alt Hacker News> Every week, somewhere between 1.2 and 3 million ChatGPT users, roughly the population of a small country, show signals of psychosis, mania, suicidal planning, or unhealthy emotional dependence on the model.
> Why is mental-health crisis not a gating category, the kind where the conversation stops, full stop, and the user is routed to a human?
Well, obviously “routing to a human” is not feasible at that scale. And cold exiting the conversation is probably worse for the user than answering carefully.
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Tech companies will pull trillions of dollars out of their asses when the problem is boosting ad revenue or automating people out of a job. But when asked to deal with the crisis they invented and dumped on society the answer is “that’s impossible, doesn’t scale”
"Routed to a human" is what the suicide hotline numbers do. OpenAI employees are neither trained nor credible to do that stuff.
> is not feasible at that scale
So if it is not scalable, then why subsidize them? This is literally a tragedy of the commons situation. Personally, I'm in favor of making the people who make a mess clean up that mess. I really don't understand why this is such a contentious opinion.
Well, then maybe you can't scale it as a free service with self-serve signups. Maybe you need to gate who you allow to use it and pace how intensely they can engage. Or maybe you need to look for other solutions.
Yielding to "not feasible at scale" is exactly how we ended up with a lot of today's most pressing and almost intractible problems, from social media's ills to person and society straight through to enshittification and non-repairability.
I don't think it's obvious that routing to a human is infeasible. I'm sure many local authorities, health agencies, and non-profits would be okay being routed to. Additionally, I'm sure many of the users are the same week over week, so giving them long term care would reduce the total volume. Finally, there is a long gap between psychosis and emotional dependence, so there could be some triage to make sure those most in need have human intervention.