[DocTomoe]

> A few months ago, OpenAI shared some data about how with 700 million users, 1 million people per week show signs of mental distress in their chats

Considering that the global prevalence of mental health issues in the population is one in seven[1], that would make OpenAI users about 100 times more 'sane' than the general population.

Either ChatGPT miraculously selects for an unusually healthy user base - or "showing signs of mental distress in chat logs" is not the same thing as being mentally ill, let alone harmed by the tool.

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-diso...

[zahlman]

Having a mental health issue is not at all the same thing as "showing signs of mental distress" in any particular "chat". Many forms of mental illness wouldn't show up in dialogue normally; when it would, it doesn't necessarily show up all the time. And then there's the matter of detecting it in the transcript.

[tehjoker]

I don't know the full details, but 700M users and 1 million per a week, means up to 52M per year though I imagine a lot of them show up multiple weeks.

[DocTomoe]

You also don't take into account that the userbase itself is shifting.

That being said: Those of us who grew up when the internet was still young remember alt.suicide.holiday, and when you could buy books explaining relatively painless methods on amazon. People are depressed. It's a result of the way we choose to live as a civilization. Some don't make the cut. We should start accepting that. In fact, forcing people to live on in a world that is unsuited for happiness might constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

[GreenWatermelon]

Maybe, just maybe, we should fix the fucked up world we created instead? Shunning the modern culture of individualism would be a great first step, followed by promoting communal culture. Live exactly how we evolved to live for hundreds of thousands of years.