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I don't see anything in here to support saying ChatGPT is exacerbating anything.
Right? The reason people are opening up to it is that you can't open up to a human about this.
I'm agree with you, today is more easy to open yourself to an AI that basically is a YES man, unfotunatelly that is the main problem from my point of view, how we expect every of our ideas should be accepted without any difficulty, in fact, this could mean a lack of essential hummanity.
Exactly. It’s like concluding that therapists are exacerbating suicidal ideation, psychosis, or mania just because their patients talk about those things during sessions. ChatGPT has 800 million weekly users - of course some of them are going to bring up topics like that.
It’s fine to be skeptical about the long-term effects of chatbots on mental health, but it’s just as unhealthy to be so strongly anti-anything that one throws critical thinking out the window and accept anything that merely feels like it supports what they already want believe as further evidence that it must be so.
The fact they have data on this isn't surprising, but it should be horrifying for anyone using the platform. This company has the data from every sad, happy, twisted, horny, and depressing reply from every one of their users, and they're analyzing it. Best case, they're "only" using it to better manipulate users into staying longer on their apps. More likely they're using it for much more than that.
possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania
It can be amusing to test what triggers this response from LLMs. Perplexity will reliably do it if you propose sacrificing a person or animal to Satan, but not Ku-waha-ilo, the Hawaiian god of war, sorcery, and devourer of souls.
I imagine a large fraction of the conversations flagged this way are people doing that rather than actually having a mental health crisis.
Preface: I love The Guardian, and fuck Altman.
But this is a bad headline.
Correlation is not causation. It’s disturbing that OpenAI even possesses, and has mined for these statistics, or that millions of people somehow think their ChatGPT app has any semblance of privacy, but I’m reading that millions reached out to ChatGPT with suicidal ideations.
Not that it’s the root cause.
The headline is that the mental health of the world sucks, not that ChatGPT inflamed the crisis all of the sudden. The Guardian should be ashamed of shoehorning in some “Fuck AI” article into that for clicks, when there are literally a million other malicious bits of OpenAI they could cover. This a sad story, sourced from an app that has an unprecedented (and disturbing) window into folks psyche en masse, they’ve twisted into clickbait.
"How can we monetize this?"
Just a matter of time before it recommends therapists in your area (that paid OpenAI to be suggested to you).
I think another potential use, is targeting and manipulating vulnerable people for political reasons.
Perhaps convince them to stay at home on election day. Perhaps convince members of undesirable demographics to disproportionately kill themselves. Perhaps make vulnerable people so paranoid or scared that they end up killing people you want to get rid of. Perhaps convince someone vulnerable to commit politically convenient violence, which can be used as a false flag or to rally support.
Why leave that kind of thing to chance, when you can use AI to tip the scales in your favour?
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
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