OpenAI has published new data showing that a small but significant percentage of ChatGPT users aren’t just talking to the chatbot about mental health issues but engaging in suicidal planning.
About 0.15 percent of active weekly users “have conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.” With over 800 million active weekly users, that’s about 1 million users per week. Furthermore, 0.05 percent of messages “contain explicit or implicit indicators of suicidal ideation or intent.”
A similar proportion of users are reportedly showing signs of strong emotional attachments to ChatGPT, with hundreds of thousands of users exhibiting signs of psychosis or mania.
Open AI emphasizes that these cases are “extremely rare” but still acknowledges that they affect hundreds of thousands of people every week. The data was published as part of a wider initiative to improve how ChatGPT deals with mental illness.
