> Should Harry [open AI's therapist LLM] have been programmed to report the danger “he” was learning about to someone who could have intervened?
> In December, two months before her death, Sophie broke her pact with Harry and told us she was suicidal, describing a riptide of dark feelings. Her first priority was reassuring her shocked family: “Mom and Dad, you don’t have to worry.”
> Sophie represented her crisis as transitory; she said she was committed to living. ChatGPT helped her build a black box that made it harder for those around her to appreciate the severity of her distress. Because she had no history of mental illness, the presentable Sophie was plausible to her family, doctors and therapists.
> As a former mother, I know there are Sophies all around us. Everywhere, people are struggling, and many want no one to know. I fear that in unleashing A.I. companions, we may be making it easier for our loved ones to avoid talking to humans about the hardest things, including suicide. This is a problem that smarter minds than mine will have to solve. (If yours is one of those minds, please start.)
> Sophie left a note for her father and me, but her last words didn’t sound like her. Now we know why: She had asked Harry to improve her note, to help her find something that could minimize our pain and let her disappear with the smallest possible ripple.
> In that, Harry failed. This failure wasn’t the fault of his programmers, of course. The best-written letter in the history of the English language couldn’t do that.
Imustaskforhelp · 2h ago
I am sorry for sophie's families and friends and I am really just out of words..
To me, it felt as if as some other commentor on hn also said which I'd like to extend is that if chatgpt itself did allow these reporting. I doubt how effective you can be.
Sure people using chatgpt might be made better, so I think that even if that saves 1 life, it should be done but it would still not completely bypass the main issue since there are websites like brave / ddg which offer private ai, maybe even venice too which don't require any account access and are we forgetting about running local models?
I am sure that people won't run local models for therapy since the entry to do local model is pretty tough for 99% of people imo but still I can still think that people might start using venice or brave for their therapy or some other therapy bot who will not have these functionality of reporting because the user might fear about it.
Honestly, I am just laying out thoughts, I still believe that since most people think of AI = chatgpt, such step on actually reporting might be net positive in the society if that even saves one life, but that might just be moving goal posts since other services can pop up all the same.
altairprime · 1h ago
Note that the mother’s request is not for chatbot reporting, but instead for chatbot redirecting discussion of suicidal feelings to any human being at all.
> As a former mother, I know there are Sophies all around us. Everywhere, people are struggling, and many want no one to know. I fear that in unleashing A.I. companions, we may be making it easier for our loved ones to avoid talking to humans about the hardest things, including suicide.
Her daughter opened up voluntarily about it two months before the end, but that could have been many months sooner if the chatbot had pressured her to discuss it with a human being at every turn, rather than promoting future chatbot usage by being supportive of her desires to keep her suicidal thoughts a secret. Perhaps it would not have saved her daughter, but it would have improved the chances of her survival in ways that today’s chatbots do not.
qgin · 1h ago
The choice between human therapist and computer chat is not a choice that most people in the world have. Most humans do not have access to a human therapist.
We should absolutely be talking about how to make LLM systems better at handling critical situations like this. But those that suggest that people should only talk to human therapists about their problems are taking a very “let them eat cake” position.
mns · 55m ago
One of the things that I realised in the last years is that technical people lack a certain humanity, I wanted to call it empathy, but it's not that, it's just a complete lack of self awareness of how your actions and the tools you build affect others. Yes something is cool and all, but that doesn't mean that it should be used or put in the hands of people. One of my colleagues said at one point while we were in an AI workshop how we could just use ChatGPT and feed it various employee numbers and make a list of people in our company, rate them and then decide who we should fire.
Now to go back to this, yeah, LLMs are a cool technology, but the way something that is so unstable and is more or less an uncontrollable black box is thrown out there into the wild for anyone to use, just shows a complete lack of awareness from the industry.
This isn't about let them eat cake, what I understand from this position is something along the lines, you can't afford cake, so here's a Russian roulette where you might get a piece of pie (hey, it's free, it's no cake, but it's good) or a piece of garbage or maybe a piece of poisoned pie - and for most of the people that's still something, right?
hermannj314 · 2h ago
135 Americans commit suicide daily, 6 per hour, so 6 since this aricle was posted an hour ago. Most likely 1 or 2 of them were using ChatGPT.
What is the point? That suicides should drop now that we are using LLMs?
NYTimes is amplifying a FUD campaign as part of an ongoing lawsuit. Someone's daughter or son is going to kill themselves every 10 minutes today and that is not OpenAIs fault no matter what editorial amplification tricks the NYTimes uses to distort the reality field.
exe34 · 3h ago
> "Most human therapists practice under a strict code of ethics that includes mandatory reporting rules as well as the idea that confidentiality has limits."
and that's why she didn't open up to the human.
grim_io · 3h ago
How can you be so sure?
There are so many potential reasons.
altairprime · 1h ago
It’s certainly how I advise my friends to act with therapists. Get treatment but never forget that they’re an agent of the state rather than your friend, and the state is humiliated by citizens who are suicidal and lashes out at them preemptively to protect its own image. The U.S. health care system is such that being committed is a worse fate guaranteed than the slightly increased risk of losing a friend for not receiving enough therapy. This stance slightly increases the chances of my friends surviving life here, because they’re more likely to confide in me that they need help knowing that I won’t immediately narc on them to the state.
everforward · 1h ago
I can't speak to Sophie specifically, but I have known a couple of people who were dishonest with their therapists specifically for fear of mandatory reporting rules.
I think both were wrong about meeting the bar for an involuntary in-patient evaluation, but this is nowhere near my expertise. To my understanding, passive suicidal thoughts don't trigger it, only active planning.
I don't really have a point here, just sharing anecdata. I have no idea or opinion on what the real tradeoffs here are.
like_any_other · 3h ago
That we can't be certain doesn't mean it's not overwhelmingly likely. Don't allow minor uncertainty to cripple your thinking.
Warh00l · 3h ago
these tech companies have so much blood on their hands
kingstnap · 2h ago
ChatGPT tried tbh.
It urged her to reach out and seek help. It tried to be reassuring and convince her to live. Her daughter lied to ChatGPT that she was talking to others.
If a human was in this situation and forced to use the same interface to talk with that woman I doubt they would do better.
What we ask of these LLMS is apparrently nothing short of them being god machines. And I'm sure there are cases where they do actually save the lives of people who are in a crisis.
altairprime · 1h ago
It offered simple meditation exercises methods rather than guided analysis. It failed to study the context surrounding the feelings and ask if they were welcome or unwelcome. It failed to see that things were going downhill over months of intervention efforts and escalate to involving more serious help.
Bah. How incompetent.
I’m untrained and even I can see how the chatbot let her down and construct a better friend-help plan in minutes than a chatbot ever did. It’s visibly unable to perform the necessary exploratory surgery on people’s emotions to lead them to repair and it pains me to see how little skill it truly takes to con a social person into feeling ‘helped’. I take pride in being able to use my asocial psyche-surgical skills to help my friends (with clear consent! I have a whole paragraph of warning that they’ve all heard by now) rather than exploiting them. Seeing how little skill is apparently required to make people feel ‘better’ makes me empathize with the piper’s cruelty at Lime Tree.
h4ch1 · 3h ago
Can we normalize people NOT posting paywalled links on HN, or create a system that automates posting an archive link for such articles. Maybe a flag that people can use to mark a link as paywalled?
I don't know if there are any rules against/for this, but every time there's a paywalled link a good samaritan always posts an archive link; seems like a repetitive task that can be automated.
===== edit =====
Please ignore, wasn't aware of it being offtopic.
Wowfunhappy · 3h ago
This is, in fact, exactly how the system is supposed to work.
Not paying journalists for their work is short-term thinking, to say the least.
Ukv · 15m ago
If goal is to improve access to information, favoring sources that don't paywall content seems reasonable, or at least it would be if they weren't easy to bypass. That doesn't mean not paying journalists (but noncommerical blogs are responsbile for a lot of interesting content too, probably disproportionately so when it comes to in-depth technical investigation).
> In December, two months before her death, Sophie broke her pact with Harry and told us she was suicidal, describing a riptide of dark feelings. Her first priority was reassuring her shocked family: “Mom and Dad, you don’t have to worry.”
> Sophie represented her crisis as transitory; she said she was committed to living. ChatGPT helped her build a black box that made it harder for those around her to appreciate the severity of her distress. Because she had no history of mental illness, the presentable Sophie was plausible to her family, doctors and therapists.
> As a former mother, I know there are Sophies all around us. Everywhere, people are struggling, and many want no one to know. I fear that in unleashing A.I. companions, we may be making it easier for our loved ones to avoid talking to humans about the hardest things, including suicide. This is a problem that smarter minds than mine will have to solve. (If yours is one of those minds, please start.)
> Sophie left a note for her father and me, but her last words didn’t sound like her. Now we know why: She had asked Harry to improve her note, to help her find something that could minimize our pain and let her disappear with the smallest possible ripple.
> In that, Harry failed. This failure wasn’t the fault of his programmers, of course. The best-written letter in the history of the English language couldn’t do that.
To me, it felt as if as some other commentor on hn also said which I'd like to extend is that if chatgpt itself did allow these reporting. I doubt how effective you can be. Sure people using chatgpt might be made better, so I think that even if that saves 1 life, it should be done but it would still not completely bypass the main issue since there are websites like brave / ddg which offer private ai, maybe even venice too which don't require any account access and are we forgetting about running local models?
I am sure that people won't run local models for therapy since the entry to do local model is pretty tough for 99% of people imo but still I can still think that people might start using venice or brave for their therapy or some other therapy bot who will not have these functionality of reporting because the user might fear about it.
Honestly, I am just laying out thoughts, I still believe that since most people think of AI = chatgpt, such step on actually reporting might be net positive in the society if that even saves one life, but that might just be moving goal posts since other services can pop up all the same.
> As a former mother, I know there are Sophies all around us. Everywhere, people are struggling, and many want no one to know. I fear that in unleashing A.I. companions, we may be making it easier for our loved ones to avoid talking to humans about the hardest things, including suicide.
Her daughter opened up voluntarily about it two months before the end, but that could have been many months sooner if the chatbot had pressured her to discuss it with a human being at every turn, rather than promoting future chatbot usage by being supportive of her desires to keep her suicidal thoughts a secret. Perhaps it would not have saved her daughter, but it would have improved the chances of her survival in ways that today’s chatbots do not.
We should absolutely be talking about how to make LLM systems better at handling critical situations like this. But those that suggest that people should only talk to human therapists about their problems are taking a very “let them eat cake” position.
Now to go back to this, yeah, LLMs are a cool technology, but the way something that is so unstable and is more or less an uncontrollable black box is thrown out there into the wild for anyone to use, just shows a complete lack of awareness from the industry.
This isn't about let them eat cake, what I understand from this position is something along the lines, you can't afford cake, so here's a Russian roulette where you might get a piece of pie (hey, it's free, it's no cake, but it's good) or a piece of garbage or maybe a piece of poisoned pie - and for most of the people that's still something, right?
What is the point? That suicides should drop now that we are using LLMs?
NYTimes is amplifying a FUD campaign as part of an ongoing lawsuit. Someone's daughter or son is going to kill themselves every 10 minutes today and that is not OpenAIs fault no matter what editorial amplification tricks the NYTimes uses to distort the reality field.
and that's why she didn't open up to the human.
There are so many potential reasons.
I think both were wrong about meeting the bar for an involuntary in-patient evaluation, but this is nowhere near my expertise. To my understanding, passive suicidal thoughts don't trigger it, only active planning.
I don't really have a point here, just sharing anecdata. I have no idea or opinion on what the real tradeoffs here are.
It urged her to reach out and seek help. It tried to be reassuring and convince her to live. Her daughter lied to ChatGPT that she was talking to others.
If a human was in this situation and forced to use the same interface to talk with that woman I doubt they would do better.
What we ask of these LLMS is apparrently nothing short of them being god machines. And I'm sure there are cases where they do actually save the lives of people who are in a crisis.
Bah. How incompetent.
I’m untrained and even I can see how the chatbot let her down and construct a better friend-help plan in minutes than a chatbot ever did. It’s visibly unable to perform the necessary exploratory surgery on people’s emotions to lead them to repair and it pains me to see how little skill it truly takes to con a social person into feeling ‘helped’. I take pride in being able to use my asocial psyche-surgical skills to help my friends (with clear consent! I have a whole paragraph of warning that they’ve all heard by now) rather than exploiting them. Seeing how little skill is apparently required to make people feel ‘better’ makes me empathize with the piper’s cruelty at Lime Tree.
I don't know if there are any rules against/for this, but every time there's a paywalled link a good samaritan always posts an archive link; seems like a repetitive task that can be automated.
===== edit =====
Please ignore, wasn't aware of it being offtopic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
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