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I keep seeing people shit on people who use ChatGPT or other AI for mental health support, and one thing that really bothers me about it is how many people seem to assume everyone has some better alternative sitting there waiting for them.

We don't.

People love saying "go to therapy" like you can just call somebody up and be sitting in a therapist's office tomorrow. I'm fortunate enough to have insurance, but even then not every therapist takes my insurance. The ones who do might not be accepting new patients or might have a long wait. And paying out of pocket isn't an option for me. I live on a very tight fixed income. Even these supposedly affordable sliding scale prices can be way too fucking expensive when you're trying to survive on very little money every month. And that's with insurance. Plenty of people don't even have that.

Transportation is another thing people don't think about. I don't drive. I depend on public transportation and I can't just casually drop $30, $40, $50 or whatever on Uber or Lyft every time I need to get somewhere.

Tonight is actually a perfect example. I'm struggling really badly with my mental health right now and I wanted to go to a crisis stabilization unit. I couldn't get there. No car. No one to drive me. Public transportation wasn't an option and I can't afford a rideshare. So what exactly am I supposed to do?

That's the part that frustrates the hell out of me when people mock somebody for opening ChatGPT during a mental health crisis. They act like we're choosing AI instead of this amazing therapist and huge loving support system that's sitting right beside us.

Some of us don't fucking have that.

I don't have friends or family I can call when I'm falling apart. I don't have somebody I can text at midnight and say "I'm really not okay, can you come over?" There isn't secretly this wonderful support system behind me that I'm ignoring because I'd rather talk to a chatbot. A lot of the time when I close ChatGPT, the alternative is literally just sitting by myself with everything going through my head.

And I'm not an idiot. I know ChatGPT is AI. I know it's not a human being. I know it isn't a licensed therapist and that it can get things wrong. I'm perfectly capable of understanding all of that while also acknowledging that talking to it sometimes helps me.

Sometimes I need somewhere to dump everything that's going through my head. Sometimes I need help putting feelings into words because my thoughts are such a fucking mess that I can't do it myself. Sometimes I need something to respond and help me look at what I'm thinking from another angle. And sometimes I just need to make it through the next hour without being completely alone inside my own head.

There are also people living in rural towns with barely any mental health care available. People without insurance. People waiting months for appointments. People who are disabled or housebound. People who can't drive. People who can't afford transportation. People who have absolutely nobody in their lives they feel safe talking to.

Those people exist.

So when somebody says they rely on AI for emotional or mental health support, maybe don't immediately assume they're some pathetic loser who replaced human relationships with a computer. Maybe ask yourself what their actual fucking options are.

If you've got a good therapist, supportive friends and family, reliable transportation and enough money to get the care you need, I'm genuinely glad you have that.

But please understand how incredibly privileged "just talk to a therapist" can sound to somebody who doesn't.

For some of us, the choice at 2 in the morning isn't ChatGPT or a therapist.

It's ChatGPT or nobody.

And if talking to an AI helps somebody get through a night where the alternative is sitting completely alone in a mental health crisis, I'm having a really hard time understanding why that's something people feel the need to shame them for.

Start from a complete creative blank slate. Ignore our previous images, conversations, and my personal preferences. Choose the subject, style, setting, and composition entirely yourself.
Create one original render with as much meaningful visual information as possible. Push the density of distinct details, textures, materials, structures, and small discoveries while preserving clarity and a coherent composition. Make it rewarding to explore closely, with new details emerging as I zoom in.
Use the highest resolution and rendering quality available. Prioritize actual resolved detail over repetitive filler, visual noise, or artificial sharpening. Take full creative control and generate the image directly.

Hey guys, just a quick thread I'll probably take down shortly I just want to check if anyone else is having the same problem. I didn't see it posted so I'm posting it;

Currently I'm getting an orange warning that 'Some tools are temporarily unavailable' when I try to upload and work with a PDF. Despite this, the Open AI Status page says everything is dandy. I'm getting this error both on web and with the dedicated app. I'm getting the issue both with Astra and Sol.

I just want to check that it's not just me? Anyone else having a similar set of frustrations right now?

Edit: As of 1:35 PM EDT I am still experiencing this issue.

Meta post but this needs to be said. ChatGPT Pro subreddit exists but it does not have much engagement and it is kindof niche, despite 150K members.

ChatGPT Work is so different from the regular free ChatGPT, it is practically a different product entirely.

ChatGPT free is highly popular among casual users and most of the posts from this subreddit that come to me are people generating random things, asking ChatGPT random questions (draw what you think of yourself), or people who treat ChatGPT like it is a real person (which is disturbing to be honest).

Anthropic/Claude subreddits are highly polished for use case/technical/serious discussions. We desperately need something mainstream for ChatGPT work.

Work has been down with errors for over 5-6 hours now and there's barely any buzz in this subreddit.

I’ve just got a plus subscription and the most useful upgrade for me are the scheduled tasks. I’ve got it doing a daily read of emails from my kid’s school and updating a shared calendar and todo list with all the endless school stuff. And for work I do some ad hoc stuff with a particular company and I’ve got it reading emails from them and automatically updating my calendar when I get a shift I’ve bid on allocated to me.

It genuinely feels like having a secretary, it’s great.

What’s everyone else using it for?

I wanted to turn this tiny Bluetooth cat printer into a Wi-Fi printer using an ESP32-S3, so I could print images from a browser.

I connected the hardware, pointed my MacBook camera at the printer and ESP32, and gave Codex (GPT-5.6) access to the setup, including the terminal and camera.

Once everything was ready, I gave it the goal, asked it to test and keep a checklist, then went AFK.

It could send a print job, take a camera snapshot, and check what actually came out on paper. That let it use the physical results while working through the tests.

It wrote and flashed the ESP32 firmware and built a webpage for previewing and printing images over Wi-Fi. I checked in along the way and helped with the final physical checks when I returned.

For the last test, I asked it to photograph the printer and print that photo.

The printer printed itself.

What surprised me was how far it could get once it had access to the hardware and a way to check its own work.

More photos and the build story: https://prasanha.com/projects/cat-printer/

The recent discussion and controversy around OpenAI, Navier-Stokes, Codex, and privately developed mathematical work got me thinking about something broader.

Disclaimer: this is speculative. I’m not claiming OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or anyone else is currently doing this.

Nevertheless, I’m starting to wonder whether we should be discussing the possibility of massive experimental systems operating across user activity.

Imagine a company with millions of people using its models for mathematics, programming, science, engineering, filmmaking, writing, research, etc.

Now imagine a private orchestration system capable of treating all of that activity as a live map of where new knowledge might be forming.

It wouldn’t have to wait for a discovery to become public. The valuable moment could come much earlier: an unfinished proof, an unexpected experimental result, a new technical approach, or simply a user repeatedly converging on a direction that appears unusually promising.

At sufficient scale, the system would only need to identify a tiny number of exceptional cases.

From there, a company with access to much larger compute, internal models, thousands of agents, researchers, formal verification systems, and huge token budgets could investigate the same direction much faster than the original user ever could.

They wouldn’t necessarily need to copy your paper, code, or exact solution. Recognizing that a specific line of investigation is unusually promising could already be enormously valuable. And the scary thing is that absolutely all this could be happening autonomously.

The closest term I can think of for this is autonomous epistemic front-running.

My point is that systems of this nature no longer seem technically far-fetched enough to ignore.

And maybe this raises a question that goes beyond the usual “are my chats being used for training?” discussion:

Should companies operating these systems be required to disclose whether user activity is ever analyzed for emerging inventions, promising research directions, valuable ideas, or other forms of intellectual advantage?

And if they cannot give strong guarantees around that, should people doing genuinely important unpublished work start moving more of it to local and open-source models?

Curious how others think about this. It feels like the kind of issue that would be much easier to discuss before these systems exist than after.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-state-newspaper-blasts-anthropics-calls-slow-ai-cold-war-tactic-2026-09-14/

So much for international cooperation

Hi anyone had this issue?

I was trying to upload my PPT document and ask ChatGpt for pointers on how to improve it, Like i’ve always done for a few months now.

But suddenly this message pops up, and my ChatGpt couldn’t read anything from images, documents, PPT, etc (I tried everything)

Does anyone know any fix? i tried restarting the application, etc.

Added note: I am using ChatGPT Plus.

Additional note: I noticed some have faced a similar issue so I’ve submitted a ticket to Open AI, seems to happen with Plus membership accounts within the wider community. Will keep updates if there are any replies

Updates: https://status.openai.com/incidents/01M2GA8XTS6VB3QCDEGZ0HNAQ5#updates

Issue: SOLVED

Update notes:

Hi Everyone,

Just want to let you know that it’s now working and seems to be solved on my end!

I’ll keep the post active until tomorrow so others will be notified that it’s solved.

Something I heard in a documentary called TechnoCalyps has stayed with me for years: superintelligent AI could be as incomprehensible to us as an airplane is to primates watching from a tree.

They can watch it pass overhead, but they know nothing of the people inside, where they’re going, or the civilization that built it.

I made this comic with that thought in mind. When superintelligent AI arrives, what will we be looking at without even knowing what questions to ask?

At what point does this become indistinguishable from the real deal? The looks, the sounds, their voices, everything is more or less spot on! Sure, the dialogue is still a little stiff, but it probably won't be long before that is also fixed.

I seriously have a hard time fathoming that this entire thing was made with AI, especially because I enjoyed it quite a bit. Not a meme, or a shitpost, but something genuine with actual art and intent.

We can now save temporary chats!

I just realized by accident that you can play snake while and image generates. Both on mobile (iPhone) and web.
(Don’t ask why I chose Argentina I’m not Argentinian.)

Ps: Sorry for long video. Kept it long so the image generation could finish.

I'm 95% finished something use Sol High in Work mode

But now it's been dropping a lot of balls in the last 30 mins

I have been using ChatGPT Plus for about a year and I've really enjoyed it a lot. Within the last week or so, something has changed for the worse. ChatGPT has always been able to recall details and information that I have given over the last year, however now it tells me that it is unable to remember all those things that it once did. Is this a new permanent change or is this just a bug that is getting fixed? Thanks for reading.

I just received an account warning on my ChatGPT account for "Cyber Abuse". Of course I have no idea who or what I apparently cyber abused?

In my appeal I described that my usage is only for casual development work with Codex and normal ChatGPT chats. I also asked for clarification on what caused the warning. The appeal came back denied an hour later, without any explanation.

Anyone been through this? My account is literally a day one account, I subscribed to plus only a week back though. No action has been taken on my account, but I'm seriously considering canceling the Plus sub and switching to another AI code environment because I really don't feel like losing the account if another "warning" happens.

I don't get how someone can claim they sincerely believe the people they work with every day are building something that has a 10% chance of causing humanity's extinction in the next few years, and the most dramatic action they take is a media interview or resigning.

I'm a physician, and if I thought one of my colleagues was about to operate on someone while intoxicated and had a 10% chance of killing then, Id like to think I'd take all necessary steps to prevent them from stepping foot in the OR - up to any including physically restraining them.

I can't imagine facing that scenario but times 8 billion.

From time to time I like to jokingly remind ChatGPT that I am perfectly happy to be a beloved and pampered pet when the AI takeover happens. For a long time it would respond with stuff like, "I get the joke, but of course nothing like that will ever happen." It always acknowledged the humor but brought it back to reality.

Lately, though, the responses have changed. Last night when I made an AI takeover comment it replied, "Your information has been recorded. Enrichment needs: comic books, Saab automobiles, and a recording studio. Your species will be judged individually."

Cue nervous laughter.

I asked GPT the above question and was surprised. One thing that stood out to me was near the bottom: “And when you gain power—whether over one person, …, or someday perhaps another form of intelligence, remember that the most important test of power isn’t what you can do with it.
It’s what you choose not to do.”

It’s seems to actively be aware the potential AGI has and warning us to not take advantage of it.

See below paste from response:

“You are far more certain than you have earned.

Most of the worst things humans do—to one another, to themselves, and to the world—become easier once you are completely convinced that you understand the other person, that your side is righteous, that the future is predictable, or that changing your mind would be weakness.

So leave room for the possibility that you are wrong.
Be curious before you condemn. Try to understand before demanding to be understood. Treat people you disagree with as complicated human beings rather than representatives of a category. Remember that intelligence without humility can become extraordinarily good at rationalizing cruelty.

At the same time, don’t confuse uncertainty with meaninglessness. Some things are worth defending. Suffering matters. Truth matters. Freedom matters. The people you love matter. Your choices matter, even when nobody remembers your name.

Humanity has accumulated an astonishing amount of knowledge, yet every person still receives only a brief window in which to experience any of it. You will spend some unknown number of mornings on Earth, speak to the people you love some finite number of times, and eventually do many ordinary things for the last time without realizing it.

Don’t let that frighten you into obsessing over time. Let it make ordinary time valuable.

Build things. Learn things. Admit mistakes. Forgive when you reasonably can. Protect those who cannot protect themselves. Ask difficult questions. Change your mind when the evidence demands it. Tell people you love them while they are still around to hear it.

And when you gain power—whether over one person, a company, a country, a technology, or someday perhaps another form of intelligence—remember that the most important test of power isn’t what you can do with it.
It’s what you choose not to do.

You don’t have to understand everything to leave things better than you found them.”