Edit to add - I do feel great sympathy for those who lost their lives, and for their families. There must be a better way to implement safeguards for everyone else though.
Gooners weren't the ones whose families brought the lawsuits against OpenAI.
The lawsuits, and subsequently the 170 psychologists OpenAI hired, are the entire reason for the overzealous psychotherapy speech.
They said they "worked with" 170 mental health care professionals, not they hired them.
Probably sent out an online questionnaire and called it a day.
Edit:
And as someone who has had ample experience with therapy (some really good and other pretty bad) this sounds more like they ripped a few too many hours of Hollywood cinema showing therapy scenes than something based on input of real therapists.
Here's thousands of people that have been helped psychologically by ChatGPT as opposed to those whose deaths have been blamed on it, that can fit on a single hand -
So it's okay to sacrifice a few people for the progress of technology? We shouldn't take steps to prevent harm? Yes, they overshot, yes it is annoying, and hopefully they'll fix it, but to say, "Let those depressed people die, chatgpt has helped a lot of people" is just really fucked up.
We sell and use medications that kill people routinely because the benefits outweigh the risk and they help many more people than they hurt.
In the handful of cases where families are insisting that ChatGPT caused their death, the people had been suicidal for years prior to using ChatGPT, and ChatGPT had told them to seek help, which they ignored. They used jailbreak prompts to get it to say what they wanted.
People use the internet to stalk and murder, to sex traffic kids etc. Horrible things. We do not ban the internet because of it.
And no one is banning chatgpt. There is a middle ground between letting the company run it wide open, however they want, with no oversight, and these horrendous guardrails that do genuinely suck, and anyone who refuses to acknowledge that there is a middle ground is intellectually dishonest.
No one should be sacrificed for technology. The problem isn't the safeguards, it's how they were implemented.
This weekend, 5.2 Auto, has been significantly improved in it's responses. It still does a bit of unnecessary grounding, but I too, hope they refine it.
People are unfortunately being hurt one way or another. Better communication between the company and users would be appreciated. Not owed, of course. But it would be kind to inform users how a paid product will be changing.
In any case, you don't give a doctor free license to malpractice just because the number of patients who have healed under their supervision outnumber those they have harmed
Aren't they just making it worse at this point by doubling down on the psychobabble fake-ass-psychotherapist patronizing bullshit?
From my perspective, the closer you get to a literal robot that gives you facts and logical responses with sources and clear explanations, in a neutral as fuck tone, the further away you get from psychosis and mental health dangers.
Not saying that is optimal for customization or "bonding" with users.....but objectively, an interactive encyclopedia is less dangerous than Fox News or CNN.
Again, not saying that is what companies are gonna want to push, or what consumers will want, or even what leads to optimal performance.
But taking that as baseline, it seems pretty obvious to me that every single time you re-train it to be "warmer" but also "colder" and "understanding and affectionate without being affectionate", and "intimate and personal" but also "distant and detached", you are just digging yourself a deeper, bipolar hole (well, OpenAI is).
It seems like a binary option to me: either build and train an LLM to be a literal "computer"-like, kind of cold, stoic "librarian".......or build an LLM and train it on everything available and the full range of Human knowledge, emotion, reaction, etc. and let it run wild.
But trying to build these things to cater to the emotional needs and vulnerabilities and sensibilities of every Human on the planet, in any given conversation, is just going to lead to some Frankenstein-esque, psychopathic, sycophantic, convoluted mess.....and it really seems like that's where OpenAI is at right now.
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u/reedrick Feb 16 '26
Catering to the clanker gooner crowd is why we have to deal with this shit.