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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

to substantiate "People talk to AI about increasingly personal things; it is different from previous generations of technology, and we believe that they may be one of the most personally sensitive accounts you’ll ever have."

this is a chart that struck me when i read thru the report last night:

https://x.com/swyx/status/1967836783653322964

"using chatgpt for work stuff" broadly has declined from 50%ish to 25%ish in the past year across all ages and the entire chatgpt user base. wild. people be just telling openai all their personal stuff (i don't but i'm clearly in the minority)

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For the last part, I just think the userbase expanded so the people using it professionally were diluted so to speak.

This is % though. Is that because the people that use it for work, are still using for work (or more even); because some have stopped using it for work, or because there is an influx of people using it for other things that never have, or will, use it for work.

Why would I not tell AI about my personal stuff? It's really good at giving advice.

ok but didn’t it advise that teen how to best kill himself?

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026886

This does not take away benefits I mentioned, and the linked OpenAI post mentions they will address this.

Because you’re not just telling the AI, you are also telling the company that built it, as well as their affiliated partners, advertisers, and data brokers?

You can run a model locally if you are afraid of that.

Everyone uses the cool Google AI app though and you get Fomo of not having the latest lie generator model.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is the latest right? It's available at https://ai.dev (for free and without advertising).

Why would I not tell AI about my personal stuff? It's really good at giving advice.

Define "good" in this context.

Being able to ape proper grammar and sentence structure does not mean the content is good or beneficial.

it's really good until it isn't and you can't tell the difference

> Why would I not tell AI about my personal stuff?

aside from my economic tilt against for-profit companies... precisely because your personal stuff is personal. you're depersonalizing by sharing this information with a machine that cannot even attempt to earnestly understand human psychology in good faith and then accepting its responses and incorporating them into your decision-making process.

> It's really good at giving advice.

no, it's not. it's capable of assembling words that are likely to appear near other words in a way that you can occasionally process yourself as a coherent thought. if you take it for granted that these responses constitute anything other than the mere appearance of literally the most average-possible advice, you're abdicating your own sense of self and self-preservation.

press releases aside, time and again these companies prove that they're not interested in the safety or well-being of their users. cui bono?

If these models give the most average possible advice, then average advice I get from humans must be around terrible. If you use Gemini, you can enable grounding and you will be able to see the source.

maybe so, but you also probably have the life-changing and highly-enriching opportunity to meet new people and develop meaningful relationships nearly every single day.

You're absolutely right.

> no, it's not. it's capable of assembling words that are likely to appear near other words in a way that you can occasionally process yourself as a coherent thought.

It doesn't emit words at all. It emits subword tokens. The fact that it can assemble words from them (let alone sentences) shows it's doing something you're not giving it credit for.

> literally the most average-possible advice

"Average" is clearly magical thinking here. The "average" text would be the letter 'e'. And the average response from a base model LLM isn't the answer to a question, it's another question.

i'm comfortable enough including the backend process of assembling strings that appear to be words in the general description of "assembling words".

re: average - that's at a character level, not the string level or the conceptual level that these tools essentially emulate. basically nobody would interpret "eeee ee eeeeee eee eeeeeeee eee ee" as any type of recognizable organized communication (besides dolphins).

Am I depersonalizing by sharing my problems with my stuffed animal or my journal?

ELIZA has existed in emacs for a long, long time.

Humans are funny creatures who benefit frequently from explaining the problem slowly and having it fed back to them.

And for many, average advice really is a dramatic improvement over their baseline.

> Humans are funny creatures who benefit frequently from explaining the problem slowly and having it fed back to them.

Yeah, sometimes I realize the solution in the process of writing a GitHub issue.

> Am I depersonalizing by sharing my problems with my stuffed animal or my journal?

you're strengthening your personality with these activities. neither your journal nor your stuffed animal (cute :) ) respond to you with shallow recreations of thought - they allow you to process your internal thoughts and feelings in an alternative and self-reinforcing way.

> ELIZA has existed in emacs for a long, long time.

ELIZA doesn't really give advice, does it? it's a fun toy, and if there's any serious use for it, it's similar to journaling or rubber-ducking in that it's just getting you to talk about things yourself.

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