About 3 percent of students in the study had positive mental health outcomes, reporting that talking to the chatbot “halted their suicidal ideation.” But researchers also found “there are some cases where their use is either negligible or might actually contribute to suicidal ideation.”
This is referring to a bot designed to help with people struggling with mental health, and is actually a big one. That number is way too low.
“hey, I know you feel like killing yourself, but if it happens then we’ll just replace you with a shitty bot” probably isn’t as helpful as they thought it would be. It’s violating and ghoulish.
I hate this attitude of “well if you can’t get a professional therapist, figure out how to get one anyways”. There needs to be an option for people who either can’t afford or can’t access a therapist. I would have loved for AI to fill that gap. I understand it won’t be as good, but in many regions the wait-list for therapy is far too long, and something is better than nothing
Someone close to me gave up on the hotlines in the US and now just uses ChatGPT. It’s no therapist, but at least it’ll hold a conversation. If only the hotlines here weren’t so absurdly understaffed.
I’ve used one called PI which I’m assuming is some kind of branch off of chat gpt or something.
You don’t have to sign up or anything (for now) which is cool. But I assume they harvest all our data and information.
I tested to see if I could break it once, and from my brief tests, it seemed to never break out of character or tell me something bad or negative, which I thought was interesting(and good!)
I actually used Pi as my intro to generative LLMs. It was … I guess not encouraging self harm, but so fucking irritating that it led me to want to. Always with the irrelevant supportive words that I guess work if you’re a teen?
I’ve given up on crisis lines. Their whole premise seems to be “get back to being comfortable with the oppressive system, you little bitch.”
I tried AI once but it just kept telling me to call the hotlines. Useless.
I would have loved AI to fill that need as well, but it’s not an adequate tool for the job.
Oh hey, reality being even worse than Black Mirror again 😿
Imagine a 3% success rate being acceptable in any situation. That tends to get you fired.
3% success vs what? 6% sent over the edge? 10% 20% ?
What shitty investigative journalism. If the journalist asked for a specific figure but was evaded then it should be stated in the article.
I don’t much like that take. Ars commits excellent journalism.
From the story:
About 3 percent of students in the study had positive mental health outcomes, reporting that talking to the chatbot “halted their suicidal ideation.” But researchers also found “there are some cases where their use is either negligible or might actually contribute to suicidal ideation.”
I don’t think they contacted the researchers and the linked study does not seem to give the answer (I spent a few minutes looking).
I generally don’t go about doing research for free.
I removed the insult.
Thank you.
Wasn’t this an episode of Black Mirror back when it was still really good?
Yeah, I know someone who won’t watch that episode again because of how unsettling it is. Luckily for them, it’s slowly becoming reality.
I watched until season 6 and all of it was really amazing. Is S7 bad?
