Alex Ossola
speaker
124 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 4d ago
Alex Ossola’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But what happens if someone starts to use these tools when they're in a crisis?
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Like if they're thinking about suicide.
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Here's how John Cohen says Talkspaces tool, T, handles that.
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That means there's a part of the model that's always looking out for signs of these things.
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If it notices something concerning and what a user is saying, humans at Talkspace may get involved to figure out what's going on and how to handle it.
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The human might decide to do nothing, or they might decide that the user needs to take a break from the app for a while, or the talkspace needs to call the police to do a safety check.
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When you sign up for tea, it asks if you're thinking about harming yourself and for your physical address.
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And how about Ash?
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Earlier this year, Slingshot published a non-peer-reviewed study comparing how Ash handled suicidal thoughts compared to several versions of OpenAI's GPT models.
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The study found that Ash was better at sending users to crisis resources like the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and that its responses were less harmful than those from the GPT models.
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John Torres, a psychiatrist at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, sees a few problems with how that study was set up.
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One of them, he says, is that the study only looked at cases that Ash flagged.
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So it's not clear if there were any risky conversations that it missed.
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Slingshot says that the actual Ash product has other safety systems that were not part of the experiment.
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Here's Slingshot co-founder Neil Parik.
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I asked Pariq whether a human ever gets involved if someone is at risk of self-harm.
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He said conversations with Ash are encrypted in order to protect user privacy.
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And generally a person would only look at them if a user opted to share their conversations with Slingshot in order to train the model.
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There are rare exceptions, what he calls breaking the glass.
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If a user says that they intend to harm others or that they have child pornography, Slingshot told us that's happened a couple of times.
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Showing 61–80 of 124 · page 4 of 7
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