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People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

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Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#131

Post by alganet »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #98
alganet wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are a conspiracy theorist and a liar! /s The problem is inside people. I met lots of people who contributed to psychotic inducing behavior. Most of them were not in a cult. They were regular folk, who enjoy a beer, movies, music, and occasionally triggering others with mental tickles. Very simple answer. Is OpenAI also doing it? Well, it was trained on people. People need to get better. Kinder. Less combative, le…

> Less combative, less jokey, less provocative. This sounds like a miserable future to me. Less "jokey"? Is your ideal human is a Vulcan from Star Trek or something? I want humans to be kind, but I don't want us to have less fun. I don't want us to build a society of blandness. Less combative, less provocative? No thanks. It sounds like a society of lobotomized drones. I hope we do not ever let anything extinguish ou…

Humanity is a fine thread between "lobotomized drones" (divided on two sides, sounds familiar?) and "aggressive clowns" (no respect, get provoked by anything, can't see an inch over their faces). Of course, it's more than a single spectrum, there's more to it than social behavior.

It could have been better than this, but there is no option now.

I can play either of those extremes and thrive. Can you?

Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#132

Post by 93po »

codr7 wrote: post #4

Being surrounded by people who follow every nudge and agree with everything you say never leads anywhere worth going. This is likely worse. That being said, I already find the (stupid) singularity to be much more entertaining than I could have imagined (grabs pop corn).

i think chatgpt agreeing with people too eagerly, even outside the recent issue this past week or so, is causing a lot of harm. it's even happened to me in my personal life - i was having conflict with someone and they threw our text messages into chatgpt and said "am i wrong for feeling this way" and got chatgpt to agree with them on every single point. i had to highlight to them that chatgpt is really prone to doing this, and if you framed the question in the opposite way and framed the text messages as coming from the opposite party, it'd agree with the other side. they used chatgpt's "opinion" as justification for doing something that felt really unkind and harmful towards me.

Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#133

Post by 93po »

sagarpatil wrote: post #105

OpenAI o3 has a hallucination rate of 33%, the highest one compared to any other models. Good luck to people who use it for spiritual fantasies. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/18/openais-new-reasoning-ai-m...

it seems like the hallucination rate is a feature, not a bug, for people wanting spiritual fantasies

Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#134

Post by anal_reactor »

Animats wrote: post #68

With a heavy enough dosage, people get lost in spiritual fantasies. The religions which encourage or compel religious activity several times per day exploit this. It's the dosage, not the theology. Video game addiction used to be a big thing. Especially for MMOs where you were expected to be there for the raid. That seems to have declined somewhat. Maybe there's something to be said for limiting some types of screen…

The fact is, for majority of people, life sucks, so when something appears that makes it suck a little bit less for a second, it's difficult to say no. Personally, I can't wait for AI technology to improve to the point that I could treat AI like a partner. And I guess that's something that will appear sooner rather than later, considering the market size.

Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#135

Post by BlueTemplar »

yellow_lead wrote: post #91

I really think the subject of this article has a preexisting mental disorder, maybe BPD or schizophrenia, because they seem to exhibit mania and paranoia. I'm not a doctor, but this behavior doesn't seem normal.

It sounds more like the mental disorder was aggravated into existence by these interactions with the LLM.

What is particularly weird and maybe worrying, is that AFAIK schizophrenia is typically triggered in young adults, and the risk drops to very low around 40 years old, yet several of these examples are around that age...

Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#136

Post by BlueTemplar »

crooked-v wrote: post #77
kaycey2022 wrote: post #60

Looks like Chatgpt persists some context information across chats and doesn't ever delete these profiles. Worst case would be for this to persist across users. That isn't unlikely given the stories of them leaking API keys etc.

> Looks like Chatgpt persists some context information across chats and doesn't ever delete these profiles. People say this, but I haven't seen anything that's convinced me that any 'secret' memory functionality is true. It seems much more likely that people are just more predictable than they like to think.

What else could possibly (and likely) explain the return of that personality after "memory deletion", up to the exact same mythological name ?!?

(Assuming we trust that report of course.)

Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#137

Post by BlueTemplar »

kaycey2022 wrote: post #101
nico wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s essentially what Google, Facebook, banks, financial institutions and even retail, have been doing for a long time now People’s data rarely gets actually deleted. And it gets actively sold as well as used to track and influence us Can’t say for the specifics of what ChatGPT is or will be doing, but imagine what Google already knows about us just with their maps app, search, chrome and Android phones

Given the complex regulations companies have to deal with, not deleting maybe understandable. But what I deleted shouldn't keep showing up in my present context. That's just sloppy.

Yeah, "deleting" itself is on a spectrum : it's not like all of sensitive information is (or even ought to be) stored on physical storage that is passed through a mechanical shredder upon deletion (anything else can be more or less un-deleted with more or less effort).

Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#138

Post by BlueTemplar »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #88
lamename wrote: post #74

If a Google engineer can get tricked by this, of course random people can. We're all human, including the flaws.

I agree. The problem with expertise (or intelligence) is people think it’s transitive or applicable when it’s not. At the end of the day, most people are just people.

Also (general ?) wisdom not being the same thing as specific expertise / (general ?) intelligence.

Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#139

Post by iggldiggl »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #26
imjustaghost wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember any of those revelations?

Nope. Don't especially mind, not remembering them. I have since learned about schizophrenia/schizoaffective (from having a family member suffer from it), and it sounds almost exactly what they went through. The thing that I remember, was that I was absolutely certain of these “revelations.” There was no doubt, whatsoever, despite the almost complete absence of any supporting evidence.

There's that Paul McCartney anecdote how he thought he'd found the meaning of life during one of his first drug experiences and the next morning he found a piece of paper on which he'd written "There are seven levels".

Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#140

Post by BlueTemplar »

grues-dinner wrote: post #64
jihadjihad wrote: post #27

“And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?” And Jesus answered and said to them: “Take heed that no one deceives you. For many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many.”

Islam has a very similar concept in the Dajjal (deceptive Messiah) at the end times. Explicitly described as a young man with a blind right eye, however, at least he should be obvious when he comes! But there are also warnings about other false prophets. (It also says Qiyamah will occur when "wealth overflows" and people compete over it: make of that what you will). I think all religions have built in protections cal…

Dajjal becoming a *chan mascot in 3... 2... 1...

(They will probably make him a girl or something like a 'femboy' though...)

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