On-Call

Ultimately, the [Trusted Contact] feature puts the responsibility back on the user, adds [Holly] Wilcox[, director of the Center for Suicide Prevention at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health]. She would like to see companies like OpenAI be more proactive in partnering with existing crisis resources like 988.

"So maybe having a human jump into the conversation at some point who's trained and knows the tools of what to do for suicide prevention," she says. "And have them jump in and say, 'You know, what's going on? Can I help?"
She told no one about her agony except ChatGPT. What her death reveals about AI risks

I've heard this suggestion made before, when it comes to generative automation chatbots and people in mental heath crises or otherwise at risk. But so far, I haven't heard the question of "who would these humans be" addressed. And that's important. Not to mention how this would all work.

If "a human" receives a ping from ChatGPT or Copilot or whatever that a person it is communicating with is showing signs of being "at risk," what should come along with that? Are they dumped into the conversation cold, and have to then sort out who the person is, and what's going on, in real time? Are they given information that the user has already given the chatbot? If so, how much? And what happens if the person communicating with the chatbot doesn't want to talk to "a human?" Is "a human" allowed to force the issue, and, if the user is signed into the service that summoned them, force the service to not re-open communications with the user unless "a human" gives the all-clear? What can, or should, companies program into their user interfaces to detect people attempting to work around safeguards? What will be the tolerance for false positives, as well as false negatives? For the idea to be viable, these questions will have to be answered.

To be sure, "maybe having a human jump into the conversation at some point" isn't a bad suggestion on the face of it, but it's a very simple suggestion on a way to solve a very complicated problem, and the sorts of news stories in which this pops up don't often have the space to go into the depth required. The NPR story that I quote from to lead off this post isn't about how to solve the problems associated with people turning to LLM-powered chatbots for mental health advice; it's the story of an attractive woman who killed herself, and her family's heartbreak, driven by her journalist mother. This is a human-interest story not a technology story. And I suspect that it feeds neatly into the overall suspicion of LLMs, and the companies that make them, on the part of the NPR audience.

And there's nothing wrong with human interest stories. There's nothing wrong with a sympathetic portrayal of a woman, and her parents, designed to bring attention to a tragic situation and a potential risk factor of an emergent technology. But there does need to be some follow-up. "Maybe having a human jump into the conversation at some point," requires, at a minimum, a number of people who are going to be on-call, such that there are always people available, so that there is going to be "a human" available, whenever a chatbot detects some level of a person being at risk. That, in and of itself, is going to have measurable costs. In 2023, the wait time for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Hotline was less than a minute. Understanding what it will take to keep the wait time low will be important. Not to mention the idea that there are likely some number of people who are turning to ChatGPT or Copilot or a different service specifically because they mistrust the 988 service.

But half of LGBTQ+ people in a recent survey by Pew Charitable Trusts said they worried a call to 988 could end in an unwanted interaction with police or a forced hospitalization.
Mental health crisis line 988 fields significantly more calls, 12 times as many texts in first year

Regardless of how realistic a concern that is, given an Administration (and 988 is a federal program) that has show itself to be hostile to the LGBT community, it's not necessarily an irrational one (and even if it was, we are talking about a mental heath service here). And, speaking of the current Administration, it also stands to reason that immigrants could be leery about using 988.

So there's a concern, worth taking seriously, that part of the reason why people turn to generative automation for mental health advice and guidance is that the resources with actual people behind them carry some sort of real or perceived risk for them.

I don't think that any of this is insurmountable. But it does require addressing, at least if a program is going to be successful. So I'd like to see a news story, or a podcast, perhaps, that actually looks at what it would take to build out this idea.

Telltale

 A  LinkedIn posted that I'd made pointing out some of the telltales of faked profiles prompted a simple enough question: "Why would anyone prey on someone that is looking for a job?"

There is, of course, a simple answer, "Money," but there's also a somewhat more nuanced answer: A painful, but recoverable, financial loss for someone in the United States or Europe can be a life-changing amount of money for someone in a poor country, and many of the random frauds that pop up on LinkedIn originate in just such poor countries.

There is a steady background hum of fraudulent activity on LinkedIn, a lot of it really minor; people shilling for companies that promise to get people jobs, offering résumé reviews/writing of dubious value or pointing job seekers to fake "recruiter" profiles. Things that LinkedIn, perhaps of necessity, is somewhat tolerant of, so one doesn't have to look very hard to find it. And that means that most of it is, in the grand scheme of things, unsophisticated. Much of it is boilerplate, and that means that it usually has telltales that something isn't right.

Which is all fine and good, but seeing a telltale, and knowing what it is are not the same. And this is where LinkedIn could be doing a better job for its users. As a run-of-the-mill social media platform, LinkedIn lives or dies by time on site and posts viewed, and so posts encouraging posting are common. But most people who use the site don't come there simply to read posts... they're social selling, looking for a job or trying to make connections. And fraudsters attempt to insert themselves into those activities. The occasional post informing people of what to look for would be useful to them, and it would let would-be thieves and con artists know that the site is on to them.

Guess What's Back

Remember SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19? Well, if you don't, National Public Radio wants to remind you.

"Just like all previous summers since the pandemic began," the NPR website notes, "COVID-19 cases are ticking up again, even while other health threats make more headlines."

Yes, and?

The accompanying story is okay, but doesn't offer much in the way of information that a reader or listener could directly act on. So the whole thing comes across as "Hey! This virus is still around out there!"

Which, in the absence of any concrete information about what people should, or should not do, makes the story seem more like a trivia piece than a useful news story. I understand that the NPR audience, being somewhat on the leftward side of the political spectrum, was more invested in the social measures that were in place to combat the spread of the disease back in 2019 and 2020, but there's no action for them to get behind now. And so the story takes on an air of "here's one more thing to concern yourself with." And I'm not sure what that does for anyone.

Validity

There's a fairly expansive ecosystem on LinkedIn, and I suspect social media in general, that seeks views, likes and other social media currency by offering a steady stream of unabashed validation to all and sundry. Such as the following:

I find the trend of people placing their names on these bland aphorisms to be interesting. Do they really expect to be credited for coining these shopworn phrases?

What I find to be interesting about this is the implication that one's "value" is an objective number, and that people for whom it's not self-evident are incorrect or not worth someone's time. But as I encounter the world, there's nothing objective about value. Some people value certain things, or people, and other people don't.

And for someone like me, who understands all value to be instrumental (as in a means to an end), it stands to reason that what one wants or needs is what determines how valuable something is. I wouldn't pay $175 for an NFL ticket. Not because I don't see it's value, but because I'm not interested in watching football games live. But if a ticket landed in my lap, I'd ask around to see if anyone wanted it, and happily sell it to them, because they'd rather have the ticket than some amount of money, and I'd rather have the money than the ticket. Our whole economy is based on this sort of exchange.

But people find this idea, that they have a certain value, and other people should be able to see that, as validation. Which is why these sorts of things how up in my feed: someone I know had "liked" them for found them "insightful." Which is fine. But it doesn't work for me. For me, the choice of place comes down to people who are doing something where I can offer them some assistance. Which I think works better, people tend to be more open about what they're attempting to do.

Unsolved

I was listening to a recent episode of the Decoder podcast, about how opposition to (hyperscale) data centers cuts across the otherwise entrenched partisan divide between Democratic and Republican voters. It was something of a follow-up to a story in The Verge from Gaby Del Valle about the broader opposition to these large data centers.

There wasn't anything really out of the ordinary in their discussion; the idea that dislike of generative automation and the data centers that house it crosses political boundaries is pretty much common knowledge at this point. But one thing did stand out for me. Host Nilay Patel asked Ms. Del Valle if there was something the technology companies could do to blunt the opposition, basically, could they buy the communities off in exchange for acceptance. The response:

I don’t know about paying for healthcare, but something that I didn’t include in the piece, because it was extremely dry and very technical, was that the small protest ended with about an hour and a half long presentation from a land use expert on how to write local zoning ordinances to prevent hyperscale data centers from being built. It was really specific stuff, like “You could have them on multiple small parcels of land.” It was really dry. “You could require them to use this amount of reclaimed water, et cetera, et cetera.”

She then went on to note that what she believed communities wanted was some level of community input into the process.

It seems to me that changes to zoning laws is something that communities can do to have a greater level of control over what goes on in their immediate vicinity; in other words, it's a solution, or at least part of one, to the problem that these places feel they have. And it was left out of the story for being "extremely dry and very technical."

Part of me wants to use this as an indictment of modern media, leaving out the part of a story that people could actually use, because it didn't come across as "sexy" enough. But that presumes that Ms. Del Valle made the wrong call on that, and I'm not certain that she did. Her intuition that readers of The Verge would have simply tuned out if she'd gone into those details may have been bang on the money. The news media is a business, and whether that business is ad-supported or funded by subscriber dollars, boring stories are deadly. And solutions to problems, especially solutions that would take a fair amount of effort, are not known for bringing in eyeballs.

Although, to be sure, it's not clear that what The Atlantic's Derek Thompson calls "solutions journalism" is being attempted often enough for there to be a large enough sample size to really figure it out. This could simply be a situation where no-one wants to be the guinea pig.