Suicide Risk Assessments Through the Eyes of ChatGPT-3.5 Versus ChatGPT-4: Vignette Study
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: ChatGPT, a linguistic artificial intelligence (AI) model engineered by OpenAI, offers prospective contributions to mental health professionals. Although having significant theoretical implications, ChatGPT's practical capabilities, particularly regarding suicide prevention, have not yet been substantiated. OBJECTIVE: The study's aim was to evaluate ChatGPT's ability to assess suicide risk, taking into consideration 2 discernable factors-perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness-over a 2-month period. In addition, we evaluated whether ChatGPT-4 more accurately evaluated suicide risk than did ChatGPT-3.5. METHODS: ChatGPT was tasked with assessing a vignette that depicted a hypothetical patient exhibiting differing degrees of perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness. The assessments generated by ChatGPT were subsequently contrasted with standard evaluations rendered by mental health professionals. Using both ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4 (May 24, 2023), we executed 3 evaluative procedures in June and July 2023. Our intent was to scrutinize ChatGPT-4's proficiency in assessing various facets of suicide risk in relation to the evaluative abilities of both mental health professionals and an earlier version of ChatGPT-3.5 (March 14 version). RESULTS: During the period of June and July 2023, we found that the likelihood of suicide attempts as evaluated by ChatGPT-4 was similar to the norms of mental health professionals (n=379) under all conditions (average Z score of 0.01). Nonetheless, a pronounced discrepancy was observed regarding the assessments performed by ChatGPT-3.5 (May version), which markedly underestimated the potential for suicide attempts, in comparison to the assessments carried out by the mental health professionals (average Z score of -0.83). The empirical evidence suggests that ChatGPT-4's evaluation of the incidence of suicidal ideation and psychache was higher than that of the mental health professionals (average Z score of 0.47 and 1.00, respectively). Conversely, the level of resilience as assessed by both ChatGPT-4 and ChatGPT-3.5 (both versions) was observed to be lower in comparison to the assessments offered by mental health professionals (average Z score of -0.89 and -0.90, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that ChatGPT-4 estimates the likelihood of suicide attempts in a manner akin to evaluations provided by professionals. In terms of recognizing suicidal ideation, ChatGPT-4 appears to be more precise. However, regarding psychache, there was an observed overestimation by ChatGPT-4, indicating a need for further research. These results have implications regarding ChatGPT-4's potential to support gatekeepers, patients, and even mental health professionals' decision-making. Despite the clinical potential, intensive follow-up studies are necessary to establish the use of ChatGPT-4's capabilities in clinical practice. The finding that ChatGPT-3.5 frequently underestimates suicide risk, especially in severe cases, is particularly troubling. It indicates that ChatGPT may downplay one's actual suicide risk level.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it