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ChatGPT shares data on how many users exhibit psychosis or suicidal thoughts

BBC News

OpenAI has released new estimates of the number of ChatGPT users who exhibit possible signs of mental health emergencies, including mania, psychosis or suicidal thoughts. The company said that around 0.07% of ChatGPT users active in a given week exhibited such signs, adding that its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot recognizes and responds to these sensitive conversations. While OpenAI maintains these cases are extremely rare, critics said even a small percentage may amount to hundreds of thousands of people, as ChatGPT recently reached 800 million weekly active users, per boss Sam Altman. As scrutiny mounts, the company said it built a network of experts around the world to advise it. Those experts include more than 170 psychiatrists, psychologists, and primary care physicians who have practiced in 60 countries, the company said. They have devised a series of responses in ChatGPT to encourage users to seek help in the real world, according to OpenAI.


More than a million people every week show suicidal intent when chatting with ChatGPT, OpenAI estimates

The Guardian

OpenAI claimed that its recent GPT-5 update improved user safety in a model evaluation involving more than 1,000 self-harm and suicide conversations. OpenAI claimed that its recent GPT-5 update improved user safety in a model evaluation involving more than 1,000 self-harm and suicide conversations. More than a million ChatGPT users each week send messages that include "explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent", according to a blogpost published by OpenAI on Monday. The finding, part of an update on how the chatbot handles sensitive conversations, is one of the most direct statements from the artificial intelligence giant on the scale of how AI can exacerbate mental health issues. In addition to its estimates on suicidal ideations and related interactions, OpenAI also said that about 0.07% of users active in a given week - about 560,000 of its touted 800m weekly users - show "possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania".


Dolphins may be getting an Alzheimer's-like disease due to this neurotoxin

Popular Science

Environment Conservation Ocean Dolphins may be getting an Alzheimer's-like disease due to this neurotoxin The neurotoxins, found in algal blooms, primarily affect the body's nervous system. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. For marine biologists, dolphins are often viewed as sentinel species, or animals that shed light on the health of the ocean . Along with whales, porpoises, and other cetacean species, dolphins are one way that researchers know to sound the alarm about environmental hazards that might affect the ocean as a whole and potentially humans. In this context, researchers have connected neurotoxins from algal blooms to brain changes associated with an Alzheimer's-like disease in dolphins in Florida.


Albania's digitally-created 'Minister for AI' is 'pregnant with 83 children', PM says

Daily Mail - Science & tech

This is why her and David Harbour's marriage REALLY ended': Following Lily Allen's'revenge album' against her ex-husband, his furious friends hit back at the'false' singer'A common medication sent my sex life roaring back... it's definitely not a rare side effect': Surprising ways women revived their flagging libidos - including a Netflix show dubbed'female Viagra' King Charles is heckled by Andrew protester shouting'how long have you known' - as he and Fergie prepare to leave Royal Lodge for separate houses Buffalo Bills suffer serious blow to Super Bowl hopes as star man Ed Oliver is ruled out'indefinitely' The NBA Mafia betting scandal is the tip of the iceberg. Now match-fixing expert speaks on wider web of sports shame... and who it implicates: 'Dancing with the devil' Woke Dem Jasmine Crockett's secret stock empire exposed - as she plots Senate run Anguish of mother whose son, four, and daughter, six, vanished in Nova Scotia woods six months ago... as cops reject claims a stranger abducted them This is exactly how to lose up to a stone by Christmas. My expert diet helps you slim while you sleep, won't leave you hungry - and no, you don't need Mounjaro or Ozempic! Trump ally and fellow real estate tycoon warns Zohran Mamdani will destroy NYC's housing market: 'That's not affordability, that's insanity' Bionic Woman actress Lindsay Wagner, 76, makes a rare appearance at fan event... see her now I wish my selfish sister had never been born. When she died at 33 after a life of hedonism, she became a saint in our family... I'll never forgive her for it Urgent warning to Gmail users as 183 MILLION passwords are stolen in data breach - here's how to check if your account is affected What HAS happened to Bradley Cooper's face?


Why do animals have spots and stripes?

Popular Science

Environment Animals Wildlife Why do animals have spots and stripes? Zebra's stripes and leopard's spots are perfectly imperfect. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The fur and scales of the animal kingdom are far from boring and full of wild colors and patterns. These mathematically inspired designs like leopard spots and tiger stripes are as interesting as they are intricate .


Jennifer Lawrence Goes Dark

The New Yorker

She has been cast in maternal roles since her teens. Now, playing a mother for the first time since becoming one, she has chosen the part of a woman pushed past the edge of sanity. In "Die My Love," Lawrence, as Grace, vibrates with boredom and fury. The novel "Die, My Love," by the Argentinean writer Ariana Harwicz, is narrated by a wife and new mother who is living in rural France and seems to be losing her mind. Motherhood has inserted an immersion blender into her psyche: lust, repulsion, pleasure, and doom swirl into a single mess. She calls herself a "sodomising rodent" with "bullet-wounds for eyes," and thinks, "When I masturbate I desecrate crypts, and when I rock my baby I say amen, and when I smile I unplug an iron lung." One night, standing in the cold, staring at her family through a sliding door, she thinks, "I'll stop trying to draw blood from a stone. I'll contain my madness, I'll use the bathroom. I'll put my baby to sleep, jerk off my man and postpone my rebellion in favor of a better life." Martin Scorsese saw a brief review of the novel in the some years ago and decided to pick up a copy. He found it to be a "powerful mosaic of the mind," he told me recently. Scorsese is a member of a book club of sorts, with a few other filmmakers, who read with an eye toward adaptation. For "Die, My Love," he imagined casting Jennifer Lawrence in the lead. He'd been amazed by her performance in Darren Aronofsky's bewildering 2017 fantasia, "Mother!" In that surreal film--it's like an allegory set inside an oil painting--Lawrence plays a woman living with her poet husband in an old farmhouse, which is gradually, then apocalyptically, invaded by strangers. "She really is feeling everything that's happening, in what appears to be a dream of some kind," Scorsese said. He and Lawrence had discussed adaptations before. They considered "The Awakening," Kate Chopin's 1899 novel of female liberation, which ends with the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, walking into the sea. "Die, My Love" was like "The Awakening" if it began with Edna already underwater.


Some People Can't See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound

The New Yorker

Ebeyer published posts about famous people who had realized that they were aphantasic: Glen Keane, one of the leading Disney animators on "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast"; John Green, the author of "The Fault in Our Stars," whose books had sold more than fifty million copies; J. Craig Venter, the biologist who led the first team to sequence the human genome; Blake Ross, who co-created the Mozilla-Firefox web browser when he was nineteen. Ebeyer also wanted the Aphantasia Network to be a place where aphantasics could find recent scientific research. For instance, estimating the strength of a person's imagery had been thoroughly subjective until Joel Pearson, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, devised tests to measure it more precisely. In a paper from 2022, Pearson reported that when people with imagery visualized a bright object their pupils contracted, as though they were seeing a bright object in real life, but the pupils of aphantasics imagining a bright object stayed the same. Another study of his had shown that, although aphantasics had the same fear response (sweating) as typical imagers to a frightening image shown on a screen, when exposed to a frightening story they barely responded at all.


How to Build an AI Startup: Go Big, Be Strange, Embrace Probable Doom

WIRED

Thousands of entrepreneurs are trying to rebuild the economy around AI. I set out to see how they're actually doing it. Earth, it's said, is home to more than 10,000 AI startups. The figure is a guess, of course--startups come, startups go. But last year, more than 2,000 of them got their first round of funding. As investors shovel their billions into AI, it's worth asking: What are all these creatures of the boom doing? I decided to approach as many recent AI founders as I could. The goal was not to try to pick winners but to see what it's like, on the ground, to build AI products--how AI tools have changed the nature of their work; how terrifying it is to compete in a crowded field.


'People thought I was a communist doing this as a non-profit': is Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales the last decent tech baron?

The Guardian

'People thought I was a communist doing this as a non-profit': is Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales the last decent tech baron? In an online landscape characterised by doom and division, the people's encyclopedia stands out - a huge collective endeavour giving everyone free access to the sum of human knowledge. But with Elon Musk branding it'Wokipedia' and AI looming large, can it survive? W ikipedia will be 25 years old in January. Jimmy Wales's daughter will be 25 and three weeks. It's not a coincidence: on Boxing Day 2000 Wales's then wife, Christine, gave birth to a baby girl, but it quickly became clear that something wasn't right. She had breathed in contaminated amniotic fluid, resulting in a life-threatening condition called meconium aspiration syndrome. An experimental treatment was available at the hospital near where they lived in San Diego. Did they want to try it?


In Russia's 'blitz' of Ukraine, the question of appeasement is back

BBC News

In Russia's'blitz' of Ukraine, the question of appeasement is back Following another week of intensive and lethal Russian bombardment of Ukraine's cities, a composite image has been doing the rounds on Ukrainian social media. Underneath an old, black-and-white photo of Londoners queuing at a fruit and vegetable stall surrounded by the bombed-out rubble of the Blitz, a second image - this time in colour - creates a striking juxtaposition. Taken on Saturday, it shows shoppers thronging to similar stalls in a northern suburb of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, while a column of black smoke rises ominously in the background. Bombs can't stop markets, reads the caption linking the two images. The night before, as the city's sleep was interrupted once again by the now all-too-familiar booms of missile and drone strikes, two people were killed and nine others injured.