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More than a million people every week show suicidal intent when chatting with ChatGPT, OpenAI estimates
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
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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.
They'd better fucking have data on this because it is horrendously irresponsible to let people talk to bots that imitate real conversations not track whether your bots are encouraging depressed people to kill themselves.
That's a good point. Still doesn't really comfort me when they're not subject to the same standards and ethics of actual mental health workers.
There is an opportunity (or there would be, if these companies were in sane jurisdictions) to try and apply some standards, because only a handful of companies are capable of hosting these bots.
However, there are limitations because of the inherent nature of what they are. Namely, they are relatively cheap, so you can host a number of conversations with them that it is completely unmanageable to manually monitor, and they are relatively unpredictable, so the best-written safety rails will have problems (both false positives and false negatives).
Put together, that means you can't have AI chatbots which don't sometimes both: spout shit they really should not be doing, such as encouraging suicide or reinforcing negative thoughts; and erroneously block people because the system to try and avoid that triggered falsely. And the less of one you try to have, the more of the other.
That implies, to me, that AI chatbots need to be monitored for harm so that those systems can be tuned - or if need be so that the whole idea can be abandoned. But that also means that the benefits of the system need to be analysed, because it's no good going "ChatGPT is implicated in 100 suicides - it must be turned off" if we have no data on how many suicides it may have helped prevent. As a stochastic process that mimics conversation, there will surely be cases of both.