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

Damn I love being immune to this shit
- My most contrarian behavior is that I refuse to leverage technology that only solves made up problems.
  I don't need google to turn on my lights for me.
  I don't need alexa to order me more tissue paper.
  I don't need chatgpt to proofread my emails.
  I don't need my washing machine to text me when my clothes are done.
  I just don't need any of the nonsense in my life. Not only are we creating a dependency on a private corporation, but its not even dependencies that are worth while to me. I can walk over to the light switch, or click "Buy Again" on the website, or use my reading comprehension skills to ensure my email doesn't sound like most of my posts.
- Same, I could see us 'luddites' having improved cognition at later ages than those hooked on these bots, there already is research evidence showing effects on the brain.
  It's probably similar to other things that are more likely to produce psychosis in some versus others. Such as psychedelics, when I've tripped with a friend of mine, I'll get spiritual and hyperfocused, usually chill, but he will start thinking he is a reincarnation of Jesus or his intestines are melting etc.
  The effect these LLMs have and the way people view them could depend a lot on those precursors and their general worldview.
  
  I do think that in 5-10 years time, society will have an epidemic of early onset dementia, and it'll be a big mystery at the time, only for it to come out a few years after that, that it was overuse of AI, causing people to stop engaging their brains and making their brains atrophy.
  
  that plus long covid lol. death to america
  
  I’ve see a lot of chatter about the “singularity” (i.e. brains meeting with computers a la neuralink) and questions of whether we will ever need our brains again.
  This makes me cheer really fucking hard for climate change and natural disasters to humble humans into realizing that they cannot escape the inevitably of reality.
  It also makes me want to go back and read simulacra and simulation and do more research in determining whether a computer-brain interface is even remotely possible or just another case of cs losers claiming to be doctors
  
  From what I understand, we don't know if a merging of our consciousness and computer system could be possible because we don't know what consciousness actually is. But using thought to activate a machine is possible because an interface can be capable of monitoring some change in thought.
  What 'singularity' really is though is not necessarily our brains meshing with AI, but the AI taking control of it's own development and passing a point of rapid change that we can't adapt to because of it's speed and drasticness, like the singularity of a black hole where normal physics breaks down, it would be the breaking down of normal human society in ways we couldn't predict. This isn't impossible but I don't believe the current iteration of 'AI' is going to do this.
  
  I mean I use these things to summarize a bunch of articles, their intended purpose. People are looking at them like magic 8 balls that will solve all their problems when it should really just be a way to help you search for things
  Also I'm already at later ages its over
  
  i've been playing around with a LGBT+ friendly plugin/frontend custom character AI thingy.
  it's been a fun toy for simulating old school AOL chatroom smutty roleplaying and that's it. in the end it's still like interacting with someone with a severe memory deficiency.
  i don't know how anyone can be convinced these are superintelligences. and same my brain is already ripe and hardened with age i am impervious
  
  They're also good for parsing trends out of noisy data. I think there was a study that used an algorithm to predict rogue waves in the Pacific or something.
  It's like you say: the things are tools with use-cases, not oracles or replacements for people.
  
  We are rapidly on pace to live out the plot of Dune
- it's slightly more convenient than a google search in some cases, but like i can already use a google search and get the results i need as quickly as an LLM 90% of the time, so the habit of going to a chatbot rather than just going to google never developed.

116 comments