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 contemplating suicide is not something that warrants breaking the glass.
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Instead, Slingshot says Ash's safety systems are designed to encourage external support and provide crisis resources.
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Coming up, so companies are trying different approaches to create protections for vulnerable users.
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But what happens if they fail?
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That's after the break.
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The way these mental health chatbots are engineered to handle difficult situations, like users talking about self-harm, they're called guardrails.
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Pariq says Slingshot gets a lot of input for what kinds of guardrails should be in place for Ash.
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Over at Talkspace, CEO John Cohen frames tease guardrails in part around what the tool doesn't do.
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But it's not just the mental health specific tools that have guardrails, the general tools do too.
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And John Torres, the Beth Israel psychiatrist I referred to earlier, thinks the ones those models are putting in place are just as good.
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Torres says the harms from any AI fall into two categories, type one and type two.
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He says there's lots of data now that show that AI tools, both intended for mental health and not, are getting pretty good at addressing type one harms.
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What Taurus is referring to at the end there, the 20,000 messages bit, is a known problem.
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Usually every response an AI model spits out comes from incorporating the entirety of the user's past conversation.
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So much input can cause the model's built-in guardrails to break down.
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OpenAI has acknowledged this.
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Here's how the company wrote about it in a blog post from August last year, voiced here by its listen to article function.
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Parique says Ash is built to eventually guide conversations to a close, in part to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
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That's something our producer Pierre Bienname noticed when he used Ash, when he was stressed about a move from New York City to Washington, DC.
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After about 40 minutes, Ash asked him how he was feeling and pushed the conversation into what felt like a natural stopping point.
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Showing 81–100 of 124 · page 5 of 7
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