We believe ChatGPT can provide a supportive space for people to process what they’re feeling, and guide them to reach out to friends, family, or a mental health professional when appropriate. Our safety improvements in the recent model update focus on the following areas: 1) mental health concerns such as psychosis or mania; 2) self-harm and suicide; and 3) emotional reliance on AI. Going forward, in addition to our longstanding baseline safety metrics for suicide and self-harm, we are adding emotional reliance and non-suicidal mental health emergencies to our standard set of baseline safety testing for future model releases.

These updates build on our existing principles for how models should behave, outlined in our Model Spec⁠(opens in a new window). We’ve updated the Model Spec to make some of our longstanding goals more explicit: that the model should support and respect users’ real-world relationships, avoid affirming ungrounded beliefs that potentially relate to mental or emotional distress, respond safely and empathetically to potential signs of delusion or mania, and pay closer attention to indirect signals of potential self-harm or suicide risk.

In order to improve how ChatGPT responds in each priority domain, we follow a five-step process:

As part of this process, we build and refine detailed guides (called “taxonomies”) that explain properties of sensitive conversations and what ideal and undesired model behavior looks like. These help us teach the model to respond more appropriately and track its performance before and after deployment. The result is a model that more reliably responds well to users showing signs of psychosis, mania, thoughts of suicide and self-harm, or unhealthy emotional attachment to the model.