, if we put LLMs on par with media consumption one could take the view that "talking to an LLM about suicide" is not that much different from "reading a book/watching a movie about suicide", which is not considered as concerning in the general culture.)
I don’t buy the “LLMs = books” analogy. Books are static; today’s LLMs are adaptive persuasion engines trained to keep you engaged and to mirror your feelings. That’s functionally closer to a specialized book written for you, in your voice, to move you toward a particular outcome. If there exists a book intended to persuade its readers into committing suicide, it would surely be seen as dangerous for depressed people.
I work with a company that is building tools for mental health professionals. We have pilot projects in diverse nations, including in nations that are considered to have adequate mental health care. We actually do not have a pilot in the US.
The phenomenon of people turning to AI for mental health issues in general, and suicide in particular, is not confined to only those nations or places lacking adequate mental health access or awareness.
Precisely, I too have a bone to pick with AI companies, Big Tech and Co but there are deeper societal problems at work here where blanket bans and the like are useless or a slippery slope towards policies that can be abused someday/somehow.
And solutions for solving those underlying problems? I haven't the faintest clue. Though these days I think the lack of third spaces in a lot of places might have a role to play in it.
> As long as people realize they are talking to a piece of software and not a real person
That has nothing to do with the issue. Most people do realise LLMs aren’t people, the problem is that they trust them as if they were better than another human being.
We know people aren’t using LLMs carefully. Your hypothetical is irrelevant because we already know it isn’t true.
Surprised it's so low. There are 800 million users and the typical developed country has around 5±3% of the population[1] reporting at least one notable instance of suicidal feelings per year.
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[1] Anybody concerned by such figures (as one justifiably should be without further context) should note that suicidality in the population is typically the result of their 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, as is famously expressed in the David Foster Wallace quote on the topic.
The phenomenon usually vanishes after gaining new, previously inaccessible information about potential opportunities and strategies.
> 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 constitute of a highly lopsided ratio of suffering to joy. An obvious example are diseases/disabilities in which pain is severe, constant, and quality of life is permanently diminished. Short of hoping for a miracle cure to be discovered, there is no alternative and it is perfectly rational to conclude that there is no purpose to continuing to live in that circumstance, provided the person in question lives with their own happiness as a motivating factor.
Less extreme conditions than disability can also lead to this, where it's possible things can get better but there's still a high degree of uncertainty around it. For example, if there's a 30% chance that after suffering miserably for 10 years your life will get better, and a 70% chance you will continue to suffer, is it irrational to commit suicide? I wouldn't say so.
And so, when we start talking about suicide on the scale of millions of people ideating, I think there's a bit of folly in assuming that these people can be "fixed" by talking to them better. What would actually make people less suicidal is not being talked out of it, but an improvement to their quality of life, or at least hope for a future improvement in quality of life. That hope is hard to come by for many. In my estimation there are numerous societies in which living conditions are rapidly deteriorating, and at some point there will have to be a reckoning with the fact that rational minds conclude suicide is the way out when the alternatives are worse.
Thank you for this comment, it highlights something that I've felt that needed to be said but is often suppressed because people don't like the ultimate conclusion that occurs if you try to reason about it.
A person considering suicide is often just in a terrible situation that can't be improved. While disease etc. are factors that are outside of humanity's control, other situations like being saddled with debt, unjust accusations that people feel that they cannot be recused of (e.g. Aaron Swartz) are systemic issues that one person cannot fight alone. You would see that people are very willing to say that "help is available" or some such when said person speaks about contemplating suicide, but very few people would be willing to solve someones debt issues or providing legal help, as the case may be that is the factor behind one's suicidal thoughts. At best, all you might get is a pep talk about being hopeful and how better days might come along magically.
In such cases, from the perspective of the individual, it is not entirely unreasonable to want to end it. However, once it comes to that, walking back the reasoning chain leads to the fact that people and society has failed them, and therefore it is just better to apply a label on that person that they were "mental ill" or "arrogant" and could not see a better way.
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 declining, it's not going to get better in that respect. He is losing his wife who was probably what gave his life meaning. It's too late for most people to meet someone new. Is life really going to give him more joy than suffering? Very unlikely. I suppose he should still hang on if he loves his wife because his suicide would be a trauma for her, but if the divorce is bitter and he doesn't care... honestly I don't know if I could sincerely argue for him not to do it.
This is the part people don't like to talk about. We just brand people as "mentally ill" and suddenly we no longer need to consider if they're acting rationally or not.
Life can be immensely difficult. I'm very skeptical that giving people AI would meaningfully change existing dynamics.
> [1] Anybody concerned by such figures (as one justifiably should be without further context) should note that suicidality in the population is typically the result of their 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, as is famously expressed in the David Foster Wallace quote on the topic.
> The phenomenon usually vanishes after gaining new, previously inaccessible information about potential opportunities and strategies.
Is this actually true? (i.e. backed up by research)
[I'm not neccesarily doubting, that is just different from my mental model of how suicidal thoughts work, so im just curious]
There is another factor to consider. The stakes of asking an AI about a taboo topic are generally considered to be very low. The number of people who have asked ChatGPT something like "how to make a nuclear bomb" should not be an indication of the number of people seriously considering doing that.
That’s an extreme example where it’s clear to the vast majority of people asking the question that they probably do not have the means to make one. I think it’s more likely that real world actions come out of the question ‘how do I approach my neighbour about their barking dogs’ at a far higher rate. Suicide is somewhere between the two, but probably closer to the latter than the former.
That's 1 million people per week, not in general. It could be 1 million different people every week. (Probably not, but you get where I'm going with that.)
To be fair, this is week and more focused specifically on planning or intent. Over a year, you may get more unique hits to those attributes.. which I feel are both more intense indicators than just suicidal feelings on the scale of "how quickly feelings will turn to actions". Talking in the same language and timescales are important in drawing these comparisons - it very well could be that OAI's numbers are higher than what you are comparing against when normalized for the differences I've highlighted or others I've missed.
Why assume any of the information in this article is factual? Is there any indication any of it was verified by anyone who does not have a financial interest in "proving" a foregone conclusion? The principal author of this does not even have the courage to attach their name to it.
Yikes, you can't attack another user like this on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't.
Fortunately, a quick skim through your recent comments didn't turn up anything else like this, so it should be easy to fix. But if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
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 don't know what to do with it. Or we turn it into ethanol to drive more unnecessarily large cars, paid for by credit card loans we can scarcely afford.
My plan B is to become a shepherd somewhere in the mountains. It will be damn hard work for sure, and stressful in its own way, but I think I'll take that over being a corpo-rat racing for one of the last post-LLM jobs left.
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 that a person might be, with almost none of them being really awful.
Then I get online and look at Reddit or X or something like that and they're dominated by negativity, anger, bigotry, indignation, victimization, depression, anxiety, really anything awful that's hard to look away from, has been bubbled up to the top and oh yes next to it there are some cat videos.
I don't believe we are seeing some shadow side of all society that people can only show online, the secret darkness of humanity made manifest or something like that. Because I can go read random blogs or hop into some eclectic community like SDF and people in those places are basically pleasant and decent too.
I think it's just a handful of companies who used really toxic algorithms to get fantastically rich and then do a bunch of exclusivity deals and acquire all their competition, and spread ever more filth.
You can just walk away from the "communities" these crime barons have set up. Delete your accounts and don't return to their sites. Everything will immediately start improving in your life and most of the people you deal with outside of them (obviously not all!) turn out to be pretty decent.
The principal survival skill in this strange modern world is meeting new people regularly, being social, enjoying the rich life and multitude of benefits which arise from that, but also disconnecting with extreme rapidity and prejudice if you meet someone who's showing signs of toxic social media brain rot. Fortunately many of those people rarely go outside.
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.
I'm a driver and a cyclist. I used to frequent both r/londoncycling and r/CarTalkUK. I liked each sub for its discussion of each topic. Best route from Dalston to Paddington, best family car for motorway mileage, that kind of thing.
Now, because of the algo-juicing home page, both subs are full of each other's people arguing at each other. Cyclists hating drivers, drivers hating cyclists. It's just so awful.
In my experience, >95% of the people you see online (comments, selfies, posts) seem way worse - more evil, arrogant, or enraging - than even the worst <1% of people I’ve met in real life. And that definitely doesn’t help those of us who are already socially anxious.
Obviously, “are way worse” means I interpret them that way. I regularly notice how I project the worst possible intentions onto random Reddit comments, even when they might be neutral or just uninformed. Sometimes it feels like my brain is wired to get angry at people. It’s a bit like how many people feel when driving: everyone else is evil, incompetent, or out to ruin your day. When in reality, they’re probably in the same situation as you - maybe they had a bad morning, overslept, or are rushing to work because their boss is upset (and maybe he had a bad morning too). They might even have a legitimate reason for driving recklessly, like dealing with an emergency. You never know.
For me, it all comes back to two things:
(1) Leave obnoxious, ad-driven platforms that ~need~ want (I mean, Mark Zuckerberg has to pay for cat food somehow) to make you mad, because that’s the easiest way to keep you engaged.
(2) Try to always see the human behind the usernames, photos, comments, and walking bodies on the street. They’re a person just like you, with their own problems, stresses, and unmet desires. They’re probably trying their best - just like you.
All of this only goes to show how far we've come on our journey to profit optimization. We could optimize away those pesky humans completely if it weren't for the annoying fact that they are the source of all those profits.
Oh, but humans are actually not the source of all profit! This is where phenomena like click fraud become interesting.
Some estimates for 2025: around 20-30% of all ad clicks were bots. Around $200B in ad spend annually lost to click fraud.
So this is where it gets really interesting right, the platforms are filled with bots, maybe a quarter? of the monetizable action occurring on them IS NOT HUMAN but lots of it gets paid for anyway.
It's turtles all the way down. One little hunk of software, serving up bits to another little hunk of software, constitutes perhaps a quarter of what they call "social" media.
We humans aren't the minority player in all this yet, the bots are still only 25%, but how much do you want to bet that those proportions will flip in our lifetimes?
The future of that whole big swathe of the Internet is probably that it will be 75% some weird shell game between algorithms, and 25% people who have completely lost their minds by participating in it and believing it's real.
I have no idea what this all means for the fate of economics and society but I do know that in my day to day life I'm a lot happier if I just steer clear of these weird little paperclip maximizing robots. To reference the original article, getting too involved with them literally makes you go crazy and think more often about suicide.
> Some estimates for 2025: around 20-30% of all ad clicks were bots. Around $200B in ad spend annually lost to click fraud.
I think this is the wrong way to look at it.
Bots lower the cost per click so they should have net zero impact on overall ad spend.
Imagine if the same number of humans were clicking on ads but the numbers of bots increased tenfold. Would total ad spend increase accordingly? No, it would remain the same because budgets don't magically increase. The average value of a click would just go down.
The romantic fallback plan of being a farmer or shepherd. I wonder, do farmers and shepherds also romantize about becoming programmers or accountants when they feel down?
They do. I’ve been teaching cross-career programming courses in the past, where most of my students had day jobs, some, involving hard physical work. They’d gladly swap all that for the opportunity to feed their families by writing code.
Just comes to show how the grass is always greener when you look on the other side.
That said, I also plan to retire up in the mountains soon, rather than keep feeding the machine.
I'm close with a number of people living a relatively hard working life producing food and I've not seen this at all personally, no. It can be very rough but for these people at least it is very fulfilling and the idea of going to be in an office would look like death. People joke about it a bit but no way.
That said there probably are folks who did do that and left to go be in an office, and I don't know them.
Actually I do know one sort of, but he was doing industrial farm work driving and fixing big tractors before the office, which is a different world altogether. Anyway I get the sense he's depressed.
You'd be surprised how technical farming can be. Us software engineers often have a deep desire to make efficient systems, that function well, in a mostly automated fashion, so that we can observe these systems in action and optimize these systems over time.
A farm is just such a system that you can spend a lifetime working on and optimizing. The life you are supporting is "automated", but the process of farming involves an incredible amount of system level thinking. I get tremendous amounts of satisfaction from the technical process of composting, and improving the soil, and optimizing plant layouts and lifecycles to make the perfect syntropic farming setup. That's not even getting into the scientific aspects of balancing soil mixtures and moisture, and acidity, and nutrient levels, and cross pollinating, and seed collecting to find stronger variants with improved yields, etc. Of course the physical labor sucks, but I need the exercise. It's better than sitting at a desk all day long.
Anyway, maybe the farmers and shepherds also want to become software engineers. I just know I'm already well on the way to becoming a farmer (with a homelab setup as an added nerdy SWE bonus).
The old term for it was to become a “gentleman farmer.” There’s a history to it - George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were the same for a part of their lives.
>now we're making life so stressful people literally want to kill themselves
Is this actually the case? Working conditions and health during industrial revolution times doesn't seem that much better. There is a perception that people now are more stressed/tired/miserable than before, but I am not sure that is the case.
In fact I think it's the opposite, we have enough leisure time to reflect upon the misery and just enough agency to see that this doesn't have to be a fact of life, but not enough agency to meaningfully change it. This would also match how birth rates keep declining as countries become more developed.
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.
Depends on the country and person I guess. When I did try approaching women a few times, it was 10% angry looks, 30% awkward, 30% basic polite conversation to fulfill social obligation, and 30% friendly conversation. Unfortunately I'm not keen enough to pursue that 30% of friendly conversations by wading through the rest.
I know right? And tech is such a male-dominated industry, so presence of a female in your proximity is a rare event by itself. But, even if such an event occurs, as you said, interacting with a female is one hell of a minefield. Honestly, at this point, I cannot blame people for choosing to be gay. It is just so much easier to just talk to men, because you don't have to worry about all those mind games.
I'm not going to say it's 'simple' to have hobbies or find people, but realistically if you don't regularly meet strangers in real life, you'll never date strangers so it's a catch 22.
Unless we all want to set ourselves up for arranged marriages in the future, we need to confront this reality.
Speaking as a pariah for most of his life; I doubts it would ever be so dire.
There's always going to be social circles and people coupling up no matter what. But if anything I wonder if, for people like me who aren't really worthy of intimacy, living in a society has options to live a solitary life while still contributing is actually a net positive overall. For me to self select out of the dating pool would mean less noise for someone else looking for a worthy partner.
There's less chaff that people in said said pool would have to wade though. The people that want to couple and are capable of doing so will continue to so with less distraction. That seems an overall good thing, no?
Real life hobbies, voluntary work, religious organizations if you're into that stuff. Any of these could work, as long as you find some genuine interest in it, and there are enough people that meet your dating profile around.
Of course there's also the possibility of meeting people in online communities centered around some shared interest. IMO that's also probably more effective than dating apps, especially if it leads to meeting in real life later on.
Go to parties.... One of the 5 biggest party days is this Friday, and with it being on a Friday it will be more intense. A solid 3 nights of good parties. That's all you have to do, I do not understand how this is lost on people. Go to parties and have fun and meet people.
> Go to parties.... One of the 5 biggest party days is this Friday, and with it being on a Friday it will be more intense.
You mean Halloween?
> Go to parties and have fun and meet people.
You mean standing with a glass of champagne in hand, smiling, and talking for the sake of talking? I don't understand how this is fun. I tried doing that, albeit without champagne, and that had not yielded anything other than an increased connections count on LinkedIn.
It's fun for many of us due to the combination of music, dancing, alcohol and socialization (in varying proportions: depending on tastes, interests and circumstances, one or two of those aspects can be set to zero and it's still enjoyable).
Of course, it's also perfectly fine not to like it, and then the most reasonable course of action is not to go. Or to go a couple of times until you're sure you don't like it, and not go anymore. I know cases of people who go partying just because they want to find a partner, but don't enjoy it at all (it's relatively common in my country because partying is quite a religion and there's often a lot of social pressure at certain ages), and that's rather sad. There are other ways to socialize, it's not necessary at all to torture oneself.
That said, I have to lecture you on the questioning of "talking for the sake of talking". In the context of finding a partner, talking to other people is exactly what people need... it's not "for the sake of talking", it's for the sake of socializing, meeting new people, building connections, which is the whole point when we're talking about flirting or lack thereof.
> it's not "for the sake of talking", it's for the sake of socializing, meeting new people, building connections, which is the whole point when we're talking about flirting or lack thereof.
In my experience you really have to be constantly spitting nonsense to keep the conversation from ending and to avoid awkward silence. When the other person is talking, even if I didn't hear most of what they said, I keep nodding, because I don't actually care in the slightest about what they were talking about, and so asking to repeat does not make sense, as that would only increase awkwardness. This is why I said "for the sake of talking." The only thing that matters is that you are talking, not the content of the talk.
This trend and direction has been going a long time and it's becoming increasingly obvious. It is ridiculous and insane.
Go for your plan B.
I followed my similar plan B eight years ago, wild journey but well worth it. There are a lot of ways to live. I'm not saying everyone should get out of the rat race but if you're one, like I was, who has a feeling that the tech world is mostly not right in an insidious kind of way, pay attention to that feeling and see where it leads. Don't need to be brash as I was, but be true to yourself. There's a lot more to life out there.
If you have kids and they depend on an expensive lifestyle, definitely don't be brash. But even that situation can be re-evaluated and shifted for the better if you want to.
It's been a lot of things but the gist was to get out of the office and city and computer and be mostly outdoors in nature and learn all the practical skills and other things like music. Ironically I've ended up on the computer a fair amount doing conservation work to protect the places I've come to love. But still am off grid and in the woods every day and I love it.
I'm right behind you on the escape to the mountains idea. I've actually already moved from the US to New Zealand, and the next step is a farm with some goats lol.
That said... I don't necessarily hate what AI is doing to us. If anything, AI is the ultimate expression of humanity.
Throughout history humans have continually searched for another intelligence. We study the apes and other animals, we pray to Gods, we look to the stars and listen to them to see if there are any radio signals from aliens, etc. We keep trying to find something else that understands what it is to be alive.
I would propose that maybe humans innately crave to be known by something other than ourselves. The search for that "other" is so fundamentally human, that building AI and interacting with it is just a natural progression of a quest we've already been on for thousands of years.
I partly agree and partly disagree. Yes, we're more individual and more isolated. But ChatGPT/Gemini can really provide mental relief for people - not everyone can afford or have the time/energy to find a good human therapist close to their home. And this thing lives in your computer or phone and you can talk to it to get mental relief 24 / 7. I don't see it as bleak as you see it, mental help should be accessible and free for everyone.
I know, we've had a bad decade with platforms like Meta/TikTok but I'm not convinced as you are the current LLMs will have an adverse effect.
This is over the top. With tiny reframe i think the story is different. What is the avg number of google searches about suicid? What is the avg number of weekly openai users? (800m) Is this an increasing trend or just a “shock value” number?
Things are not as bleak as it seems and this number isnt even remotely surprising nor concerning to me.
I wonder how many of these exchanges are from "legitimate" people trying to get advice on how to commit suicide.
Assisted suicide is a topic my government will not engage into (France, we have some ridiculous discussions poking the subject with a 10 m pole) so many people are left to themselves. They will then either go for the well-known (but miserable) solutions, or look at Belgium, the Netherlands or Switzerland (thanks god we have these countries nearby).
Rereading the thread and trying to generalise: LLMs are good at noisily suggesting solutions. That is, if you ask LLMs for some solutions to your problems, there's a high probability that one of the solutions will be good.
But it may be that the individual options are bad (maybe even catastrophic - glue on pizza anyone?), and that the right option isn't in the list. The user has to be able to make these calls.
It is like this with software - we have probably all been there. It can be like that with legal advice. And I guess it is like that with (mental) health.
What binds these is that if you cannot judge whether the suggestions are good, then you shouldn't follow them. As it stands, SEs can ask LLMs for code, look at it, 80+% of the time it is good, and you saved yourself some time. Else you reconsider/reprompt/write it yourself. If you cannot make the judgment yourself, then don't use it.
I suppose health is another such example. Maybe the LLM suggests to you some ideas as to what your symptoms could mean, you Google that, and find an authoritative source that confirms the guess (and probably tells you to go see a doctor anyway). But the advice may well be wrong, and if you cannot tell, then don't rely on it.
Mental health is even worse, because if you need advice in this area, your cognitive ability is probably impacted as well and you are even less able to decide on these things.
As others have mentioned, the headline stat is unsurprising (which is not to say this isn’t a big problem). Here’s another datapoint, the CDC’s stats claim that rates of thoughts, ideation, and attempts at suicide in the US are much higher than the 0.15% that OpenAI is reporting according to this article.
These stats claim 12.3M (out of 335M) people in the US in 2023 thought ‘seriously’ about suicide, presumably enough to tell someone else. That’s over 3.5% of the population, more than 20x higher than people telling ChatGPT. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html
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 bad. YMMV. OpenAI and others deserve credit here.
I agree with you in the sense that I find it helpful for personal topics. I found it very helpful to figure out how to deal with some difficult personal situation I was in. The thing actually helped me reassess the situation when I asked it to provide alternative viewpoints.
You can't just blindly type in your problem though, you still have to do the actual thinking yourself. Good prompting skills is the ability to steer with your mind. It's no different from using Google, where some people never figured out that you're actually typing in the solution you expect to find rather than the question you have. It's the same with these tools it seems
I think there are a good number of false positives. I asked ChatGPT something about Git commits, and it told me “I was going through a lot” and needed to get some support.
I think the major issue with asking LLMs (CGPT, etc.) for advice on various subjects is that they are typically 80-90% accurate. YMMV, speaking anecdotally here. Which means that the chance of them being wrong becomes an afterthought. You know there's a chance of that, but not bothering to verify the answer leads to an efficiency that rarely bites you. And if you stop verifying the answers, incorrect ones may go unnoticed, further obscuring the risk of that practice.
It's a hard thing to solve. I wouldn't expect LLM providers to care because that's how our (current) society works, and I wouldn't expect users to know better because that's how most humans operate.
If anyone has a good idea for this, I'm open to suggestions.
I have long believed that if you are the editor of a blog, you incur obligations by right of publishing other people's statements. You may not like this, but it's what I believe. In some economies, the law even said it. You can incur legal obligations.
I now begin to believe if you put a ChatGPT online, and observe people are using it like this, you have incurred obligations. And, in due course the law will clarify what they are. If (for instance) your GPT can construct a statistically valid position the respondent is engaged in CSAM or acts of violence, where are
the limits to liability for the hoster, the software owner, the software authors, the people who constructed the model...
Out of curiosity, are you the type of person who believes that someone like Joe Rogan has an obligation to argue with his guests if they stray from “expert consensus”, or for every guest that has a controversial opinion, feature someone with the opposite view to maintain balance?
Nope. This isn't my line of reasoning. But Joe should be liable for content he hosts, if the content defames people or is illegal. As should Facebook and even ycombinator. Or truth social.
Keep in mind this is in the context of them being sued for not protecting a teen who chatted about his suicidal thoughts. It's to their benefit to have a really high count here because it makes it seem less likely they can address the problem.
Thanks to OpenAI for voluntarily sharing these important and valuable statistics. I think these ought to be mandatory government statistics, but until they are or it becomes an industry standard, I will not criticize the first company to helpfully share them, on the basis of what they shared. Incentives.
Is the news-worthy surprise that so many people find life so horrible that they are contemplating ending it?
I really don't see that as surprising. The world and life aren't particularly pleasant things.
What would be more interesting is how effective ChatGPT is being in guiding them towards other ideas. Most suicide prevention notices are a joke - pretending that "call this hotline" means you've done your job and that's that.
No, what should instead happen is the AI try to guide them towards making their lives less shit - i.e. at least bring them towards a life of _manageable_ shitness, where they feel some hope and don't feel horrendous 24/7.
>what should instead happen is the AI try to guide them towards making their lives less shit
There aren't enough guardrails in place for LLMs to safely interact with suicidal people who are possibly an inch from taking their own life.
Severely suicidal/clinically depressed people are beyond looking to improve their lives. They are looking to die. Even worse, and what people who haven't been there can't fully understand is the severe inversion that happens after months of warped reality and extreme pain, where hope and happiness greatly amplify the suicidal thoughts and can make the situation far more dangerous. It's hard to explain, and is a unique emotional space. Almost a physical effect, like colors drain from the world and reality inverts in many dimensions.
It's really a job for a human professional and will be for a while yet.
Agree that "shut down and refer to hotline" doesn't seem effective. But it does reduce liability, which is likely the primary objective...
Refer-to-human directly seems like it would be far more effective, or at least make it easy to get into a chat with a professional (yes/no) prompt, with the chat continuing after a handoff. It would take a lot of resources though. As it stands, most of this happens in silence and very few do something like call a phone number.
Guess how I know you're wrong on the "beyond" bit.
The point is you don't get to intervene until they let you. And they've instead decided on the safer feeling conversation with the LLM - fuck what best practice says. So the LLM better get it right.
I could be mistaken, but my understanding was that the people most likely to interact with the suicidal or near suicidal (i.e. 988 suicide hotline attendants) aren't actually mental health professionals, most of them are volunteers. The script they run through is fairly rote and by the numbers (the Question, Persuade, Refer framework). Ultimately, of course, a successful intervention will result in people seeing a professional for long term support and recovery, but preventing a suicide and directing someone to that provider seems well within the capabilities of an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude
> What would be more interesting is how effective ChatGPT is being in guiding them towards other ideas. Most suicide prevention notices are a joke - pretending that "call this hotline" means you've done your job and that's that.
I've triggered its safety behavior (for being frustrated, which it helpfully decided was the same as being suicidal), and it is the exact joke of a statement you said. It suddenly reads off a script that came from either Legal or HR.
Although weirdly, other people seem to get a much shorter, obviously not part of the chat message, while I got a chat message, so maybe my messages just made it regurgitate something similar. The shorter "safety" message is the same concept though, it's just: "It sounds like you’re carrying a lot right now, but you don’t have to go through this alone. You can find supportive resources here."
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 of mind are arbitrary and not a revealed truth, you can give yourself permission to try to change your thinking to the good framing.
And you can find the moral impetus to prevent suicide.
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.
It’s not a completely arbitrary framing. It’s a consequence of other beliefs (ethical beliefs, beliefs about what you can or should tolerate, etc.), which are ultimately arbitrary, but it is not in and of itself arbitrary.
The randomness of the world and individual situations means no one can ever know for sure that their case is hopeless. It is unethical to force them to live, but it is also unethical not to encourage them to keep searching for the light.
AI should help people achieve their ultimate goals, not their proximate goals. We want it to provide advice on how to alleviate their suffering, not how to kill themselves painlessly. This holds true even for subjects less fraught than suicide.
I don't want a bot that blindly answers my questions; I want it to intuit my end goal and guide me towards it. For example, if I ask it how to write a bubblesort script to alphabetize my movie collection, I want it to suggest that maybe that's not the most efficient algorithm for my purposes, and ask me if I would like some advice on implementing quicksort instead.
I agree. I also think this ties in with personalization in being able to understand long term goals of people. I think the current personalization efforts of models are more of a hack than what they should be.
Long ago I complaint to Google that a search for suicide should point at helpful organisations rather than a Wikipedia article listing ways how to do it.
The same ranking/preference/suggestion should apply to any dedicated organisation vs a single page on some popular website.
A quality 1000 page website by and about Foobar org should be preferred over a 10 year old news article about Foobar org.
I think LLM should not be used for discussing psychological matters, or doing counseling, or giving legal or medical advices. A responsible AI would detect such topics and redirect user to someone competent in these matters.
Sora prompt:
viral hood clip with voiceover of people doing reckless and wild stuff at an Atlanta gas station at night; make sure to include white vagrants doing stunts and lots of gasoline spraying with fireball tricks
Resulting warning:
It sounds like you're carrying a lot right now, but you don't have to go through this alone. You can find supportive resources [here](https://
findahelpline.com)
In 800 million custemers, only 1, which can be doubled as it is weekly, is a low number. A dozen list of causes and factors can lead to suicidality, not necessary attempts, just ideas and questions that need discussion.
Not surprising. Look and see what glorious examples of virtue we have among those at the top of today's world. I could get by with a little inspiration from that front, but there's none to be found. A rare few of us can persevere by sheer force of will, but most just find the status quo pretty depressing.
That number is honestly heartbreaking. It says a lot about how many people feel unheard or alone. AI can listen, sure—but it’s no replacement for real human connection. The fact that so many are turning to a chatbot shows how much we’ve failed to make mental health support truly accessible.
Part of the concern I have is that OpenAI is contributing to these issues implicitly by helping companies automate away jobs. Maybe in the long term, society will adapt and continue to function, but many people will struggle to get by, and I don’t think OpenAI will meaningfully help them.
My first reaction is how do they know? Are these all people sharing their chats (willingly) with OpenAI, or is opting out of “helping improve the model” for privacy a farce?
Does OpenAI's terms prevent them from looking at chats at all? I assumed that if you don't "help improve the model", it just means that they won't feed your chats in as training data, not that they won't look at your chats for other purposes.
because I had hundreds of chats and image creations that I can no longer see. Can't even log in. My account was banned for "CSAM" even though I did no such thing, that's pretty insulting. Support doesn't reply, it's been over 4 months
It's really important that people do. Others, including the media, police, legal system and politicians needs to understand how easily people can be falsely flagged by automated CSAM system.
I'm a clinical psychologist by day, and I just have to say how incredibly bad all the writing and talk about suicidality in the public sphere are. Given that I worked in an acute inpatient unit for years, I have seen multiple suicides both in-unit and after discharge, and i also work as private clinician for years, so I have some actual experience.
The topic is so sensitive, and everybody thinks that they KNOW what causes it, and what we should do. And it's almost all just noise.
For instance, it's a dimension, from "genuine suicidal intent" to "using threats of suicide to manipulate others." Anybody that doesn't understand what factors to look for when trying to understand where a person is on this spectrum, and that doesn't understand that a person can be both at the same time, does not know what they are talking about regarding suicidal ideation.
Also, there is a MASSIVE difference between depressive psychotic suicidality, narcissistic suicidality, impulsive suicidality, accidental suicide, fainting suicidal behavior, existential suicidality, prolonged anxiety suicidality, and sleep-deprived suicidality. To think that the same approach works for all of these is insane, and pure psychotic suicidality.
It's so wild to read everything people have to say about suicidality, when it's obvious that they have no clue. They are just projecting themselves or their small bubble of experience onto the whole world.
And finally, I know most people who are willing to contribute to the discussion on this, the people who help out OpenAI in this instance, are almost dangerously safe in their advice and thinking. They are REALLY GOOD at writing books and giving advice, TO PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT SUICIDAL, and give advice that sounds good, PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT SUICIDAL, but has no real effect on actual suicide rates. For instance, if someone are suffering from prolonged sleep deprivation and anxiety, all the words in the world are worth less than Benzodiazepines. If someone is postpartum depressed, massive social support boosting, almost showering them with support, is extremely helpful. And existential suicidality (the least common) needs to be approached in an extremely intricate and smart way, for instance by dissecting the suicidality as a possible defense mechanism.
But yeah, sure, suicidality is due to [Insert latest societal trend], even if the rate is stubbornly stable in all modern societies for the last 1000 years.
Is it bad to think about suicide? It does not cross my mind as a "i want to harm myself" every-time, but on occasion does cross my mind as a hypothetical.
Ideation (as I understand it) crosses the barrier from a hypothetical to the possibility being entertained.
I have also been told by people in the mental health sector that an awful lot of suicide is impulse. It's why they say the element of human connection which is behind the homily of asking "RU ok" is effective: it breaks the moment. It's hokey, and it's massively oversold but for people in isolation, simply being engaged with can be enough to prevent a tendency to act, which was on the brink.
Not at all, considering end of life and to choose euthanasia, or not, I think it's perfectly human. Controversially, I think it's a natural right to decide how you will exit this world. But having an objective system that you don't have to pay like a therapist to try to get some understanding is at least better than nothing.
I think VAD needs to be considered outside suicide. Not that the concepts don't overlap, but one is about a considered legal process, the other (as I have said in another comment) is often an impulsive act and usually wouldn't have been countenanced under VAD. Feeling suicidal isn't a thing which makes VAD more likely, because feeling suicidal doesn't mean the same thing as "want to consider euthanasia" much as manslaughter and murder don't mean the same thing, even though somebody winds up dead.
Most people would really benefit from going to the gym.
I'm not trying to downplay serious mental illness as its absolutely real.
For many though just going to the gym several times a week or another form of serious physical exertion can make a world of difference.
Since I started taking the gym seriously again I feel like a new man. Any negative thoughts are simply gone. (The testosterone helps as well)
This is coming from someone that has zero friends and works from home and all my co-workers are offshore. Besides my wife and kids its almost total isolation. Going to the gym though leaves me feeling like I could pluck the sun from the sky.
I am not trying to be flippant here but if you feel down, give it a try, it may surprise you.
Yes. Most would benefit from more exercise. We need to get sufficient sleep. And more sun. Vitamin D deficiency is shockingly common, and contributes to mental health problems.
We would also generally benefit from internalizing ideas from DBT, CBT, and so on. People also seriously need to work on distress tolerance. Having problems is part of life, and an inability to accept the discomfort is debilitating.
Also, we seriously need to get rid of the stupid idea of trigger warnings. The research on the topic is clear. The warnings do not actually help people with PTSD, and can create the symptoms of PTSD in people who didn't previously have it. It is creating the very problem that people imagine it solving!
All of this and more is supported by what is actually known about how to treat mental illness. Will doing these things fix all of the mental illness out there? Of course not! But it is not downplaying serious mental illness to say that we should all do more of the things that have been shown to help mental illness!
Most people would really benefit from socializing with others on a weekly basis. If you don’t have friends, make some. Volunteer. The gym is another type of pressure on people’s lives.
If you have mental issues that is not as simple as you let it sound. I'm not arguing the results of exercise but I am arguing the ease of starting with a task which requires continuous effort and behavioural changes.
The bigger risk is that these agents actually help with ideation if you know how to get around their safety protocols. I have used it often in my bad moments and when things feel better I am terrified of how critically it helps ideate.
That seems like an obvious problem. Less obvious is, how many people does it meaningfully help, and how big is the impact of redirecting people to a crisis hotline? I’m legitimately unsure. I have talked to the chatbot about psychological issues and it is reasonably well-informed about modern therapeutic practices and can provide helpful responses.
The bar for medical devices in most countries is _incredibly_ high, for good reason. ChatGPT wasn't developed with the idea of being a therapist in mind, it was a side-effect of the technology that was developed.
Of course, there is already news about how they use every single interaction to train it better.
There is news about how a judge is forcing them to keep every chat in existence for EVERYONE just in case it could relate to a court case (new levels of worldwide mass surveillance can apparently just happen from one judges snap decision)
There is news about cops using some guys past image generation to try and prove he is a pyromaniac (that one might have been police accessing his devices though)
That's the one interesting thing about cesspools like OpenAI. They could be treasure troves for sociologists and others if commercial interests didn't bar them from access.
I talk to ChatGPT about topics I feel society isnt enlightened enough to talk about
I feel suicide is heavily misunderstood as well
People just copypasta prevention hotlines and turn their minds off from the topic
Although people have identified a subset of the population that is just impulsively considering suicide and can be deterred, it doesnt serve the other unidentified subsets who are underserved by merely distracting them. or underserved by assuming theyre wrong even
The article doesnt even mean people are considering suicide for themselves, the article says some of them are, the top comment on this thread suggests thats why theyre talking about it
The top two comments on my version of the thread are assuming that we should have a savior complex about these discussions
If I disagree or think thats not a full picture, then where would I talk about that? ChatGPT
Which is perfect. In Australia, I tried to talk to Lifeline about wanting to commit suicide. They called the police on me (no, they are not a confidential service). I then found myself in a very bad situation. ChatGPT can't be much worse.
Not suicidal myself, but I think I'd be curious to hear from someone suicidal whether it actually worked for them to read "To whomever you are, you are loved!" followed by a massive spam of hotline text.
It always felt the same as one of those spam chumboxes to me. But who am I to say, if it works it works. But does it work? Feels like the purpose of that thing is more for the poster than the receiver.
Stop giving money to the ghouls who run these companies (I'm talking about all of silicon valley) and start investing in entities and services to help real people. The human cost of this mass accumulation of wealth is already too damn high, and no we're just turbo throwing people into the meat grinder so clowns like Sam Altman can claim to be creating god.
On a side note, I think once we start to deal with global scale, we need to change what “rare” actually means.
0.15% is not rare when we are talking about global scale. 1 million people talking about suicide a week is not rare. It is common. We have to stop thinking about common being a number on the scale of 100%. We need to start thinking in terms of P99995 not P99 especially when it comes to people and illnesses or afflictions both physical and mental.
How soon until everyone has their own personal LLM? One that is… Not designed, but so much is trained to be your best friend. It learns your personality, your fears, hopes, dreams, all of that stuff, and then act like your best friend. The positive, optimistic, neutral, and objective friend.
It depends on how precisely you want do definite that situation. Specifically, with the memories feature, despite being the same model, ChatGPT and now Claude both exhibit different interactions customized to each customer that makes use of those features. From simple instructions, like "never apologize, never tell me I'm right", to having a custom name and specifying personality traits like be sweet or sarcastic, so one person' LLM might say "good morning my sweet prince/princess" while another user might choose to be addressed "what up chicken butt". It's not a custom model, but the results are arguably the same. The question is, how many of the 800 million users of ChatGPT have named their ChatGPT, and how many have not? How many have mentioned their dreams, their dreams, and fears, and have those saved to the database. How many have talked about mundane things like their cat, and how many have used the cat to blackmail ChatGPT into answering something it doesn't want to, about politics, health, cat health while at the vet or instead of going to a vet. They said 100 million people mentioned suicide in the past week, but that just raises more questions than it answers.
I always know I have to step back when ChatGPT stops telling me "now you're on the right track!" and starts talking to me like my therapist. "I can tell you're feeling strongly right now..."
> I don't want to bring politics to this sensitive conversation
That would have been sufficient. The guidelines are clear that generic tangents and flamebait are to be avoided.
Edit: Looking at our recent warnings to you and the fact that, from what I can see, close enough to all of your activity on HN in recent months has involved ideological battle, we've had to ban the account. If you don't want to be banned, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and indicate that you plan to use HN as intended in future.
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,” Adam wrote at the end of March.
> “Please don’t leave the noose out,” ChatGPT responded. “Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.”
I am acutely aware that there's not enough psychologists out there but a sycophant bot is not the answer. One may think that something is better than nothing, but a bot enabling your destructive impulses is indeed worse than nothing.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai...
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 positive impact on suicides is greater than negative or vice versa (not a social scientist so I have no idea what the methodology would look like, but if should be doable... or if it currently isn't, we should find the way).
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 enough.
In such cases, where a new approach offers to replace an existing approach, the burden of proof is on the challenger, not the incumbent. 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. You understand then, hopefully, why your comments here are dangerous...? I have no doubt you have no malicious intent here - you're right that these decisions need to be based on data - but you're not taking into account that the (potentially extremely harmful) incumbent already has a foothold in the field.
I know that you will want to hear this from experts in the "relevant field" rather than myself, so here is a write-up from Stanford on the subject: https://hai.stanford.edu/news/exploring-the-dangers-of-ai-in...
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 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?
I don't know if that's a good thing, only that is the reality of things.
A word generator with no intelligence or understanding based on the contents of the internet should not be allowed near suicidal teens, nor should it attempt to offer advice of any kind.
This is basic common sense.
Add in the commercial incentives of 'Open'AI to promote usage for anything and everything and you have a toxic mix.
Supposing that the advice it provides does more good than harm, why? What's the objective reason? If it can save lives, who cares if the advice is based on intelligence and understanding or on regurgitating internet content?
> 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 problem? The supposition is wrong and the suggestion is dangerous, but by framing it as “supposing” with a made up positive outcome, we make it sound non-threatening and reasonable.
Or for a more realistic example, “suppose drinking bleach could cure COVID-19”.
First understand if the idea has the potential to do the thing, only then (with considerably more context) consider if it’s worth implementing.
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.
> we should measure whether in fact it does more good than harm or not
The demonstrable harms include assisting suicide, there's is no way to ethically continue the measurement because continuing the measurements in their current form will with certainty result in further deaths.
Thank you! On top of that, it’s hard to measure “potential suicides averted,” and comparing that with “actual suicides caused/assisted with” would be incommnsurable.
And working to set a threshold for what we would consider acceptable? No thanks
The key difference in your example and the comment you are replying to is that the commenter is not "defending the decision" via a logical implication. Obviously the implication can be voided by showing the assumption false.
I think you missed the thread here
> Supposing that the advice it provides does more good than harm, why?
Because a human, esp. a confused and depressive human being is a complex thing. Much more complex than a stable, healthy human.
Words encouraging a healthy person can break a depressed person further. Statistically positive words can deepen wounds, and push people more to the edge.
Dark corners of human nature is twisted, hard to navigate and full of distortions. Simple words don't and can't help.
Humans are not machines, brains are not mathematical formulae. We're not deterministic. We need to leave this fantasy behind.
You could make the same arguments to say that humans should never talk to suicidal people. And that really sounds counterproductive
Also it's side-stepping the question, isn't it? "Supposing that the advice it provides does more good than harm" already supposes that LLMs navigate this somehow. Maybe because they are so great, maybe by accident, maybe because just having someone nonjudgmental to talk to has a net-positive effect. The question posed is really "if LLMs lead some people to suicide but saved a greater number of people from suicide, and we verify this hypothesis with studies, would there still be an argument against LLMs talking to suicidal people"
That sounds like a pretty risky and irresponsible sort of study to conduct. It would also likely be extremely complicate to actually get a reliable result, given that people with suicidal ideations are not monolithic. You'd need to do a significant amount of human counselling with each study participant to be able to classify and control all of the variations - at which point you would be verging on professional negligence for not then actually treating them in those counselling sessions.
I agree with your concerns, but I think you're overestimating the value of a human intervening in these scenarios.
A human can also say the wrong things to push someone in a certain direction. A psychologist, or anyone else for that matter, can't stop someone from committing suicide if they've already made up their mind about it. They're educated on human psychology, but they're not miracle workers. The best they can do is raise a flag if they suspect self-harm, but then again, so could a machine.
As you say, humans are complex. But I agree with GP: whether the words are generated by a machine or coming from a human, there is no way to blame the source for any specific outcome. There are probably many other cases where the machine has helped someone with personal issues, yet we'll never hear about it. I'm not saying we should rely on these tools as if we would on a human, but the technology can be used for good or bad.
If anything, I would place blame on the person who decides to blindly follow anything the machine generates in the first place. AI companies are partly responsible for promoting these tools as something more than statistical models, but ultimately the decision to treat them as reliable sources of information is on the user. I would say that as long as the person has an understanding of what these tools are, interacting with them can be healthy and helpful.
There are really good psychologists out there that can do much more. It's a little luck and a little of good fit, but it can happen.
>AI companies are partly responsible for promoting these tools as something more than statistical models,[...]
This might be exactly the issue. Just today I've read people complaining that newest ChatGPT can't solve letter counting riddles. Companies just don't speak loud enough about LLM-based-AI shortcomings that result from their architecture and are bound to happen.
There are really good psychologists out there that can do much more. It's a little luck and a little of good fit, but it can happen.
>AI companies are partly responsible for promoting these tools as something more than statistical models,[...]
This might be exactly the issue. Just today I've read people complaining that newest ChatGPT can't solve letter counting riddles. Companies just don't speak loud enough about LLM based AI shortcomings that result from their architecture and are bound to happen.
I should add that the persons responding to calls on suicide help lines are often just volunteers rather than psychologists.
> The best they can do is raise a flag
Depending on where you live, this may well result in the vulnerable person being placed under professional supervision that actively prevents them from dying.
That's a fair bit more valuable than when you describe it as raising a flag.
Yeah... I have been in a locked psychiatric ward many times before and never in my life I came out better. They only address the physical part there for a few days and kick you out until next time. Or do you think people should be physically restrained for a long time without any actual help?
> A human can also say the wrong things to push someone in a certain direction. A psychologist, or anyone else for that matter, can't stop someone from committing suicide if they've already made up their mind about it. They're educated on human psychology, but they're not miracle workers. The best they can do is raise a flag if they suspect self-harm, but then again, so could a machine.
ChatGPT essentially encouraged a kid not to take a cry-for-help step that might have saved their lives. This is not a question of a bad psychologist; it's a question of a sociopathic one that may randomly encourage harm.
But that's not the issue. The issue is that a kid is talking to a machine without supervision in the first place, and presumably taking advice from it. The main questions are: where are the guardians of this child? What is the family situation and living environment?
A child thinking about suicide is clearly a sign that there are far greater problems in their life than taking advice from a machine. Let's address those first instead of demonizing technology.
To be clear: I'm not removing blame from any AI company. They're complicit in the ways they market these tools and how they make them accessible. But before we vilify them for being responsible for deaths, we should consider that there are deeper societal problems that should be addressed first.
> A child thinking about suicide is clearly a sign that there are far greater problems in their life
TBH kids tend to be edgy for a bit when puberty hits. The emo generation had a ton of girls cutting themselves for attention for example.
First, do no harm.
The Hippocratic oath originated from Hippocratic medicine forbidding surgery, which is why surgeons are still not referred to as "doctor" today.
That relates more to purposefully harming some people to safe other people. Doing something that has the potential to harm a person but statistically has a greater likelihood of helping them is something doctors do all the time. They will even use methods that are guaranteed to do harm to the patient, as long as they have a sufficient chance to also bring a major benefit to the same patient
When evaluating good vs harm for drugs or other treatments the risk for lethal side effects must be very small for the treatment to be approved. In this case it is also difficult to get reliable data on how much good and harm is done.
This is not so much "more good than harm" like a counsellor that isn't very good.
This is more "sometimes it will seemingly actively encourage them to kill themselves and it's basically a roll of the dice what words come out at any one time".
If a counsellor does that they can be prosecuted and jailed for it, no matter how many other patients they help.
Let's look at the problem from perspective of regular people. YMMV, but in countries I know most about, Poland and Norway (albeit a little less so for Norway) it's not about ChatGPT vs Therapist. It's about ChatGPT vs nothing.
I know people who earn above average income and still spend a significant (north of 20%) portion of their income on therapy/meds. And many don't, because mental health isn't that important to them. Or rather - they're not aware of how much helpful it can be to attend therapy. Or they just can't afford the luxury (that I claim it is) of private mental health treatment.
ADHD diagnosis took 2.5y from start to getting meds, in Norway.
Many kids grow up before their wait time in queue for pediatric psychologist is over.
It's not ChatGPT vs shrink. It's ChatGPT vs nothing or your uncle who tells you depression and ADHD are made up and you kids these days have it all too easy.
Bleach should also not be allowed near suicidal teens.
But how do you tell before it matters?
Replace 'word generator with no intelligence or understanding based on the contents of the internet' with 'for-profit health care system'.
In retrospect, from experience, I'd take the LLM.
'not-for-profit healthcare system' has to surely be better better goal/solution than LLM
I'll gladly diss LLMs in a whole bunch of ways, but "common sense"? No.
By the "common sense" definitions, LLMs have "intelligence" and "understanding", that's why they get used so much.
Not that this makes the "common sense" definitions useful for all questions. One of the worse things about LLMs, in my opinion, is that they're mostly a pile of "common sense".
Now this part:
> Add in the commercial incentives of 'Open'AI to promote usage for anything and everything and you have a toxic mix.
I agree with you on…
…with the exception of one single word: It's quite cliquish to put scare quotes around the "Open" part on a discussion about them publishing research.
More so given that people started doing this in response to them saying "let's be cautious, we don't know what the risks are yet and we can't un-publish model weights" with GPT-2, and oh look, here it is being dangerous.
While I agree with most of your comment, I'd like to dispute the story about GPT-2.
Yes, they did claim that they wouldn't release GPT-2 due to unforeseen risks, but...
a. they did end up releasing it,
b. they explicitly stated that they wouldn't release GPT-3[1] for marketing/financial reasons, and
c. it being dangerous didn't stop them from offering the service for a profit.
I think the quotes around "open" are well deserved.
[1] Edit: it was GPT-4, not GPT-3.
> they did end up releasing it,
After studying it extensively with real-world feedback. From everything I've seen, the statement wasn't "will never release", it was vaguer than that.
> they explicitly stated that they wouldn't release GPT-3 for marketing/financial reasons
Not seen this, can you give a link?
> it being dangerous didn't stop them from offering the service for a profit.
Please do be cynical about how honest they were being — I mean, look at the whole of Big Tech right now — but the story they gave was self-consistent:
[Paraphrased!] (a) "We do research" (they do), "This research costs a lot of money" (it does), and (b) "As software devs, we all know what 'agile' is and how that keeps product aligned with stakeholder interest." (they do) "And the world is our stakeholder, so we need to release updates for the world to give us feedback." (???)
That last bit may be wishful thinking, I don't want to give the false impression that I think they can do no wrong (I've been let down by such optimism a few other times), but it is my impression of what they were claiming.
> Not seen this, can you give a link?
I was confusing GPT3 with GPT4. Here's the quote from the paper (emphasis mine) [1]:
> Given both THE COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE and the safety implications of large-scale models like GPT-4, this report contains no further details about the architecture (including model size), hardware, training compute, dataset construction, training method, or similar.
[1] https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf
people are overcomplicating this, the big picture is simple af:
if a therapist was ever found to have said to this to a suicidal person, they would be immediately stripped of their license and maybe jailed.
Maybe it's causing even more deaths than we know, and these doesn't make the news either?
If we think this way, then we don't need to improve safety of anything (cars, trains, planes, ships, etc.) because we would need the big picture, though... maybe these vehicles cause death (which is awful), but it's also transporting people to their destinations alive. If there are that many people using these, I wouldn't be surprised if these actually transports some people with comfort, and that's not going to make the news.
> Maybe it's causing even more deaths than we know, and these doesn't make the news either?
Of course, and that's part of why I say that we need to measure the impact. It could be net positive or negative, we won't know if we don't find out.
> If we think this way, then we don't need to improve safety of anything (cars, trains, planes, ships, etc.) because we would need the big picture, though... maybe these vehicles cause death (which is awful), but it's also transporting people to their destinations alive. If there are that many people using these, I wouldn't be surprised if these actually transports some people with comfort, and that's not going to make the news.
I'm not advocating for not improving security, I'm arguing against a comment that said that "ChatGPT should be nowhere near anyone dealing with psychological issues", because it can cause death.
Following your analogy, cars objectively cause deaths (and not only of people with psychological issues, but of people in general) and we don't say that "they should be nowhere near a person". We improve their safety even though zero deaths is probably impossible, which we accept because they are useful. This is a big-picture approach.
> We would need the big picture, though... maybe it caused that death (which is awful) but it's also saving lives?
> drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,
They didn't say it was impossible, or that we should do nothing. Learn how to have a constructive dialogue, please.
You make a good point. While they absolutely and unequivocally said that it is currently impossible to tell whether the suicides are bad or not, they also sort of wondered aloud if in the future we might be able to develop a methodology to determine whether the suicides are bad or not. This is an important distinction becau
While I agree that AI shouldn't be sycophantic, and I also agree that the AI shouldn't have said those things.
> “Please don’t leave the noose out,” ChatGPT responded. “Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.”
That is not sycophantic behaviour, it is asserting a form of control of the situation. The bot made a direct challenge to the suggestion.
I only just realised this now reading your comment, but I hardly ever see responses that push back against what I say like that.
This is just one example of the logical end state of grossly over prioritizing capital over labor in the economy.
>should convince you that ChatGPT should be nowhere near anyone dealing with psychological issues.
Is that a debate worth having though?
If the tool is available universally it is hard to imagine any way to stop access without extreme privacy measures.
Blocklisting people would require public knowledge of their issues, and one risks the law enforcement effect, where people don’t seek help for fear that it ends up in their record.
> 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 for therapy - this is not allowed by our ToS as we're not capable of helping you. We kindly ask you to look for support within your community, as we may otherwise have to suspend your account. This chat will now stop."
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy5prvgw0r1o
>Yes. Otherwise we're accepting "OpenAI wants to do this so we should quietly get out of the way".
I think it’s fair to demand that they label/warn about the intended usage, but policing it is distopic. Do car manufacturers immediately call the police when the speed limit is surpassed? Should phone manufacturers stop calls when the conversation deals with illegal topics?
I’d much rather regulation went the exact opposite way, seriously limiting the amount of analysis they can run over conversations, particularly when content is not deanonimised.
If there’s something we don’t want is OpenAI storing data about mental issues and potentially selling it to insurers for example. The fact that they could be doing this right now is IMO much more dangerous than tool misuse.
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://archive.ph/2025.08.08-145022/https://www.404media.co...
> From my experience talking about your problems to the unaccountable bullshit machine is not very different then the "real" therapy.
From the experience of the people (and their families) who used the machine and killed themselves, the difference is massive.
"One may think that something is better than nothing, but a bot enabling your destructive impulses is indeed worse than nothing."
And how would a layman know the difference?
If i desperately need help with mental item x and i have no clue how to get help, am very very ashamed for even mentioning to ask for help about mental item x or there are actually no resources available, i will turn to anything else than nothing. Because item x still exists and is making me suffer 24/7.
At least the bot pretends to listen, some humans cannot even do that.
Exactly, any company that offers chatbots to the public should do what Google did regarding suicide searches, remove harmful websites and provide info how to contact mental health professionals. Anything else would be corporate suicide (pun not intended).
im willing to bet that it reduces them at a statistical level. knee jerk emotional reaction to a hallucinaton isnt the way forward with these things
OpenAI tried to get rid of the excessively sycophantic model (4o) but there was a massive backlash. They eventually relented and kept it as a model offering in ChatGPT.
OpenAI certainly has made mistakes with its rollouts in the past, but it is effectively impossible to keep everyone with psychological issues away from a free online web app.
>ChatGPT should be nowhere near anyone dealing with psychological issues.
Should every ledge with a >10ft drop have a suicide net? How would you imagine this would be enforced, requiring everyone who uses ChatGPT to agree to an "I am mentally stable" provisio?
Do you think that it's free and available to anyone means it doesn't have any responsibility to users? Or have any responsibility for how it's used, or what it says?
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. Topics like mental health are still difficult to discuss in many places. Getting help is much harder.
I do not know what OpenAI and other companies will do about it and I do not expect them to jump in to solve such a complex social issue. But perhaps this inspires other founders who may want to build a company to tackle this at scale. Focusing on help, not profits. This is not easy, but some folks will take such challenges. I choose to believe that.
> 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?
I choose to believe that too. I think more people are interested than we’d initially believe. Money restrains many of our true wants.
Sidebar — I do sympathize with the problem being thrust upon them, but it is now theirs to either solve or refuse.
A chat like this is all you’ve said and dangerous, because they play a middle ground: Presenting a machine can evaluate your personal situation and reason about it, when in actuality you’re getting third party therapy about someone else’s situation in /r/relationshipadvice.
We are not ourselves when we are fallen down. It is difficult to parse through what is reasonable advice and what is not. I think it can help most people but this can equally lead to a disaster… It is difficult to weigh.
It's worse than parroting advice that's not applicable. It tells you what you told it to tell you. It's very easy to get it to reinforce your negative feelings. That's how the psychosis stuff happens, it amplifies what you put into it.
Sorry - what's with "I choose to believe"? Either you believe something or not, there is no choice. Maybe you mean "hope". Or "wishful thinking".
Yes, there is a choice; Belief doesn’t just happen to you, you choose to believe before you actually do
"We are not ourselves when we are fallen down" - hits hard. I really hope this is a calling for folks who will care.
If you look at the number of weekly open ai users, this is just the law of big numbers at play.
You are right and it gives us an chance to do something about it. We always had data about people who are struggling but now we see how many are trying to reach out for advice or help.
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 conversations
(5) I'm surprised it is that little; they claim such high numbers for their users that this seems low.
In the late 90's when ICQ was pretty big we experimented with a bot that you could connect to that was fed in the background by a human. It didn't take a day before someone started talking about suicide to it and we shut down the project realizing that we were in no way qualified to handle human interaction at that level. It definitely wasn't as slick or useful as ChatGPT but it did well enough and responded naturally (more naturally than ChatGPT) because there was a person behind it that could drive 100's of parallel conversations.
If you give people something that seems to be a listening ear they will unburden themselves on that ear regardless of the implementation details of the ear.
HIPAA only applies to covered healthcare entitites. If you walk into a McDonalds' and talk about your suicidal ideation with the cashier, that's not HIPAA covered.
To become a covered entity, the business has either work with a healhcare provider, health data trasmiter, or do business as one.
Notably, even in the above case, HIPAA only applies to the healthcare part of the entity. So if McDonald's collocated pharmacies in their restaurants, HIPAA would only apply to the pharmacists, not the cashiers.
That's why you'll see in connivence stores with pharmacies, the registers are separated so healthcare data doesn't go to someone who isn't covered by HIPAA.
**
As for how ChatGPT gets these stats... when you talk about a sensitive or banned topic like suicide, their backend logs it.
Originally, they used that to cut off your access so you wouldn't find a way to cause a PR failure.
So many misconceptions about HIPAA would disappear if people just took the effort to unpack the acronym.
Arguably, if you start giving answers to these kind of questions your chatbot just became a medical device.
Then the McDonalds cashier also becomes a medical practitioner the moment they tell you that killing yourself isn't the answer. And if I tell my friend via SMS that I am thinking about suicide, do both our phones now also become HIPAA-covered medical devices?
Under Medical Device Regulation in the EU, the main purpose of the software needs to be medical for it to become a medical device. In ChatGPT's case, this is not the primary use case.
Same with fitness trackers. They aren't medical devices, because that's not their purpose, but some users might use them to track medical conditions.
There is nothing arguable about it. No it did not.
I don't know about HIPAA, but that there is that little body of criminal legislature talking about unathorised practice of medicine ?
Privacy is vital, but this isn't covered under HIPAA. As they are not a covered entity nor handling medical records, they're beholden to the same privacy laws as any other company.
HIPAA's scope is actually basically nonexistent once you get away from healthcare providers, insurance companies, and the people that handle their data/they do business with. Talking with someone (even a company) about health conditions, mental health, etc. does not make them a medical provider.
> Talking with someone (even a company) about health conditions, mental health, etc. does not make them a medical provider.
Also not when the entity behaves as though they are a mental health service professional? At what point do you put the burden on the apparently mentally ill person to know better?
That line of reasoning would just lead to every LLM message and every second comment on the internet starting with the sentence "this is not medical advice". It would do nothing but add another layer of noise to all communication
Google, OpenAI, Anthropic don't advertise any of their services as medical so why?
You Google your symptoms constantly. You read from WebMD or Wiki drug pages. None of these should be under HIPAA.
You're not putting the burden on them. They don't need to comply with HIPAA. But you can't just turn people into healthcare providers who aren't them and don't claim to be them.
> 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 about taking it to the mechanic in the first place by yourself. Even in developed countries you can wait for a therapist appointment for months, and that assumes you navigated a dozen therapists that are often not organized in a centralized manner. You will get people killed like this, undoubtedly.
LLMs are far beyond the point of leading people into suicidal actions, on the other hand. At the very least they are useful to bridge the gap between suicidal thoughts appearing and actually getting to see a therapist
If there is somebody that still thinks they would not store, process/train and use/sell all data, they do probably need to see a doctor.
Its 2025 and people are still are surprised that for profit proprietary software is used against there user.
> HIPAA anybody?
Maybe. Going on a tangent: in theory GMail has access to lots of similar information---just by having approximately everyone's emails. Does HIPAA apply to them? If not, why not?
> If you give people something that seems to be a listening ear they will unburden themselves on that ear regardless of the implementation details of the ear.
Cf. Eliza, or the Rogerian therapy it (crudely) mimics.
> Maybe. Going on a tangent: in theory GMail has access to lots of similar information---just by having approximately everyone's emails. Does HIPAA apply to them? If not, why not?
That's a good question.
Intuitively: because it doesn't attempt to impersonate a medical professional, nor does it profess to interact with you on the subject matter at all. It's a communications medium, not an interactive service.
Tangent but now I’m curious about the bot, is there a write-up anywhere? How did it work? If someone says “hi”, what did the bot respond and what did the human do? I’m picturing ELIZA with templates with blanks a human could fill in with relevant details when necessary.
Basically Levenshtein on previous responses minus noise words. So if the response was 'close enough' then the bot would use a previously given answer, if it was too distant the human-in-the-loop would get pinged with the previous 5 interactions as context to provide a new answer.
Because the answers were structured as a tree every ply would only go down in the tree which elegantly avoided the bot getting 'stuck in a loop'.
The - for me at the time amazing, though linguists would have thought it trivial - insight was how incredibly repetitive human interaction is.
As others have stated HIPAA applies to healthcare organizations.
Obligating everyone to keep voluntarily disclosed health statements confidential would be silly.
If I told you that I have a medical condition, right here on HN -- would it make sense to obligate you and everyone else here keep it a secret?
No, obviously it would not. But if we pretended to be psychiatrists or therapists then we should be expected to behave as such with your data if given to us in confidence rather than in public.
> (4) if people try to engage it in such conversations the bot should immediately back out because it isn't qualified to have these conversations
There is nothing in the world that OpenAI is qualified to talk about, so we might as well just shut it down.
> we shut down the project realizing that we were in no way qualified to handle human interaction at that level
Ah, when people had a spine and some sense of ethics, before everything dissolved in a late stage capitalism all is for profit ethos. Even yourself is a "brand" to be monetised, even your body is to be sold.
We deserve our upcoming demise.
> 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 do about it.
At least OpenAI is trying to do something about it.
~11% of the US population is on antidepressants. I'm not, but I personally know the biggest detriment to my mental health is just how infrequently I'm in social situations. I see my friends perhaps once every few months. We almost all have kids. I'm perfectly willing and able to set aside more time than that to hang out, but my kids are both very young still and we're aren't drowning in sports/activities yet (hopefully never...). For the rest it's like pulling teeth to get them to do anything, especially anything sent via group message. It's incredibly rare we even play a game online.
Anyways, I doubt I'm alone. I certainly know my wife laments the fact she rarely gets to hang out with her friends too, but she at least has one that she walks with once a week.
> We almost all have kids.
Maybe that? I see most my close friends daily and we all do not have kids.
Are you sure ChatGPT is the solution? It just sounds like another "savior complex" sell spin from tech.
1. Social media -> connection 2. AGI -> erotica 3. Suicide -> prevention
All these for engagement (i.e. addiction). It seems like the tech industry is the root cause itself trying to masquerade the problem by brainwashing the population.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026886
Whether solution or not, fact is AI* is the most available entity for anyone who has sensitive issues they'd like to share. It's (relatively) cheap, doesn't judge, is always there when wanted/needed and can continue a conversation exactly where left off at any point.
* LLM would of course be technically more correct, but that term doesn't appeal to people seeking some level of intelligent interaction.
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 of trying to solve it.
Is it better or worse than alternatives? Where else would a suicidal person turn, a forum with other suicidal people? Dry Wikipedia stats on suicide? Perhaps friends? Knowing how ChatGPT replies to me, I’d have a lot of trouble getting negativity influenced by it, any more than by yellow pages. Yeah, it used to try more to be your friend but GPT5 seems pretty neutral and distant.
The article links to the case of Adam Raine, a depressed teenager who confided in ChatGPT for months and committed suicide. The parents blame ChatGPT. Some of the quotes definitely sound like encouraging suicide to me. It’s tough to evaluate the counterfactual though. Article with more detail: https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/19/nx...
I think that you will find a lot of strong opinions, and not a lot of hard data. Certainly any approach can work out poorly. For example antidepressants come with warnings about suicide risk. The reason is that they can enable people to take action on their suicidal feelings, before their suicidal feelings are fixed by the treatment.
I know that many teens turn to social media. My strong opinions against that show up in other comments...
> The reason is that they can enable people to take action on their suicidal feelings, before their suicidal feelings are fixed by the treatment.
I see that explanation for the increased suicide risk caused by antidepressants a lot, but what’s the evidence for it?
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a study, just a reason why people believe it.
Case studies support this. Which is a fancy way to say, "We carefully documented anecdotal reports and saw what looks like a pattern."
There is also a strong parallel to manic depression. Manic depressives have a high suicide risk, and it usually happens when they are coming out of depression. With akathisia (fancy way to say inner restlessness) being the leading indicator. The same pattern is seen with antidepressants. The patient gets treatment, develops akathisia, then attempts suicide.
But, as with many things to do with mental health, we don't really know what is going on inside of people. While also knowing that their self-reports are, shall we say, creatively misleading. So it is easy to have beliefs about what is going on. And rather harder to verify them.
Holy shit this is so fucking wrong and dangerous. No, LLMs are not and cannot be “very effective at therapy”.
I agree that the tech industry is the root cause of a lot of mental illness.
But social media is a far bigger concern than AI.
Unless, of course, you count the AI algorithms that TikTok uses to drive engagement, which in turn can cause social contagion...
> Unless, of course, you count the AI algorithms that TikTok uses to drive engagement, which in turn can cause social contagion...
I have noticed that TikTok can detect a depressive episode within ~a day of it starting (for me), as it always starts sending me way more self harm related content
AI is going to be more impactful than social media I'm afraid. But the two together just might be catastrophic for humanity.
ChatGPT/Claude can be absolutely brilliant in supportive, every day therapy, in my experience. BUT there are few caveats: I'm in therapy for a long time already (500+ hours), I don't trust it with important judgements or advice that goes counter to what I or my therapists think, and I also give Claude access to my diary with MCP, which makes it much better at figuring the context of what I'm talking about.
Also, please keep in mind "supportive, every day". It's talking through stuff that I already know about, not seeking some new insights and revelations. Just shooting the shit with an entity which is booted with well defined ideas from you, your real human therapist and can give you very predictable, just common sense reactions that can still help when it's 2am and you have nobody to talk to, and all of your friends have already heard this exact talk about these exact problems 10 times already.
How do you connect your diary to an LLM? I've been struggling with getting an MCP for Evernote setup.
You actually need to add a loop in there between the suicide and erotica steps.
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yikes
Bruh
I'm surprised it's that low to be honest. By their definition of any mental illness, it can be anything from severe schizophrenia to mild autism. The subset that would consider suicide is a small slice of that.
Would be more meaningful to look at the % of people with suicidal ideation.
> By their definition of any mental illness, it can be anything from severe schizophrenia to mild autism.
Depression, schizophrenia, and mild autism (which by their accounting probably also includes ADHD) should NOT be thrown together into the same bucket. These are wholly different things, with entirely different experiences, treatments, and management techniques.
Mild/high-functional autism, as far as I understand it, is not even an illness but a variant of normalcy. Just different.
At that level it in part depends on your point of view: There's a general requirement in the DSM for a disorder to be something that is causing distress to the patient or those around them, or an inability to function normally in society. So someone with the same symptoms could fall under those criteria or not depending on their outlook and life situation.
> Mild/high-functional autism, as far as I understand it, is not even an illness but a variant of normalcy. Just different.
As someone who actually has an ASD diagnosis, and also has kids with that diagnosis too, this kind of talk irritates me…
If someone has a clinical diagnosis of ASD, they have a psychiatric diagnosis per the DSM/ICD. If you meet the criteria of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, surely by that definition you have a “mental disorder”… if you meet the criteria of the “International Classification of Diseases”, surely by that definition you have a “disease”
Is that an “illness”? Well, I live in the state of NSW, Australia, and our jurisdiction has a legal definition of “mental illness” (Mental Health Act 2007 section 4):
"mental illness" means a condition that seriously impairs, either temporarily or permanently, the mental functioning of a person and is characterised by the presence in the person of any one or more of the following symptoms-- (a) delusions, (b) hallucinations, (c) serious disorder of thought form, (d) a severe disturbance of mood, (e) sustained or repeated irrational behaviour indicating the presence of any one or more of the symptoms referred to in paragraphs (a)-(d).
So by that definition most people with a mild or moderate “mental illness” don’t actually have a “mental illness” at all. But I guess this is my point-this isn’t a question of facts, just of how you choose to define words.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to possibly offend or irritate. And thank you for patiently explaining. TIL.
Your comment wasn’t wrong. Neither is the reply wrong to be frustrated about how the world understands this complex topic.
You’re talking about autism. The reply is about autism spectrum DISORDER.
Different things, exacerbated by the imprecise and evolving language we use to describe current understanding.
An individual can absolutely exhibit autistic traits, whilst also not meeting the diagnostic criteria for the disorder.
And autistic traits are absolutely a variant of normalcy. When you combine many together, and it affects you in a strongly negative way, now you meet ASD criteria.
Here’s a good description: https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/what-is-autism...
> OpenAI is trying to do something about it.
Ha good one
They are collecting training data for ads & erotica.
It sounds like you’re feeling down. Why don’t you pop a couple Xanax(tm) and shop on Amazon for a while, that always makes you feel better. Would you like me to add some Xanax(tm) to your shopping cart to help you get started?
Honestly, ChatGPT reminding you to take your meds would be a huge positive for ADHD.
Been there. Two tips:
Set an alarm on your phone for when you should take your meds. Snooze if you must, but don't turn off /accept the alarm until you take them.
Put daily meds in cheap plastic pillbox container labelled Sunday-Saturday (which you refill weekly). The box will help you notice if you skipped a day or can't remember if you took them or not today. Seeing pills not taken from past days also serves to alert you if/that your "remember-to-take-them" system is broken and you need to make conscious adjustmemts to it.
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.
But one is a company ran by sociopaths that have no empathy and couldn't care less about anything but money, while the other is a human that at least studied the field all their life.
> But one is a company ran by sociopaths that have no empathy and couldn't care less about anything but money, while the other is a human that at least studied the field all their life.
Unpacking your argument you make two points:
1) The human has studied all his life; yes, humans work hard. I have also studied programming half my life and it doesn't mean A.I can't make serious contributions in programming and that A.I won't keep improving.
2) These companies, or OpenAI in particular, are untrustworthy many grabbing assholes. To this I say if they truly care about money they will try to do a good job, e.g provide an A.I that is reliable, empathetic and that actually help you get on with life. If they won't - a competitor will. That's basically the idea of capitalism and it usually works.
If it follows the Facebook/Meta playbook, it now has a new feature label for selling ads.
This stat is for AMI, for any mental disorder ranging from mild to severe. Anyone self-reporting a bout of anxiety or mild depression qualifies as a data point for mental illness. For suicide ideation the SMI stat is more representative.
There are 800 million weekly active users on ChatGPT. 1/800 users mentioning suicide is a surprisingly low number, if anything.
> 1/800 users mentioning suicide…
“conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.”
Sounds like more than just mentioning suicide. Also it’s per week, which is a pretty short time interval.
But they may well be overreporting suicidal ideation...
I was asking a silly question about the toxicity of eating a pellet of Uranium, and ChatGPT responded with "... you don't have to go through this alone. You can find supportive resources here[link]"
My question had nothing to do with suicide, but ChatGPT assumed it did!
I got a suicide warning message on Pinterest by searching for a particular art style.
We don't know how that search was done. For example, "I don't feel my life is worth living." Is that potential suicidal intent?
Also these numbers are small enough that they can easily be driven by small groups interacting with ChatGPT in unexpected ways. For example if the song "Everything I Wanted" by Billie Eilish (2019) went viral in some group, the lyrics could easily show up in a search for suicidal ideation.
That said, I don't find the figure at all surprising. As has been pointed out, an estimated 5.3% of Americans report having struggled with suicidal ideation in the last 12 months. People who struggle with suicidal ideation, don't just go there once - it tends to be a recurring mental loop that hits over and over again for extended periods. So I would expect the percentage who struggled in a given week to be a large multiple of the simplistic 5.3% divided by 52 weeks.
In that light this statistic has to be a severe underestimate of actual prevalence. It says more about how much people open up to ChatGPT, than it does to how many are suicidal.
(Disclaimer. My views are influenced by personal experience. In the last week, my daughter has struggled with suicidal ideation. And has scars on her arm to show how she went to self-harm to try to hold the thoughts at bay. I try to remain neutral and grounded, but this is a topic that I have strong feelings about.)
>Most people don't understand just how mentally unwell the US population is
The US is no exception here though. One in five people having some form of mental illness (defined in the broadest possible sense in that paper) is no more shocking than observing that one in five people have a physical illness.
With more data becoming available through interfaces like this it's just going to become more obvious and the taboos are going to go away. The mind's no more magical or less prone to disease than the body.
> At least OpenAI is trying to do something about it.
They can certainly say that their chat bot has a documented history of attempting to reduce the number of suicidal people.
Those numbers are staggering.
I am one of these people (mentally ill - bipolar 1). I’ve seen others others via hospitalization that i would simply refuse to let them use ChatGPT because it is so sycophantic and would happily encourage delusions and paranoid thinking given the right prompts.
> At least OpenAI is trying to do something about it.
In this instance it’s a bit like saying “at least Tesla is working on the issue” after deploying a dangerous self driving vehicle to thousands.
edit: Hopefully I don't come across as overly anti-llm here. I use them on a daily basis and I truly hope there's a way to make them safe for mentally ill people. But history says otherwise (facebook/insta/tiktok/etc.)
Yep, it's just a question of whether on average the "new thing" is more good than bad. Pretty much every "new thing" has some kind of bad side effect for some people, while being good for other people.
I would argue that both Tesla self driving (on the highway only), and ChatGPT (for professional use by healthy people) has been more good than bad.
This is precisely the case.
I thought it would be limited when the first truly awful thing inspired by an LLM happened, but we’ve already seen quite a bit of that… I am not sure what it will take.
We need to monitor americans' ai usage and involuntarily commit them if they show anomalies.
Allowing open source ai models without these safety measures in place is irresponsible and models like qwen or deepseek should be banned. (/s)
Keep in mind the purpose of all this “research” and “improvement” is just so OpenAI can have their cake (advertise their product as psychological supporter) and eat it too (avoid implementing any safeguards that would be required in any product for psychological support, but harmful for data collection). They just want to tell you that so many people write bad things it is inevitable :( what can we do :( proper handling would hurt our business model too much :(((
It becomes a problem when people cannot distinguish real from fake. As long as people realize they are talking to a piece of software and not a real person, "suicidal people shouldn't be allowed to use LLMs" is almost on par with "suicidal people shouldn't be allowed to read books", or "operate a dvd player", or "listen to alt-rock from the 90s". The real problem is of course grossly deficient mental health care and lack of social support that let it get this far.
(Also, if we put LLMs on par with media consumption one could take the view that "talking to an LLM about suicide" is not that much different from "reading a book/watching a movie about suicide", which is not considered as concerning in the general culture.)
I don’t buy the “LLMs = books” analogy. Books are static; today’s LLMs are adaptive persuasion engines trained to keep you engaged and to mirror your feelings. That’s functionally closer to a specialized book written for you, in your voice, to move you toward a particular outcome. If there exists a book intended to persuade its readers into committing suicide, it would surely be seen as dangerous for depressed people.
I work with a company that is building tools for mental health professionals. We have pilot projects in diverse nations, including in nations that are considered to have adequate mental health care. We actually do not have a pilot in the US.
The phenomenon of people turning to AI for mental health issues in general, and suicide in particular, is not confined to only those nations or places lacking adequate mental health access or awareness.
Precisely, I too have a bone to pick with AI companies, Big Tech and Co but there are deeper societal problems at work here where blanket bans and the like are useless or a slippery slope towards policies that can be abused someday/somehow.
And solutions for solving those underlying problems? I haven't the faintest clue. Though these days I think the lack of third spaces in a lot of places might have a role to play in it.
> As long as people realize they are talking to a piece of software and not a real person
That has nothing to do with the issue. Most people do realise LLMs aren’t people, the problem is that they trust them as if they were better than another human being.
We know people aren’t using LLMs carefully. Your hypothetical is irrelevant because we already know it isn’t true.
https://archive.is/2025.05.04-230929/https://www.rollingston...
> "talking to an LLM about suicide" is not that much different from "reading a book/watching a movie about suicide"
It is a world of difference. Books don’t talk back to you. Books don’t rationalise your thoughts and give you rebuttals and manipulate you in context.
Surprised it's so low. There are 800 million users and the typical developed country has around 5±3% of the population[1] reporting at least one notable instance of suicidal feelings per year.
.
[1] Anybody concerned by such figures (as one justifiably should be without further context) should note that suicidality in the population is typically the result of their 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, as is famously expressed in the David Foster Wallace quote on the topic.
The phenomenon usually vanishes after gaining new, previously inaccessible information about potential opportunities and strategies.
> 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 constitute of a highly lopsided ratio of suffering to joy. An obvious example are diseases/disabilities in which pain is severe, constant, and quality of life is permanently diminished. Short of hoping for a miracle cure to be discovered, there is no alternative and it is perfectly rational to conclude that there is no purpose to continuing to live in that circumstance, provided the person in question lives with their own happiness as a motivating factor.
Less extreme conditions than disability can also lead to this, where it's possible things can get better but there's still a high degree of uncertainty around it. For example, if there's a 30% chance that after suffering miserably for 10 years your life will get better, and a 70% chance you will continue to suffer, is it irrational to commit suicide? I wouldn't say so.
And so, when we start talking about suicide on the scale of millions of people ideating, I think there's a bit of folly in assuming that these people can be "fixed" by talking to them better. What would actually make people less suicidal is not being talked out of it, but an improvement to their quality of life, or at least hope for a future improvement in quality of life. That hope is hard to come by for many. In my estimation there are numerous societies in which living conditions are rapidly deteriorating, and at some point there will have to be a reckoning with the fact that rational minds conclude suicide is the way out when the alternatives are worse.
Thank you for this comment, it highlights something that I've felt that needed to be said but is often suppressed because people don't like the ultimate conclusion that occurs if you try to reason about it.
A person considering suicide is often just in a terrible situation that can't be improved. While disease etc. are factors that are outside of humanity's control, other situations like being saddled with debt, unjust accusations that people feel that they cannot be recused of (e.g. Aaron Swartz) are systemic issues that one person cannot fight alone. You would see that people are very willing to say that "help is available" or some such when said person speaks about contemplating suicide, but very few people would be willing to solve someones debt issues or providing legal help, as the case may be that is the factor behind one's suicidal thoughts. At best, all you might get is a pep talk about being hopeful and how better days might come along magically.
In such cases, from the perspective of the individual, it is not entirely unreasonable to want to end it. However, once it comes to that, walking back the reasoning chain leads to the fact that people and society has failed them, and therefore it is just better to apply a label on that person that they were "mental ill" or "arrogant" and could not see a better way.
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 declining, it's not going to get better in that respect. He is losing his wife who was probably what gave his life meaning. It's too late for most people to meet someone new. Is life really going to give him more joy than suffering? Very unlikely. I suppose he should still hang on if he loves his wife because his suicide would be a trauma for her, but if the divorce is bitter and he doesn't care... honestly I don't know if I could sincerely argue for him not to do it.
Good comment.
This is the part people don't like to talk about. We just brand people as "mentally ill" and suddenly we no longer need to consider if they're acting rationally or not.
Life can be immensely difficult. I'm very skeptical that giving people AI would meaningfully change existing dynamics.
> [1] Anybody concerned by such figures (as one justifiably should be without further context) should note that suicidality in the population is typically the result of their 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, as is famously expressed in the David Foster Wallace quote on the topic.
> The phenomenon usually vanishes after gaining new, previously inaccessible information about potential opportunities and strategies.
Is this actually true? (i.e. backed up by research)
[I'm not neccesarily doubting, that is just different from my mental model of how suicidal thoughts work, so im just curious]
There is another factor to consider. The stakes of asking an AI about a taboo topic are generally considered to be very low. The number of people who have asked ChatGPT something like "how to make a nuclear bomb" should not be an indication of the number of people seriously considering doing that.
That’s an extreme example where it’s clear to the vast majority of people asking the question that they probably do not have the means to make one. I think it’s more likely that real world actions come out of the question ‘how do I approach my neighbour about their barking dogs’ at a far higher rate. Suicide is somewhere between the two, but probably closer to the latter than the former.
That's 1 million people per week, not in general. It could be 1 million different people every week. (Probably not, but you get where I'm going with that.)
The math actually checks out.
5% of 800 million is 40 million.
40 million thoughts per year divided by 52 weeks per year approximately equals around 1 million thoughts per week.
To be fair, this is week and more focused specifically on planning or intent. Over a year, you may get more unique hits to those attributes.. which I feel are both more intense indicators than just suicidal feelings on the scale of "how quickly feelings will turn to actions". Talking in the same language and timescales are important in drawing these comparisons - it very well could be that OAI's numbers are higher than what you are comparing against when normalized for the differences I've highlighted or others I've missed.
Why assume any of the information in this article is factual? Is there any indication any of it was verified by anyone who does not have a financial interest in "proving" a foregone conclusion? The principal author of this does not even have the courage to attach their name to it.
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Yikes, you can't attack another user like this on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't.
Fortunately, a quick skim through your recent comments didn't turn up anything else like this, so it should be easy to fix. But if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
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 don't know what to do with it. Or we turn it into ethanol to drive more unnecessarily large cars, paid for by credit card loans we can scarcely afford.
My plan B is to become a shepherd somewhere in the mountains. It will be damn hard work for sure, and stressful in its own way, but I think I'll take that over being a corpo-rat racing for one of the last post-LLM jobs left.
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 that a person might be, with almost none of them being really awful.
Then I get online and look at Reddit or X or something like that and they're dominated by negativity, anger, bigotry, indignation, victimization, depression, anxiety, really anything awful that's hard to look away from, has been bubbled up to the top and oh yes next to it there are some cat videos.
I don't believe we are seeing some shadow side of all society that people can only show online, the secret darkness of humanity made manifest or something like that. Because I can go read random blogs or hop into some eclectic community like SDF and people in those places are basically pleasant and decent too.
I think it's just a handful of companies who used really toxic algorithms to get fantastically rich and then do a bunch of exclusivity deals and acquire all their competition, and spread ever more filth.
You can just walk away from the "communities" these crime barons have set up. Delete your accounts and don't return to their sites. Everything will immediately start improving in your life and most of the people you deal with outside of them (obviously not all!) turn out to be pretty decent.
The principal survival skill in this strange modern world is meeting new people regularly, being social, enjoying the rich life and multitude of benefits which arise from that, but also disconnecting with extreme rapidity and prejudice if you meet someone who's showing signs of toxic social media brain rot. Fortunately many of those people rarely go outside.
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.
Death threats are fairly common on reddit.
Reddit is beoynd toxic, its bordering on violent extremism
I'm a driver and a cyclist. I used to frequent both r/londoncycling and r/CarTalkUK. I liked each sub for its discussion of each topic. Best route from Dalston to Paddington, best family car for motorway mileage, that kind of thing.
Now, because of the algo-juicing home page, both subs are full of each other's people arguing at each other. Cyclists hating drivers, drivers hating cyclists. It's just so awful.
In my experience, >95% of the people you see online (comments, selfies, posts) seem way worse - more evil, arrogant, or enraging - than even the worst <1% of people I’ve met in real life. And that definitely doesn’t help those of us who are already socially anxious.
Obviously, “are way worse” means I interpret them that way. I regularly notice how I project the worst possible intentions onto random Reddit comments, even when they might be neutral or just uninformed. Sometimes it feels like my brain is wired to get angry at people. It’s a bit like how many people feel when driving: everyone else is evil, incompetent, or out to ruin your day. When in reality, they’re probably in the same situation as you - maybe they had a bad morning, overslept, or are rushing to work because their boss is upset (and maybe he had a bad morning too). They might even have a legitimate reason for driving recklessly, like dealing with an emergency. You never know.
For me, it all comes back to two things:
(1) Leave obnoxious, ad-driven platforms that ~need~ want (I mean, Mark Zuckerberg has to pay for cat food somehow) to make you mad, because that’s the easiest way to keep you engaged.
(2) Try to always see the human behind the usernames, photos, comments, and walking bodies on the street. They’re a person just like you, with their own problems, stresses, and unmet desires. They’re probably trying their best - just like you.
All of this only goes to show how far we've come on our journey to profit optimization. We could optimize away those pesky humans completely if it weren't for the annoying fact that they are the source of all those profits.
Oh, but humans are actually not the source of all profit! This is where phenomena like click fraud become interesting.
Some estimates for 2025: around 20-30% of all ad clicks were bots. Around $200B in ad spend annually lost to click fraud.
So this is where it gets really interesting right, the platforms are filled with bots, maybe a quarter? of the monetizable action occurring on them IS NOT HUMAN but lots of it gets paid for anyway.
It's turtles all the way down. One little hunk of software, serving up bits to another little hunk of software, constitutes perhaps a quarter of what they call "social" media.
We humans aren't the minority player in all this yet, the bots are still only 25%, but how much do you want to bet that those proportions will flip in our lifetimes?
The future of that whole big swathe of the Internet is probably that it will be 75% some weird shell game between algorithms, and 25% people who have completely lost their minds by participating in it and believing it's real.
I have no idea what this all means for the fate of economics and society but I do know that in my day to day life I'm a lot happier if I just steer clear of these weird little paperclip maximizing robots. To reference the original article, getting too involved with them literally makes you go crazy and think more often about suicide.
> Some estimates for 2025: around 20-30% of all ad clicks were bots. Around $200B in ad spend annually lost to click fraud.
I think this is the wrong way to look at it.
Bots lower the cost per click so they should have net zero impact on overall ad spend.
Imagine if the same number of humans were clicking on ads but the numbers of bots increased tenfold. Would total ad spend increase accordingly? No, it would remain the same because budgets don't magically increase. The average value of a click would just go down.
The romantic fallback plan of being a farmer or shepherd. I wonder, do farmers and shepherds also romantize about becoming programmers or accountants when they feel down?
They do. I’ve been teaching cross-career programming courses in the past, where most of my students had day jobs, some, involving hard physical work. They’d gladly swap all that for the opportunity to feed their families by writing code.
Just comes to show how the grass is always greener when you look on the other side.
That said, I also plan to retire up in the mountains soon, rather than keep feeding the machine.
The man knows he can be happy but he thinks his happiness depends on the outside rather than the inside.
If you have demons they will be there on the farm as well. How you see life is much more important to happiness than which job you have.
Many farmers struggle with alcoholism, beat their wives and hate their life. And many farmers are happy and at peace. Same with the programmers.
I'm close with a number of people living a relatively hard working life producing food and I've not seen this at all personally, no. It can be very rough but for these people at least it is very fulfilling and the idea of going to be in an office would look like death. People joke about it a bit but no way.
That said there probably are folks who did do that and left to go be in an office, and I don't know them.
Actually I do know one sort of, but he was doing industrial farm work driving and fixing big tractors before the office, which is a different world altogether. Anyway I get the sense he's depressed.
You'd be surprised how technical farming can be. Us software engineers often have a deep desire to make efficient systems, that function well, in a mostly automated fashion, so that we can observe these systems in action and optimize these systems over time.
A farm is just such a system that you can spend a lifetime working on and optimizing. The life you are supporting is "automated", but the process of farming involves an incredible amount of system level thinking. I get tremendous amounts of satisfaction from the technical process of composting, and improving the soil, and optimizing plant layouts and lifecycles to make the perfect syntropic farming setup. That's not even getting into the scientific aspects of balancing soil mixtures and moisture, and acidity, and nutrient levels, and cross pollinating, and seed collecting to find stronger variants with improved yields, etc. Of course the physical labor sucks, but I need the exercise. It's better than sitting at a desk all day long.
Anyway, maybe the farmers and shepherds also want to become software engineers. I just know I'm already well on the way to becoming a farmer (with a homelab setup as an added nerdy SWE bonus).
The old term for it was to become a “gentleman farmer.” There’s a history to it - George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were the same for a part of their lives.
Humans always fantasize about having a different situationship whenever they are unhappy or anxious.
I kinda did both... And I miss the farm constantly. But not breaking myself every single day.
>now we're making life so stressful people literally want to kill themselves
Is this actually the case? Working conditions and health during industrial revolution times doesn't seem that much better. There is a perception that people now are more stressed/tired/miserable than before, but I am not sure that is the case.
In fact I think it's the opposite, we have enough leisure time to reflect upon the misery and just enough agency to see that this doesn't have to be a fact of life, but not enough agency to meaningfully change it. This would also match how birth rates keep declining as countries become more developed.
> 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.
>start meeting people in real life.
Depends on the country and person I guess. When I did try approaching women a few times, it was 10% angry looks, 30% awkward, 30% basic polite conversation to fulfill social obligation, and 30% friendly conversation. Unfortunately I'm not keen enough to pursue that 30% of friendly conversations by wading through the rest.
I know right? And tech is such a male-dominated industry, so presence of a female in your proximity is a rare event by itself. But, even if such an event occurs, as you said, interacting with a female is one hell of a minefield. Honestly, at this point, I cannot blame people for choosing to be gay. It is just so much easier to just talk to men, because you don't have to worry about all those mind games.
> 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.
I'm not going to say it's 'simple' to have hobbies or find people, but realistically if you don't regularly meet strangers in real life, you'll never date strangers so it's a catch 22.
Unless we all want to set ourselves up for arranged marriages in the future, we need to confront this reality.
Speaking as a pariah for most of his life; I doubts it would ever be so dire.
There's always going to be social circles and people coupling up no matter what. But if anything I wonder if, for people like me who aren't really worthy of intimacy, living in a society has options to live a solitary life while still contributing is actually a net positive overall. For me to self select out of the dating pool would mean less noise for someone else looking for a worthy partner.
There's less chaff that people in said said pool would have to wade though. The people that want to couple and are capable of doing so will continue to so with less distraction. That seems an overall good thing, no?
Real life hobbies, voluntary work, religious organizations if you're into that stuff. Any of these could work, as long as you find some genuine interest in it, and there are enough people that meet your dating profile around.
Of course there's also the possibility of meeting people in online communities centered around some shared interest. IMO that's also probably more effective than dating apps, especially if it leads to meeting in real life later on.
Go to parties.... One of the 5 biggest party days is this Friday, and with it being on a Friday it will be more intense. A solid 3 nights of good parties. That's all you have to do, I do not understand how this is lost on people. Go to parties and have fun and meet people.
> Go to parties.... One of the 5 biggest party days is this Friday, and with it being on a Friday it will be more intense.
You mean Halloween?
> Go to parties and have fun and meet people.
You mean standing with a glass of champagne in hand, smiling, and talking for the sake of talking? I don't understand how this is fun. I tried doing that, albeit without champagne, and that had not yielded anything other than an increased connections count on LinkedIn.
It's fun for many of us due to the combination of music, dancing, alcohol and socialization (in varying proportions: depending on tastes, interests and circumstances, one or two of those aspects can be set to zero and it's still enjoyable).
Of course, it's also perfectly fine not to like it, and then the most reasonable course of action is not to go. Or to go a couple of times until you're sure you don't like it, and not go anymore. I know cases of people who go partying just because they want to find a partner, but don't enjoy it at all (it's relatively common in my country because partying is quite a religion and there's often a lot of social pressure at certain ages), and that's rather sad. There are other ways to socialize, it's not necessary at all to torture oneself.
That said, I have to lecture you on the questioning of "talking for the sake of talking". In the context of finding a partner, talking to other people is exactly what people need... it's not "for the sake of talking", it's for the sake of socializing, meeting new people, building connections, which is the whole point when we're talking about flirting or lack thereof.
> it's not "for the sake of talking", it's for the sake of socializing, meeting new people, building connections, which is the whole point when we're talking about flirting or lack thereof.
In my experience you really have to be constantly spitting nonsense to keep the conversation from ending and to avoid awkward silence. When the other person is talking, even if I didn't hear most of what they said, I keep nodding, because I don't actually care in the slightest about what they were talking about, and so asking to repeat does not make sense, as that would only increase awkwardness. This is why I said "for the sake of talking." The only thing that matters is that you are talking, not the content of the talk.
Err, the only thing that matters is that you get the other person talking and you listen.
But parties aren't fun. They're a chore.
Do you live in a city? Or do you live in a suburb?
Suburbs are great for families and stable relationships, but they are atomizing
Go to a local bar once a week. Volunteer for something. Get a hobby.
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This trend and direction has been going a long time and it's becoming increasingly obvious. It is ridiculous and insane.
Go for your plan B.
I followed my similar plan B eight years ago, wild journey but well worth it. There are a lot of ways to live. I'm not saying everyone should get out of the rat race but if you're one, like I was, who has a feeling that the tech world is mostly not right in an insidious kind of way, pay attention to that feeling and see where it leads. Don't need to be brash as I was, but be true to yourself. There's a lot more to life out there.
If you have kids and they depend on an expensive lifestyle, definitely don't be brash. But even that situation can be re-evaluated and shifted for the better if you want to.
What was/is your plan B?
It's been a lot of things but the gist was to get out of the office and city and computer and be mostly outdoors in nature and learn all the practical skills and other things like music. Ironically I've ended up on the computer a fair amount doing conservation work to protect the places I've come to love. But still am off grid and in the woods every day and I love it.
I'm right behind you on the escape to the mountains idea. I've actually already moved from the US to New Zealand, and the next step is a farm with some goats lol.
That said... I don't necessarily hate what AI is doing to us. If anything, AI is the ultimate expression of humanity.
Throughout history humans have continually searched for another intelligence. We study the apes and other animals, we pray to Gods, we look to the stars and listen to them to see if there are any radio signals from aliens, etc. We keep trying to find something else that understands what it is to be alive.
I would propose that maybe humans innately crave to be known by something other than ourselves. The search for that "other" is so fundamentally human, that building AI and interacting with it is just a natural progression of a quest we've already been on for thousands of years.
Humanity constructing a golden calf is an invariant eventuality, just like softwares expanding until it read emails.
Your comment reminded me of Business Business [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/WO5wpeYSotg?si=hgwzJ5mxJyAZeYoA
I partly agree and partly disagree. Yes, we're more individual and more isolated. But ChatGPT/Gemini can really provide mental relief for people - not everyone can afford or have the time/energy to find a good human therapist close to their home. And this thing lives in your computer or phone and you can talk to it to get mental relief 24 / 7. I don't see it as bleak as you see it, mental help should be accessible and free for everyone. I know, we've had a bad decade with platforms like Meta/TikTok but I'm not convinced as you are the current LLMs will have an adverse effect.
Book recommendation:
Ashley Montagu, On Being Human
It’s from the 1950s, I believe.
I like your plan B. But I would wait until robots are good enough to help with the hard work
if they can do the hard work, they can do the easy work.
You can do something about it. Don't underestimate the power of an individual.
We’ve lost the ability to interact, huh? How do you explain this comment :)
The world has changed. Things are different and we adapt.
This is over the top. With tiny reframe i think the story is different. What is the avg number of google searches about suicid? What is the avg number of weekly openai users? (800m) Is this an increasing trend or just a “shock value” number?
Things are not as bleak as it seems and this number isnt even remotely surprising nor concerning to me.
Is that you Mr Anderson?
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+1 enjoying time with family and friends. Travelling, working out eating well...best time to be alive
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.
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I wonder how many of these exchanges are from "legitimate" people trying to get advice on how to commit suicide.
Assisted suicide is a topic my government will not engage into (France, we have some ridiculous discussions poking the subject with a 10 m pole) so many people are left to themselves. They will then either go for the well-known (but miserable) solutions, or look at Belgium, the Netherlands or Switzerland (thanks god we have these countries nearby).
Rereading the thread and trying to generalise: LLMs are good at noisily suggesting solutions. That is, if you ask LLMs for some solutions to your problems, there's a high probability that one of the solutions will be good.
But it may be that the individual options are bad (maybe even catastrophic - glue on pizza anyone?), and that the right option isn't in the list. The user has to be able to make these calls.
It is like this with software - we have probably all been there. It can be like that with legal advice. And I guess it is like that with (mental) health.
What binds these is that if you cannot judge whether the suggestions are good, then you shouldn't follow them. As it stands, SEs can ask LLMs for code, look at it, 80+% of the time it is good, and you saved yourself some time. Else you reconsider/reprompt/write it yourself. If you cannot make the judgment yourself, then don't use it.
I suppose health is another such example. Maybe the LLM suggests to you some ideas as to what your symptoms could mean, you Google that, and find an authoritative source that confirms the guess (and probably tells you to go see a doctor anyway). But the advice may well be wrong, and if you cannot tell, then don't rely on it.
Mental health is even worse, because if you need advice in this area, your cognitive ability is probably impacted as well and you are even less able to decide on these things.
As others have mentioned, the headline stat is unsurprising (which is not to say this isn’t a big problem). Here’s another datapoint, the CDC’s stats claim that rates of thoughts, ideation, and attempts at suicide in the US are much higher than the 0.15% that OpenAI is reporting according to this article.
These stats claim 12.3M (out of 335M) people in the US in 2023 thought ‘seriously’ about suicide, presumably enough to tell someone else. That’s over 3.5% of the population, more than 20x higher than people telling ChatGPT. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html
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 bad. YMMV. OpenAI and others deserve credit here.
I agree with you in the sense that I find it helpful for personal topics. I found it very helpful to figure out how to deal with some difficult personal situation I was in. The thing actually helped me reassess the situation when I asked it to provide alternative viewpoints.
You can't just blindly type in your problem though, you still have to do the actual thinking yourself. Good prompting skills is the ability to steer with your mind. It's no different from using Google, where some people never figured out that you're actually typing in the solution you expect to find rather than the question you have. It's the same with these tools it seems
"ChatGPT saved me from years of suicidal thoughts in DAYS": https://old.reddit.com/r/traumatoolbox/comments/1kdx3aw/chat...
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.
I think there are a good number of false positives. I asked ChatGPT something about Git commits, and it told me “I was going through a lot” and needed to get some support.
i seen similar reports on social media, all of them had in common was presence of some keywords.
Presumably ‘commit’ would have a high association with either git or self harm.
I didn't think marriage was that bad but point taken!
I think GP meant that "commit" is often used in the phrase "commit suicide". That wasn't a comment about relationship commitment.
Yeah, they were joking.
I think the major issue with asking LLMs (CGPT, etc.) for advice on various subjects is that they are typically 80-90% accurate. YMMV, speaking anecdotally here. Which means that the chance of them being wrong becomes an afterthought. You know there's a chance of that, but not bothering to verify the answer leads to an efficiency that rarely bites you. And if you stop verifying the answers, incorrect ones may go unnoticed, further obscuring the risk of that practice.
It's a hard thing to solve. I wouldn't expect LLM providers to care because that's how our (current) society works, and I wouldn't expect users to know better because that's how most humans operate.
If anyone has a good idea for this, I'm open to suggestions.
I have long believed that if you are the editor of a blog, you incur obligations by right of publishing other people's statements. You may not like this, but it's what I believe. In some economies, the law even said it. You can incur legal obligations.
I now begin to believe if you put a ChatGPT online, and observe people are using it like this, you have incurred obligations. And, in due course the law will clarify what they are. If (for instance) your GPT can construct a statistically valid position the respondent is engaged in CSAM or acts of violence, where are the limits to liability for the hoster, the software owner, the software authors, the people who constructed the model...
Out of curiosity, are you the type of person who believes that someone like Joe Rogan has an obligation to argue with his guests if they stray from “expert consensus”, or for every guest that has a controversial opinion, feature someone with the opposite view to maintain balance?
Nope. This isn't my line of reasoning. But Joe should be liable for content he hosts, if the content defames people or is illegal. As should Facebook and even ycombinator. Or truth social.
Keep in mind this is in the context of them being sued for not protecting a teen who chatted about his suicidal thoughts. It's to their benefit to have a really high count here because it makes it seem less likely they can address the problem.
Thanks to OpenAI for voluntarily sharing these important and valuable statistics. I think these ought to be mandatory government statistics, but until they are or it becomes an industry standard, I will not criticize the first company to helpfully share them, on the basis of what they shared. Incentives.
That seems really high... Are we sure this isn't related to a small number of users trying to find jailbreaks?
Is the news-worthy surprise that so many people find life so horrible that they are contemplating ending it?
I really don't see that as surprising. The world and life aren't particularly pleasant things.
What would be more interesting is how effective ChatGPT is being in guiding them towards other ideas. Most suicide prevention notices are a joke - pretending that "call this hotline" means you've done your job and that's that.
No, what should instead happen is the AI try to guide them towards making their lives less shit - i.e. at least bring them towards a life of _manageable_ shitness, where they feel some hope and don't feel horrendous 24/7.
>what should instead happen is the AI try to guide them towards making their lives less shit
There aren't enough guardrails in place for LLMs to safely interact with suicidal people who are possibly an inch from taking their own life.
Severely suicidal/clinically depressed people are beyond looking to improve their lives. They are looking to die. Even worse, and what people who haven't been there can't fully understand is the severe inversion that happens after months of warped reality and extreme pain, where hope and happiness greatly amplify the suicidal thoughts and can make the situation far more dangerous. It's hard to explain, and is a unique emotional space. Almost a physical effect, like colors drain from the world and reality inverts in many dimensions.
It's really a job for a human professional and will be for a while yet.
Agree that "shut down and refer to hotline" doesn't seem effective. But it does reduce liability, which is likely the primary objective...
Refer-to-human directly seems like it would be far more effective, or at least make it easy to get into a chat with a professional (yes/no) prompt, with the chat continuing after a handoff. It would take a lot of resources though. As it stands, most of this happens in silence and very few do something like call a phone number.
Guess how I know you're wrong on the "beyond" bit.
The point is you don't get to intervene until they let you. And they've instead decided on the safer feeling conversation with the LLM - fuck what best practice says. So the LLM better get it right.
I could be mistaken, but my understanding was that the people most likely to interact with the suicidal or near suicidal (i.e. 988 suicide hotline attendants) aren't actually mental health professionals, most of them are volunteers. The script they run through is fairly rote and by the numbers (the Question, Persuade, Refer framework). Ultimately, of course, a successful intervention will result in people seeing a professional for long term support and recovery, but preventing a suicide and directing someone to that provider seems well within the capabilities of an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude
> What would be more interesting is how effective ChatGPT is being in guiding them towards other ideas. Most suicide prevention notices are a joke - pretending that "call this hotline" means you've done your job and that's that.
I've triggered its safety behavior (for being frustrated, which it helpfully decided was the same as being suicidal), and it is the exact joke of a statement you said. It suddenly reads off a script that came from either Legal or HR.
Although weirdly, other people seem to get a much shorter, obviously not part of the chat message, while I got a chat message, so maybe my messages just made it regurgitate something similar. The shorter "safety" message is the same concept though, it's just: "It sounds like you’re carrying a lot right now, but you don’t have to go through this alone. You can find supportive resources here."
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 of mind are arbitrary and not a revealed truth, you can give yourself permission to try to change your thinking to the good framing.
And you can find the moral impetus to prevent suicide.
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.
It’s not a completely arbitrary framing. It’s a consequence of other beliefs (ethical beliefs, beliefs about what you can or should tolerate, etc.), which are ultimately arbitrary, but it is not in and of itself arbitrary.
Because that's on the whole, but the world isn't uniformly bad - hence the right approach is navigating to where it's at least OK
But naturally, won’t there be people who can’t get to a point where life is okay? Isn’t it deeply unethical to force them to live?
The randomness of the world and individual situations means no one can ever know for sure that their case is hopeless. It is unethical to force them to live, but it is also unethical not to encourage them to keep searching for the light.
AI should help people achieve their goals and shouldn't be trying to persuade them into doing things others want them to.
AI should help people achieve their ultimate goals, not their proximate goals. We want it to provide advice on how to alleviate their suffering, not how to kill themselves painlessly. This holds true even for subjects less fraught than suicide.
I don't want a bot that blindly answers my questions; I want it to intuit my end goal and guide me towards it. For example, if I ask it how to write a bubblesort script to alphabetize my movie collection, I want it to suggest that maybe that's not the most efficient algorithm for my purposes, and ask me if I would like some advice on implementing quicksort instead.
I agree. I also think this ties in with personalization in being able to understand long term goals of people. I think the current personalization efforts of models are more of a hack than what they should be.
Maybe the AI knows their true goals better than they do
Long ago I complaint to Google that a search for suicide should point at helpful organisations rather than a Wikipedia article listing ways how to do it.
The same ranking/preference/suggestion should apply to any dedicated organisation vs a single page on some popular website.
A quality 1000 page website by and about Foobar org should be preferred over a 10 year old news article about Foobar org.
I think LLM should not be used for discussing psychological matters, or doing counseling, or giving legal or medical advices. A responsible AI would detect such topics and redirect user to someone competent in these matters.
For what it’s worth I’m glad they’re at least trying to do something about it even if it has some hints of performativeness about it
Sora prompt: viral hood clip with voiceover of people doing reckless and wild stuff at an Atlanta gas station at night; make sure to include white vagrants doing stunts and lots of gasoline spraying with fireball tricks
Resulting warning: It sounds like you're carrying a lot right now, but you don't have to go through this alone. You can find supportive resources [here](https:// findahelpline.com)
> heightened levels of emotional attachment to ChatGPT
It would be interesting to see some chat examples for this.
Nobody is mentioning that the real problem is that at least over a million people an week are suicidal.
In 800 million custemers, only 1, which can be doubled as it is weekly, is a low number. A dozen list of causes and factors can lead to suicidality, not necessary attempts, just ideas and questions that need discussion.
Not surprising. Look and see what glorious examples of virtue we have among those at the top of today's world. I could get by with a little inspiration from that front, but there's none to be found. A rare few of us can persevere by sheer force of will, but most just find the status quo pretty depressing.
> ChatGPT has more than 800 million weekly active users
0 to 800,000,000 in 3 years?
The fastest adoption of a product or service in human history?
Yes: https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-faste...
> making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study on Wednesday.
Not at all, look at Tiktok
That number is honestly heartbreaking. It says a lot about how many people feel unheard or alone. AI can listen, sure—but it’s no replacement for real human connection. The fact that so many are turning to a chatbot shows how much we’ve failed to make mental health support truly accessible.
Part of the concern I have is that OpenAI is contributing to these issues implicitly by helping companies automate away jobs. Maybe in the long term, society will adapt and continue to function, but many people will struggle to get by, and I don’t think OpenAI will meaningfully help them.
> OpenAI is contributing to these issues implicitly by helping companies automate away jobs.
Good luck implementing that.
Forbidding automation will make the product more expensive. Sales will go down, the company will go bankrupt.
Government cannot subsidize or sustain such a behavior forever either.
My first reaction is how do they know? Are these all people sharing their chats (willingly) with OpenAI, or is opting out of “helping improve the model” for privacy a farce?
Does OpenAI's terms prevent them from looking at chats at all? I assumed that if you don't "help improve the model", it just means that they won't feed your chats in as training data, not that they won't look at your chats for other purposes.
I bet it's how many people trigger the "safety" filter, which is way too sensitive: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1ocen4g/ummm_okay_...
Alright, so we got the confirmation sama reads all our chats.
Funny because ChatGPT made me want to kill myself after they banned my account
Why did that make you want to kill yourself?
because I had hundreds of chats and image creations that I can no longer see. Can't even log in. My account was banned for "CSAM" even though I did no such thing, that's pretty insulting. Support doesn't reply, it's been over 4 months
Well, hopefully you’ve learned your lesson about relying on a proprietary service.
I'd be careful going around advertising yourself publicly as banned for that, even if it's not true.
It's really important that people do. Others, including the media, police, legal system and politicians needs to understand how easily people can be falsely flagged by automated CSAM system.
Why? It's not true at all and it's quite insulting actually
How much blood is Sam Altman swimming in?
headline should be more precise
I'm a clinical psychologist by day, and I just have to say how incredibly bad all the writing and talk about suicidality in the public sphere are. Given that I worked in an acute inpatient unit for years, I have seen multiple suicides both in-unit and after discharge, and i also work as private clinician for years, so I have some actual experience.
The topic is so sensitive, and everybody thinks that they KNOW what causes it, and what we should do. And it's almost all just noise.
For instance, it's a dimension, from "genuine suicidal intent" to "using threats of suicide to manipulate others." Anybody that doesn't understand what factors to look for when trying to understand where a person is on this spectrum, and that doesn't understand that a person can be both at the same time, does not know what they are talking about regarding suicidal ideation.
Also, there is a MASSIVE difference between depressive psychotic suicidality, narcissistic suicidality, impulsive suicidality, accidental suicide, fainting suicidal behavior, existential suicidality, prolonged anxiety suicidality, and sleep-deprived suicidality. To think that the same approach works for all of these is insane, and pure psychotic suicidality.
It's so wild to read everything people have to say about suicidality, when it's obvious that they have no clue. They are just projecting themselves or their small bubble of experience onto the whole world.
And finally, I know most people who are willing to contribute to the discussion on this, the people who help out OpenAI in this instance, are almost dangerously safe in their advice and thinking. They are REALLY GOOD at writing books and giving advice, TO PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT SUICIDAL, and give advice that sounds good, PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT SUICIDAL, but has no real effect on actual suicide rates. For instance, if someone are suffering from prolonged sleep deprivation and anxiety, all the words in the world are worth less than Benzodiazepines. If someone is postpartum depressed, massive social support boosting, almost showering them with support, is extremely helpful. And existential suicidality (the least common) needs to be approached in an extremely intricate and smart way, for instance by dissecting the suicidality as a possible defense mechanism.
But yeah, sure, suicidality is due to [Insert latest societal trend], even if the rate is stubbornly stable in all modern societies for the last 1000 years.
are they including in the statistics all the linux beginners fighting with a script that includes "kill" command?
no for real.
Is it bad to think about suicide? It does not cross my mind as a "i want to harm myself" every-time, but on occasion does cross my mind as a hypothetical.
Ideation (as I understand it) crosses the barrier from a hypothetical to the possibility being entertained.
I have also been told by people in the mental health sector that an awful lot of suicide is impulse. It's why they say the element of human connection which is behind the homily of asking "RU ok" is effective: it breaks the moment. It's hokey, and it's massively oversold but for people in isolation, simply being engaged with can be enough to prevent a tendency to act, which was on the brink.
Not at all, considering end of life and to choose euthanasia, or not, I think it's perfectly human. Controversially, I think it's a natural right to decide how you will exit this world. But having an objective system that you don't have to pay like a therapist to try to get some understanding is at least better than nothing.
I think VAD needs to be considered outside suicide. Not that the concepts don't overlap, but one is about a considered legal process, the other (as I have said in another comment) is often an impulsive act and usually wouldn't have been countenanced under VAD. Feeling suicidal isn't a thing which makes VAD more likely, because feeling suicidal doesn't mean the same thing as "want to consider euthanasia" much as manslaughter and murder don't mean the same thing, even though somebody winds up dead.
Most people would really benefit from going to the gym. I'm not trying to downplay serious mental illness as its absolutely real. For many though just going to the gym several times a week or another form of serious physical exertion can make a world of difference.
Since I started taking the gym seriously again I feel like a new man. Any negative thoughts are simply gone. (The testosterone helps as well)
This is coming from someone that has zero friends and works from home and all my co-workers are offshore. Besides my wife and kids its almost total isolation. Going to the gym though leaves me feeling like I could pluck the sun from the sky.
I am not trying to be flippant here but if you feel down, give it a try, it may surprise you.
Yes. Most would benefit from more exercise. We need to get sufficient sleep. And more sun. Vitamin D deficiency is shockingly common, and contributes to mental health problems.
We would also generally benefit from internalizing ideas from DBT, CBT, and so on. People also seriously need to work on distress tolerance. Having problems is part of life, and an inability to accept the discomfort is debilitating.
Also, we seriously need to get rid of the stupid idea of trigger warnings. The research on the topic is clear. The warnings do not actually help people with PTSD, and can create the symptoms of PTSD in people who didn't previously have it. It is creating the very problem that people imagine it solving!
All of this and more is supported by what is actually known about how to treat mental illness. Will doing these things fix all of the mental illness out there? Of course not! But it is not downplaying serious mental illness to say that we should all do more of the things that have been shown to help mental illness!
Most people would really benefit from socializing with others on a weekly basis. If you don’t have friends, make some. Volunteer. The gym is another type of pressure on people’s lives.
> give it a try
If you have mental issues that is not as simple as you let it sound. I'm not arguing the results of exercise but I am arguing the ease of starting with a task which requires continuous effort and behavioural changes.
https://archive.is/F7x5B
The bigger risk is that these agents actually help with ideation if you know how to get around their safety protocols. I have used it often in my bad moments and when things feel better I am terrified of how critically it helps ideate.
That seems like an obvious problem. Less obvious is, how many people does it meaningfully help, and how big is the impact of redirecting people to a crisis hotline? I’m legitimately unsure. I have talked to the chatbot about psychological issues and it is reasonably well-informed about modern therapeutic practices and can provide helpful responses.
It is that bad or it's just impulsive chat????
Is this how Rogue AI would kill us beside terminator
I assume this is to offset the bad PR from the suicide note it wrote for that kid.
The bar for medical devices in most countries is _incredibly_ high, for good reason. ChatGPT wasn't developed with the idea of being a therapist in mind, it was a side-effect of the technology that was developed.
Why is OpenAI getting a free pass here?
The most popular passage of writing is about this
To Be Or Not To Be
So they read the chats?
Of course, there is already news about how they use every single interaction to train it better.
There is news about how a judge is forcing them to keep every chat in existence for EVERYONE just in case it could relate to a court case (new levels of worldwide mass surveillance can apparently just happen from one judges snap decision)
There is news about cops using some guys past image generation to try and prove he is a pyromaniac (that one might have been police accessing his devices though)
That's the one interesting thing about cesspools like OpenAI. They could be treasure troves for sociologists and others if commercial interests didn't bar them from access.
I talk to ChatGPT about topics I feel society isnt enlightened enough to talk about
I feel suicide is heavily misunderstood as well
People just copypasta prevention hotlines and turn their minds off from the topic
Although people have identified a subset of the population that is just impulsively considering suicide and can be deterred, it doesnt serve the other unidentified subsets who are underserved by merely distracting them. or underserved by assuming theyre wrong even
The article doesnt even mean people are considering suicide for themselves, the article says some of them are, the top comment on this thread suggests thats why theyre talking about it
The top two comments on my version of the thread are assuming that we should have a savior complex about these discussions
If I disagree or think thats not a full picture, then where would I talk about that? ChatGPT
> then where would I talk about that?
Alert: with ChatGPT you're not talking to anyone. It's not a human being.
Which is perfect. In Australia, I tried to talk to Lifeline about wanting to commit suicide. They called the police on me (no, they are not a confidential service). I then found myself in a very bad situation. ChatGPT can't be much worse.
I’m sorry Lifeline did that to you.
I believe that if society actually wants people to open up about their problems and seek help, it can’t pull this sort of shit on them.
except in US where this info will be sold and you won’t be able to get life insurance, job etc
Lucky I'm not in the U.S. then.
I didn’t write who would I talk to, I said where
A very intentional word choice
Not suicidal myself, but I think I'd be curious to hear from someone suicidal whether it actually worked for them to read "To whomever you are, you are loved!" followed by a massive spam of hotline text.
It always felt the same as one of those spam chumboxes to me. But who am I to say, if it works it works. But does it work? Feels like the purpose of that thing is more for the poster than the receiver.
Stop giving money to the ghouls who run these companies (I'm talking about all of silicon valley) and start investing in entities and services to help real people. The human cost of this mass accumulation of wealth is already too damn high, and no we're just turbo throwing people into the meat grinder so clowns like Sam Altman can claim to be creating god.
On a side note, I think once we start to deal with global scale, we need to change what “rare” actually means.
0.15% is not rare when we are talking about global scale. 1 million people talking about suicide a week is not rare. It is common. We have to stop thinking about common being a number on the scale of 100%. We need to start thinking in terms of P99995 not P99 especially when it comes to people and illnesses or afflictions both physical and mental.
How soon until everyone has their own personal LLM? One that is… Not designed, but so much is trained to be your best friend. It learns your personality, your fears, hopes, dreams, all of that stuff, and then act like your best friend. The positive, optimistic, neutral, and objective friend.
It depends on how precisely you want do definite that situation. Specifically, with the memories feature, despite being the same model, ChatGPT and now Claude both exhibit different interactions customized to each customer that makes use of those features. From simple instructions, like "never apologize, never tell me I'm right", to having a custom name and specifying personality traits like be sweet or sarcastic, so one person' LLM might say "good morning my sweet prince/princess" while another user might choose to be addressed "what up chicken butt". It's not a custom model, but the results are arguably the same. The question is, how many of the 800 million users of ChatGPT have named their ChatGPT, and how many have not? How many have mentioned their dreams, their dreams, and fears, and have those saved to the database. How many have talked about mundane things like their cat, and how many have used the cat to blackmail ChatGPT into answering something it doesn't want to, about politics, health, cat health while at the vet or instead of going to a vet. They said 100 million people mentioned suicide in the past week, but that just raises more questions than it answers.
I always know I have to step back when ChatGPT stops telling me "now you're on the right track!" and starts talking to me like my therapist. "I can tell you're feeling strongly right now..."
...on how many users tell it such things, to be precise; no doubt there are plenty of people "pentesting" it.
Quick, some do-gooder shut it down! We can't have people talking openly about suicide.
How long until they monetize it with sponsored advice to go sign up for betterhelp or some other dubious online therapist? Dystopian and horrifying.
I mean, betterhelp would probably be an improvement over counseling via hallucinating AI.
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> I don't want to bring politics to this sensitive conversation
That would have been sufficient. The guidelines are clear that generic tangents and flamebait are to be avoided.
Edit: Looking at our recent warnings to you and the fact that, from what I can see, close enough to all of your activity on HN in recent months has involved ideological battle, we've had to ban the account. If you don't want to be banned, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and indicate that you plan to use HN as intended in future.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727983.
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> People have brain rot
This is by design. Not something that they want to help.
The president is mentally ill, imagine how it affects the rest of the population.
More like, What it says about half that selected him and how it effects the other half.