[more_corn]

It’s not hard to add a function that says “is this conversion about suicide? If so escalate to an intervention pathway.” You could even do it as an out of band batch process so it doesn’t increase latency.

OpenAI didn’t put in the simplest, smallest, easiest protection. (You could do it with a tiny LLM, batch up the conversion on a five minute interval with a cron job.) I could implement it for less than the operations team spends on lunch today. And certainly less than OpenAI will spend bringing their in-house council up to speed on the lawsuit.

Suicide is a crisis and it’s possible to intervene, but only if the confidant tries. In this case it was a machine with insufficient safety controls.

Fixing ChatGPT will 100% lower the suicide rate by exactly the amount of people who confide in ChatGPT about suicidal thoughts and who receive successful intervention. I can’t tell you what that number is ahead of time but I assure it’s nonzero.