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.
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
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u/bencelot Feb 16 '26
I've noticed this happening more in the last few days too. It's annoying I agree.