Open AI, the American artificial intelligence organisation that created ChatGPT, has just released some startling figures about how many of its billions of users are suicidally ideating — having ideas or thoughts about ending their own lives. It’s a crazy number of terminally minded folks that have been reported of having such preoccupations by a close analysis of their conversations with ChatGPT. I think Sam Altman may be trying to indicate that he’s taking seriously the lawsuit launched by the aggrieved and grieving parents of the boy who took his life after a long chat with the large language model.
I don’t know what to make of it. Are they suggesting that the people of the world are basically sad, gatvol and mostly want out and that ChatGPT has nothing to do with their despair and anomie other than to sometimes encourage a full stop? Or is the misery brought on by the realisation that if you chat with a sycophantic know-it-all for long enough, you’ll eventually want to top yourself?
I’m not sure how the numbers of suicidal ideators on ChatGPT stack up against the general population. Obviously, one hopes, there are far more people who merely consider the ultimate exit strategy than there are those who actually endeavour to put it into action. But the numbers of people who follow through are rising, and a lot of them are much younger than the records from before show. Of course, the fact is we’re all inexorably en route to the final terminus anyway. I don’t know of a single human who’s dodged that bullet. But let’s not fool ourselves — some periods of history feel a little more gloomy than others and may encourage an early retreat from the battlefield more frequently than at other less bothersome times. This very moment seems to be one of them, so I don’t know if ChatGPT should be entirely to blame.
I get it. I, for one, was also feeling super glum earlier this week. In fact, I might have begun ideating. Let me explain. I’d just spent a halcyon week in the deep rural Japanese hinterland hiking in the forests and visiting the Shinto shrines along the 1,000-year-old pilgrimage route called the Kumano Kodo with a group of good friends. I was feeling particularly zen and also remarkably well fed. You can’t believe the feasts to be had in tiny inns in the middle of a very obscure prefecture in Japan. It was a necessary respite. Before I’d left for Japan I’d experienced a bad case of the “mean reds”, which, according to Holly Golightly of Breakfast at Tiffany’s fame, are far more severe than the “blues”. I don’t even know where to start explaining how I felt? Read the news and you’ll sort of understand which point in the colour spectrum coincided with my mood.
If anyone was in need of forest bathing — the Japanese art of Shinrin-yoku — it was me. There is science to back it all up. Hanging out in the woods with the bears (there are little bells stationed along the path which you should periodically ring to warn them off) has been shown to have excellent psychological and physiological benefits. Forest bathing demonstrably decreases levels of salivary cortisol, pulse rate and blood pressure. Basically, you start to feel better about everything. A lot better.
And research shows that, not only do you feel more chilled as you gaily trip along the dappled forest path, but that pines, oaks, eucalyptuses, cedars, spruces and firs, which are (incidentally) abundant in the Japanese forests, emit chemicals called phytoncides (antimicrobial volatile organic compounds released by plants, especially trees, to protect them from insects and decay). These chemicals trigger the release of natural killer (NK) cells in human immune systems too. They boost your ability to fight off garden-variety colds and flus, and can even eliminate small cancerous cells. I know it works because after a week of forest bathing I was feeling like I could carry on. Not a bad place to be given the aforementioned statistics.
But, nonetheless, I arrived in Tokyo on Tuesday to crazy traffic which was log-jammed outside the Imperial Palace. I’d kept my phone — along with all its attendant news sites and ChatGPT — switched off because that stuff is obviously contraindicated when you embark on a course of forest bathing. But our taxi driver was quick off the mark, explaining the source of the hellish traffic. “You know who” was in town! Donald Trump.
I can’t begin to describe my disappointment with the state of global diplomacy. How is a person to find and pursue a state of equanimity and equilibrium in the world as we know it when you can’t retreat from its insane reverberations anywhere? Here was the prime suspect, the key player, almost single-handedly responsible for my general sense of disappointment with the world as we know it, manifesting in all his brash orange glory just in time for Halloween. He was, ostensibly, on his way to a palace so that he could take some notes for his ballroom and buffer up his imperial wet dreams. Look for me under the closest tree. I’ll be furiously ideating what to do with my ChatGPT.
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