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What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
51–60 of 548 posts
Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
#52Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
phew, that's a healthy start. I am still slightly worried about accepting emotional support from a bot. I don't know if that slope is slippery enough to end in some permanent damage to my relationships and I am honestly not willing to try it at all even. That being said, I am fairly healthy in this regard. I can't imagine how it would go for other people with serious problems.
A friend broke up with her partner. She said she was using ChatGPT as a therapist. She showed me a screenshot, ChatGPT wrote "Oh [name], I can feel how raw the pain is!". WTF, no you don't bot, you're a hunk of metal!
I got a similar synthetic heartfelt response about losing some locally saved files without backup
Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I worry about the damage caused by these things on distressed people. What can be done? Why? We are gregarious animals, we need social connections. ChatGPT has guardrails that keep this mostly safe and helps with the loneliness epidemic. It's not like people doing this are likely thriving socially in the first place, better with ChatGPT than on some forum à la 4chan that will radicalize them. I feel like this will…
The tech industry's capacity to rationalize anything, including psychosis, as long as it can make money off it is truly incredible. Even the temporarily embarrassed founders that populate this message board do it openly.
> Even the temporarily embarrassed founders that populate this message board do it openly.
Not a wannabe founder, I don't even use LLMs aside from Cursor. It's a bit disheartening that instead of trying to engage at all with a thought provoking idea you went straight for the ad hominem.
There is plenty to disagree with, plenty of counter-arguments to what I wrote. You could have argued that human connection is special or exceptional even, anything really. Instead I get "temporarily embarrassed founders".
Whether you accept it or not, the phenomenon of using LLMs as a friend is getting common because they are good enough for human to get attached to. Dismissing it as psychosis is reductive.
Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may not be a concern now, but it comes down to their level of maintaining critical thinking. The risk of epistemic drift, when you have a system that is designed (or reinforced) to empathize with you, can create long-term effects not noticed in any single interaction. Related: "Delusions by design? How everyday AIs might be fuelling psychosis (and what can be done about it)" ( https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/cmy7n…
Wouldn't there necessarily be correlative effects in professional settings a la programming?
Not necessarily: transactional, impersonal directions to a machine to complete a task don't automatically imply, in my mind, the sorts of feedback loops necessary to induce AI psychosis.
All CASE tools, however, displace human skills, and all unused skills atrophy. I struggle to read code without syntax highlighting after decades of using it to replace my own ability to parse syntactic elements.
Perhaps the slow shift risk is to one of poor comprehension. Using LLMs for language comprehension tasks - summarising, producing boilerplate (text or code), and the like - I think shifts one's mindset to avoiding such tasks, eventually eroding the skills needed to do them. Not something one would notice per interaction, but that might result in a major change in behaviour.
Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
#56Anthropic was founded by exiles of OpenAI's safety team, who quit en masse about 5 years ago. Then a few years later, the board tried to fire Altman. When will folks stop trusting OpenAI?
Claude has a sycophancy problem too. I actually ended up canceling my subscription because I got sick of being "absolutely right" about everything.
Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
#57Caelan Conrad made a few videos on specifically AI encouraging kids to socially isolate and commit suicide. In the videos he reads the final messages aloud for multiple cases, if this isn't your cup of tea there's also the court cases if you would prefer to read the chat logs. It's very harrowing stuff. I'm not trying to make any explicit point here as I haven't really processed this fully enough to have one, but I e…
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Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of reasons why having a chatbot partner is a bad idea (especially for young people), but here's just a few: - The sycophantic and unchallenging behaviours of chatbots leaves a person unconditioned for human interactions. Real relationships have friction, from this we develop important interpersonal skills such as setting boundaries, settling disagreements, building compromise, standing up for oneself…
These are only problems if you assume the person later wants to come back to having human relationships. If you assume AI relationships are the new normal and the future looks kinda like The Matrix, with each person having their own constructed version of reality while their life-force is bled dry by some superintelligent machine, then it is all working as designed.
Someone has to make the babies!
Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are only problems if you assume the person later wants to come back to having human relationships. If you assume AI relationships are the new normal and the future looks kinda like The Matrix, with each person having their own constructed version of reality while their life-force is bled dry by some superintelligent machine, then it is all working as designed.
Someone has to make the babies!
Decanting jars, a la Brave New World!
Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When the justice system finally catches up and puts Sam behind bars Sam bears massive personal liability, in my opinion. But criminal? What crimes has he committed?
I'm sure we could invent one that sufficiently covers the insane sociopathy that rots the upper echelons of corporate technology. Society needs to hold these people accountable. If the current legal system is not adequate, we can repair it until it is.
> If the current legal system is not adequate, we can repair it until it is
Sure. Relevant for the next guy. Not for Sam.