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What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

nytimes.com

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Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#391

Post by survirtual »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #384
survirtual wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said women don't need men, did I? Let me read what I said again. No, I never said that. I said women need safety, and society is largely not safe for them. Human beings are social creatures. Women need men. Women need women. Men need women. Men need men. We all need each other. The system patterns of online dating cultivate undesirable traits in both men and women which result in side effects that no one woul…

Perhaps one of the problems with modern dating is that women expect a man to provide safety, but many men don’t want to be viewed as a source of safety? Me, I am only interested in relationship for companionship, someone with whom I can share interesting experiences, because joy is not complete unless it is shared. But when it comes to safety and security, a partner is on her own. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t do…

We're speaking to different things.

Safety doesn't mean you're a provider. It means you are safe to be authentic with. Safe to share truth with.

That safety takes many forms.

You cannot have depth without that safety. It is physical, it is also emotional and intellectual.

For instance, without safety a partner would never join you on many interesting experiences. If you want those experiences, they need to be able to trust you.

Now extend that idea of safety to a broad society context, and that is approaching what I was speaking to.

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#392

Post by nathan_compton »

joshtbradley wrote: post #240

It surprises me how hyper focused people are on AI risk when we’ve grown numb to the millions of preventable deaths that happen every year. 8 million people to smoking. 4 million to obesity. 2.6 million to alcohol. 2.5 million to healthcare. 1.2 million to cars. Hell even coconuts kill 150 people per year. It is tragic that people have lost their mind or their life to AI, and it should be prevented. But those using t…

God, the perfect whatabout post. Truly epic. No one is even suggesting we ban AI.

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#393

Post by survirtual »

arresin wrote: post #370
survirtual wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Chimpanzees and Bonobos are our distant ancestors. Have a look at how they operate. From what I can tell, men have cause significant damage to women's psyche. Men that turn women into a commodity plaything instead of a fellow human being. Women are human beings just like men, they aren't some alien species. Trauma hurts their psyche, not pleasure. If women were in a safe, supportive, mature society, some wo…

> nonsense! Proceeds to talk about baboons.

The person I replied to mentioned evolution, so it is natural to remind that we're also animal derived from primates.

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#394

Post by HeinzStuckeIt »

survirtual wrote: post #391
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps one of the problems with modern dating is that women expect a man to provide safety, but many men don’t want to be viewed as a source of safety? Me, I am only interested in relationship for companionship, someone with whom I can share interesting experiences, because joy is not complete unless it is shared. But when it comes to safety and security, a partner is on her own. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t do…

We're speaking to different things. Safety doesn't mean you're a provider. It means you are safe to be authentic with. Safe to share truth with. That safety takes many forms. You cannot have depth without that safety. It is physical, it is also emotional and intellectual. For instance, without safety a partner would never join you on many interesting experiences. If you want those experiences, they need to be able to…

The safety I have heard demanded directly from women to me as a partner – or from female friends about the man they seek – is the safety of being a provider, giving them a feeling of security that they can’t manage to achieve on their own. It’s not just about a man being safe to be with. Again, you are speaking about something I haven’t heard from actual women, and I think I’ll trust the latter (and reportage matching it) over a HN stranger for forming my assumption of what women want from relationships.

And again, maybe part of why women might be having problems with dating is that many men today don’t want to be seen as a big emotional support for a partner either. That’s draining and time-consuming. This might bother you, but my whole point is that the social pressures are no longer there to compel men (or women) to act a certain way, and that is impacting dating.

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#395

Post by afavour »

joshtbradley wrote: post #240

It surprises me how hyper focused people are on AI risk when we’ve grown numb to the millions of preventable deaths that happen every year. 8 million people to smoking. 4 million to obesity. 2.6 million to alcohol. 2.5 million to healthcare. 1.2 million to cars. Hell even coconuts kill 150 people per year. It is tragic that people have lost their mind or their life to AI, and it should be prevented. But those using t…

I don't really understand this logic. Enormous efforts are made to reduce those deaths, if they weren't the numbers would be considerably higher. But we shouldn't worry about AI because of road accident deaths? Huh? We're able to hold more than one thought in our heads at a time.

> But those using this as an argument to ban AI

Are people arguing that, though? The introduction to the article makes the perspective quite clear:

> In tweaking its chatbot to appeal to more people, OpenAI made it riskier for some of them. Now the company has made its chatbot safer. Will that undermine its quest for growth?

This isn't an argument to ban AI. It's questioning the danger of allowing AI companies to do whatever they want to grow the use of their product. To go back to your previous examples, warning labels on cigarette packets help to reduce the number of people killed by smoking. Why shouldn't AI companies be subject to regulations to reduce the danger they pose?

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#396

Post by rafterydj »

infecto wrote: post #365
DanielVZ wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think we need to be hyper focused on this. We do not need more ways for people to be convinced of suicide. This is a huge misalignment of objectives and we do not know what other misalignment issues are already more silently happening or may appear in the future as AI capabilities evolve. Also we can’t deny the emotional element. Even though it is subjective, knowing that the reason your daughter didn’t seek gui…

Hard question to answer imo but at a high level I would argue that social media for folks under 18 is even more harmful than LLMs. It is quite fascinating and I hope more studies exist that look into why some folks are more susceptible to this type of manipulation.

Respectfully I disagree there. Social media is dangerous and corrosive to a healthy mind, but AI is like a rapidly adaptive cancer if you don't recognize it for what it is.

Reading accounts from people who fell into psychosis induced by LLMs feels like a real time mythological demon whispering insanities and temptations into the ear directly, in a way that algorithmically recommended posts from other people could never match.

It will naturally mimic your biases. It will find the most likely response for you to keep engaging with it. It will tell you everything you want to hear, even if it is not based in reality. In my mind it's the same dangers of social media but dialed all the way up to 11.

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#397

Post by riazrizvi »

stingraycharles wrote: post #360
riazrizvi wrote: post #355

This is exactly how natural language is meant to function, and the intervention response by OpenAI is not right IMO. If some people have a behavior language based on fortune telling, or animal gods, or supernatural powers, picked up from past writing of people who shared their views, then I think it’s fine for the chatbot to encourage them down that route. To intervene with ‘science’ or ‘safety’ is nannying, intellec…

I think it’s a silly take. Companies want to avoid getting bad PR. People having schizophrenic episodes with ChatGPT is bad PR. There are plenty of legitimate purposes for weird psychological explorations, but there are also a lot of risks. There are people giving their AI names and considering them their spouse. If you want completely unfiltered language models there are plenty of open source providers you can use.

No-one blames Cutco when some psycho with a knife fetish stabs someone. There’s a social programming aspect here that we are engaging with, where we are collectively deciding if/where to point a finger. We should clarify for folks what these LLMs are, and let them use them as is.

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#398

Post by mrbungie »

zamadatix wrote: post #388
mrbungie wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It surprises me how hyper focused people are on AI risk when we’ve grown numb to the millions of preventable deaths that happen every year. Companies are bombarding us with AI in every piece of media they can, obviously with a bias on the positive. This focus is an expected counterresponse to said pressure, and it is actually good that we're not just focusing on what they want us to hear (i.e. just the pros and not…

Not just focusing only on what they want us to hear is a good thing, but using more noise we knowingly consider low value may actually be worse IMO. Both in terms of the overall discourse but also in terms of how much people end up buying into the positive bias. I.e. "yeah, I heard many counters to all of the AI positivity but it just seemed to be people screaming back with whatever they could rather than any impactf…

Fair point. I don't know how to actually respond to this one without an objective measure or at least proxy of a measure on the sentiment of the discourse and it's public perception.

Anecdotically I would say we're just in a reversal/pushback of the narrative and that's why it feels more negative/noisy right now. But I'd also add that (1) it hasn't been a prolongued situation, as it started getting more popular in late 2024 and 2025; and (2) probably won't be permanent.

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#399

Post by [deleted] »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #384
survirtual wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said women don't need men, did I? Let me read what I said again. No, I never said that. I said women need safety, and society is largely not safe for them. Human beings are social creatures. Women need men. Women need women. Men need women. Men need men. We all need each other. The system patterns of online dating cultivate undesirable traits in both men and women which result in side effects that no one woul…

Perhaps one of the problems with modern dating is that women expect a man to provide safety, but many men don’t want to be viewed as a source of safety? Me, I am only interested in relationship for companionship, someone with whom I can share interesting experiences, because joy is not complete unless it is shared. But when it comes to safety and security, a partner is on her own. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t do…

[deleted]

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#400

Post by dahart »

qcnguy wrote: post #244
joshtbradley wrote: post #240

It surprises me how hyper focused people are on AI risk when we’ve grown numb to the millions of preventable deaths that happen every year. 8 million people to smoking. 4 million to obesity. 2.6 million to alcohol. 2.5 million to healthcare. 1.2 million to cars. Hell even coconuts kill 150 people per year. It is tragic that people have lost their mind or their life to AI, and it should be prevented. But those using t…

Agree that it's ridiculous to talk about banning AI because some people misuse it, but the word preventable is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that argument. Preventable how? Chopping down all the coconut trees? Re-establishing the prohibition? Deciding prayers > healthcare? Our society is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that death is inevitable. We've lost a lot of the rituals and traditions over the centuries th…

The vast majority of traffic deaths are preventable. Whether we’re willing to accept that as a goal and make the changes needed to achieve that goal remains to be seen. Industrial accidents, and cancer from smoking are both preventable, and thankfully have been declining due to prevention efforts. Reducing pollution, fixing food supply issues, and making healthcare more available can prevent many many unnecessary deaths. It certainly is worth trying to prevent some of the dumb ways to die we’ve added since losing whatever traditions we lost. Having family & friends die old from natural causes is more psychologically endurable than when people die young from something that could have been avoided, right?
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