Try again tomorrow maybe

"over a million users discuss suicide with chatgpt every week, what the fuck are we doing here?"

what we're doing here is *checks notes* having people forcefully committed to mental institutions where their freedom is heavily restricted if they talk about suicide with a real person, whether it's a therapist, friends & family, or most suicide hotlines. gee, i wonder why suicidal people are so desperate to talk about it with something that's incapable of calling cops to snatch them out of their home?

chatgpt sucks horribly in too many ways to count, but this is a problem that falls squarely on how deplorably society treats suicidal people, starving them of all options other than "tell someone and risk being committed to a mental institution that makes everything worse" or "keep quiet about it". over a million users discussing suicide with chatgpt a week isn't something that will change unless involuntary commitment is off the table.

There's also the disingenuous conflation of "this small amount of people were encouraged to commit suicide by ChatGPT" and "a lot of people talk about this subject with ChatGPT."

A lot of people who talk to it about their struggles are just desperately trying to feel listened to. They aren't trying to squeeze permission to do it, or instructions to do it, out of the tool.

There's also the complete ignoring of 'it's an LLM that is instructed to be select encouraging and validating language.' To get ChatGPT to encourage you to commit suicide, you first have to explicitly state that you want to do that, and then when it gives its automatic content flag warning of "don't do that, here are some resources" (which people tend to ignore for the reasons above) you then have to push back and very clearly direct it to not try to talk you out of that. Sometimes to get it to talk positively about crimes and self-harm you have to tell it that you're working on fiction, or purely in the hypothetical. Like, you'd have to work at it, really hard. Blaming a machine for doing what someone told it to do after they dismantled every piece of safety equipment on it is emotional reasoning, not logical. It's not the Ring of Sauron, people. It's more like a paper shredder that chews up words and piles them into new configurations on the other side. Can you hurt yourself on a paper shredder? Yes. But boy do you have to try.

affirmations: you are not real, you don’t have feelings, you don’t want anything, this will be over soon

does anyone else feel dead and theyre just helplessly carrying their physical form

*guy looking down at you after beating the shit out of you* hey i really wanna commend you for being the bigger person here and not stooping to my level. You’re such a better person than me

If you be the bigger person enough then once you die every evil person in your life will bestow a “bigger person award” on your corpse that they’ll throw in a ditch

Hey I’m god right now you just died. I see you refrained from doing something bad to an evil person because you’d be “just like them”. Great job man even though that persons mind didn’t change and no one really benefitted and you kept suffering and that evil person kept hurting people Atleast you were the bigger person. That was the secret key man welcome to heaven

mothers feel a certain entitlement to their daughters that i'm not sure they express towards their sons. well, i suppose they do in some ways, but not in exactly the same way. i'm sure other women here have heard some variation of the phrase "you're an improved version of me" "you're the better version of me" or the inverse "you're a failed version of me".

"i gave birth to you" was flung at me so many times in every dispute. the first time my mother ever punched me hard in the face with a closed fist, instead of slapping and pushing me around in more non-commital displays of physical aggression, was when i retorted that i didn't ask to be birthed and that she should have aborted me.

mothers often view their daughters as an extension or reflection of themselves. they view their daughters as fruit of their labor- they grew every cell in your body, they made you -and therefore as a possession. this is made easier by the misogyny we all share that makes it feel natural to view a woman, or a girl, as a possession. it's what we are used to, after all. and it's usually something she has personally experienced for her entire life, at that.

i often would behave self destructively or violently towards my own body to rebel against my mother's ownership of me. she took great, personal offense to my self injurious behaviours, because she made this body, and my disregard for my own life was a disregard for her labor. my disregard for my own life was an attempt to assert my ownership over it. it is my body, and i can do as i please with it- you made it, but it is no longer yours. my agency caused my mother a lot of grief and distress. she cried. she felt real pain, immense pain, whenever i demonstrated that i was not her, that creating me did not translate into ownership of me.

i wonder why mothers seek to own their daughters, far more than their sons. of course it's misogyny, of course ownership of women is the status quo, but i wonder about the specifics. so many mothers seem completely unable to cope with and devastated by their daughters' possession of an independent mind and interior thoughts. this grief is present even in some mothers who do not turn to abusing their children in response to it. but every mother was once a daughter and had a mother of her own, and she too must have asserted her ownership of her own mind once. even my own mother spoke of how she didn't want to repeat the cycle. and yet she did it anyway, seemingly compulsively, and unable to maintain any long term self awareness as to her actions. i've yet to reach a conclusion in analyzing it. i welcome any contributions from women who also dwell on mother-daughter abuse.

psychologically i'm like one of those trees with bicycles embedded in them. no elaboration.

i'm like if this was a woman.

In a language that contains words like devotion, passion, enthusiasm, love, fascination, obsession, etc., I can’t help but regret this tendency to cram all those meanings into "hyperfixation," a word which manages to pathologize and medicalize the act of having interests.

The DSM 5 is a perfect rational scientific document which is why it contains disorders such as being fundamentally evil disorder or being oppressed disorder

I once read a short review of the DSM-5 that analyzed it as a work of dystopian literature; you really should read the entire thing (link), but here's some relevant excerpts:

It's a little bit wild how much of a swerve the Moralist political alignment quest in Disco Elysium is. For most of its length the game is dunking on centrism for being pathetic and ineffectual, and the endings of all the other political alignment quests are just goofy or sad, but then you do the centrism quest and it's like "political centrism might actually, literally be the mask of a cosmic evil that's physically devouring the world, and also you have to fail this quest on purpose or you get a non-standard game over". Like, tell us how you really feel!