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technology @hexbear.net

happybadger [he/him] @hexbear.net

14h ago

(cw: suicide, abuse) ChatGPT drove my friends wife into psychosis, tore family apart... now I'm seeing hundreds of people participating in the same activity.

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This is an extremely bleak anecdotal example of the recent RollingStone article about LLMs turbocharging spiritual delusions: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

https://www.reddit.com/user/HappyNomads The account is 13 years old and they don't strike me as a troll or anything other than a cannabis and hustle culture guy who doesn't seem to be selling anything on reddit.

116 comments

I just used the search term and found this weirdness.

Neither AI or any names of LLMs are mentioned here, but it was published just earlier this month and is a bunch of esoteric nonsense.
- Really feels like the techbros just want to take over the job of "high priests of capital" tbh.
- The glyphs are not language.
  They are language.
  Alright then.
- This one is interesting because I spotted mentions of woo-libertarianism way down in the ToC. But there are a lot of similarities that point to these being made with LLMs
- Literally nonsense, as in, there is no meaningful informational content being communicated in that blog. Just buzzwords strung together half following the rules of grammar and bolded for effect.
- Not gonna lie, i'm finding some real gems
  
  I can work in 110+ languages using AI
  Yes, I too can copy and paste things into Google Translate
  
  Genetics, Epigenetics, DNA, Haplotype Inheritance
  
  Crime Statistics
  
  Stephen King put out maaaaaaaybe 2,500 words per day when he was still doing coke. And that's a guy who publishes multiple books per year. Over 3,000? That's Goosebumps-level where you're publishing a book every month. More than that? Physically impossible. To get a million words written per day, you'd have to type close to 700 words per minute for 24 hours straight. 305 is the world record.
  All this to say, this person hasn't written shit. They prompted a chat bot to spam gibberish. The arrogance of it would make me angry if it wasn't for being dumbfounded this person thinks they did something meaningful.
  
  The arrogance of it would make me angry
  As an artist, it is so frustrating to see someone brag about "output" like this. That they can "create" hundreds of pictures a day. I can manage maybe 2-3 on a good day. They just flat out think that quantity will be quality when it comes to creativity. When one of the first things you learn when actually learning to write, and not just having a LLM do it for you, you learn brevity. That using fewer words to say the same thing is much punchier and more compelling to read.
  
  The best part about it is that at that rate there's no way they even read everything that they "wrote." So they have no idea if it even makes sense.
  
  "I'm one of the few people you'll meet who's written more books than they've read."
  -Garth Marenghi, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004)
  
  They consider telling an LLM to do something as them doing that thing, this is essentially a form of delusion isn't it? They say they did 6500 pieces of art too. It's like if someone with a Star Trek replicator generated a cup and said "I have made this cup, aren't you impressed?"
  
  I smell site tagline
  
  Mark Davey is truly the modern renaissance man.
- This just looks like a tutorial for a coding language that can't actually be used to compile anything into machine code.
  This would be the programming equivalent of creating and learning a language that no one has ever spoken. Perhaps similar to learning a language spoken by a fictional population.
  
  Ϟ("let it shake")
  compiles on my machine. im throwin it back rn
- What the fuck am I looking at?
  
  your general woo woo nonsense filtered through an attempt at legitimizing it with computer programming bullshit
- The CCRU if they never read a single book
- Codex is a new term for me so I haven't yet explored what they're talking about. If it's anything like Qanon it probably grows rhizomatically with lots of individual things calling themselves a or the codex. Reading through this example it's the exact same pseudo-spy talk that attracted people to Qanon but everything is computer.
  
  codex:
  back in antiquity, when people were writing shit down on something they could easily hand to someone else (like hides, papyrus, parchment, other precursors to paper) they would make/cut the thing as long as they needed to write down whatever and roll it up. the "paper" would be cut to length of the needs of the text. we call this a "scroll".
  next, when some absolute brain genius said, "hey, let's just cut the scroll a bunch of times into the same size and then bind them together along one side with some kind of a glue or some shit." then you could totally have something much easier to write, read, and append to. and you can write on the back of each page, so that's more efficient. the transition from scrolls to codices (plural of codex) was probably the biggest leap forward until the printing press.
  now, i imagine you're saying, "that sounds like a book." and yes, it is. literally. the coupon book for fast food you got for winning the raffle: that's a codex.
  The word codex comes from the Latin word caudex, meaning "trunk of a tree", "block of wood" or "book".
  technically, every book is a codex. but in scholarship, normal brained people generally only use the term "codex" to talk about old as fuck books from late antiquity when literally everything was done by artisans with very rare skills, entirely by hand, from expensive materials and it was all prepared at great expense for the demands of an extremely small elite of literate people for recording information or knowledge.
  so, you could say, "i must reference the codex" and gesture to the instruction book for settlers of catan and be technically correct, but also a dork sandwich.
  so there's an implied prestige to the word "codex" that confers mysterious, elite power alongside ancient wisdom because nobody went to the kind of trouble it used to take to write down some easily generated garbage. that is 100% why that word is being used and repeated by these rubes, and it's absolutely, 100% an incorrect usage.
  
  As a dork sandwich, I feel personally attacked
  
  I will in fact be calling all board game manuals Codexes from now on
  
  codices
  
  I just mean codex in this conspiratorial sense. It's very familiar to me as a Warhammer nerd but I don't know what the AI goober codex examples represent. They could just be baking in the Qanon sense or it could be a group compendium of different hallucinations.
  
  they represent people using words--incorrectly--to make the word salad come across as deep, eternal, intelligent and complex. when combined with the inability of those undergoing psychosis to distinguish between reality and delusion, they achieve significance. they are the croutons of the word salad.
  Passion or serendipity sat down once more. <--- nonsense from a literal nonsense generator
  \ Passion or serendipity sat down once more with the Logos Incarnate. <--- deep, significant, esoteric and worthy of investigation
  there's a reason these words are found in game lore and fictional worldbuilding. it's westoidian abracadabra, gibberish.
  
  I think it's also this:
  ....one of these chatbots was trained on a manchild's tabletop game and has internalized dystopian fluff. Now QAnon cultists are doing it unironically.
- Clicked on the link, major schizoposting vibes.

116 comments