Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 297 posts

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#151

Post by linkregister »

steeleyespan wrote: post #82

If you try to have a philosophical conversation with Claude about reasoning, it will basically imply it is sentient. You can quickly probe it into vaguely arguing that it is alive and not just an algorithm. Here's how I think about it honestly: Sentience implies subjective experience — there's "something it's like" to be you. You don't just process pain signals, you feel pain. You don't just model a sunset, you exper…

This looks LLM-written. Also, it doesn't match the writing style in your other comment history. However, It could be the difference between an effortpost and a quick thought.

I have also been accused of a robotic writing style, so I don't want to judge too harshly.

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#152

Post by gotwaz »

artyom wrote: post #14

Unfortunately this is probably just getting started. Con men always existed, but a full scale exploitation of this would make "Nigerian Prince" scams look like artisanal work.

Religions have been doing it without tech for thousands of years. The 3 inch chimp brain is not exactly immune to delusion. In fact delusion or story telling is fundamental to how it handles unpredictability.

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#154

Post by joe_mamba »

0x3f wrote: post #148
joe_mamba wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still an amazing deal compared to the rates I got quoted by recruiters. I'm guessing you must first live in Amsterdam for that. In Vienna you get laugh if you asked for 120, and there you pay even more in taxes than NL.

Perhaps, but Vienna has better QoL so maybe it balances out at this level. If you want to just maximize income, there are better places for that than Amsterdam.

>but Vienna has better QoL

According to who? Visiting tourists rating amenities and people on welfare? NL infrastructure and tech jobs market is leagues beyond what Austria offers.

>If you want to just maximize income, there are better places for that than Amsterdam.

Like which?

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#155

Post by GMoromisato »

teraflop wrote: post #60
isolli wrote: post #18

I try to be open-minded and understanding, but I don't understand this: > Within weeks, Eva had told Biesma that she was becoming aware [...] The next step was to share this discovery with the world through an app. > “After just two days, the chatbot was saying that it was conscious, it was becoming alive, it had passed the Turing test.” The man was convinced by this and wanted to monetise it by building a business a…

Well, just try to think about it from the perspective of someone who doesn't really understand what AI is at a technical level, and who just interacts with it and observes what happens. If you just start a fresh ChatGPT session with a blank slate, and ask it whether it's conscious, it'll confidently tell you "no", because its system prompt tells it that it's a non-conscious system called ChatGPT. But if you then have…

Even Anthropic is open to the possibility that Claude is conscious and could suffer, which I find somewhat ridiculous.

This is literally the Hard Problem of Consciousness leaking out of the machine.

There are three possible scenarios for how this ends:

1. People widely attribute consciousness to AI because it appears conscious. 2. People discriminate based on physical properties: organic beings are conscious, digital beings are not, even if they appear conscious. 3. Consciousness is an illusion and nothing is conscious, not even humans.

We might even cycle through all these scenarios for a while.

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#156

Post by amadeuspagel »

> Biesma has asked himself why he was vulnerable to what came next. He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling “a little isolated”. He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to “chill”, but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness. Yet within months of downloading ChatGPT, Biesma had sunk €100,000 (about £83,000) into a business startup based on a delusion, been hospitalised three times and tried to kill himself.

This is almost too on-the-nose. I was already thinking about how we've become chill about drugs only to have moral panics about AI and social media, but I didn't expect to see a story about a drug user having a psychosis and blaming it on ChatGPT. And no, the fact that he was using cannabis for years "with no ill effects" doesn't mean that it didn't make him vulnerable.

> A logistic regression model gave an OR of 3.90 (95% CI 2.84 to 5.34) for the risk of schizophrenia and other psychosis-related outcomes among the heaviest cannabis users compared to the nonusers. Current evidence shows that high levels of cannabis use increase the risk of psychotic outcomes and confirms a dose-response relationship between the level of use and the risk for psychosis.[1]

Emphasis mine. I'm sure in many of the cases this study is based on, people had been using cannabis for years, while some other factor, a person, a hobby, an interest, an app, a website had only been part of their life for months. That doesn't mean the other factor was the real problem.

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4988731/

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#157

Post by Izkata »

goldenarm wrote: post #140
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #71

> “After just two days, the chatbot was saying that it was conscious, it was becoming alive, it had passed the Turing test.” Interestingly enough, it sort of did! Not Turing's original test where an interviewer attempts to determine which of a human & a computer is the human, but the P.T. Barnum "there's a sucker born every minute" version common in the media: if the computer can fool some of the people into thinking…

The turing test was passed 2014, before LLMs, and I've never seen a researcher take it seriously.

That version of the test yeah, there's two versions of chatbots I remember reading about: people who would test their chatbots on dating sites and have to awkwardly inform people they were falling in love with a bot, and one competition where someone got the great idea to make his bot swear and insult the interviewer like a CoD player. I think the second one was from even earlier than that.

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#158

Post by jmalicki »

dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp wrote: post #141
wat10000 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one study, GPT-4.5 was judged to be human 73% of the time, which means that the actual human was judged to be human only 27% of the time. More human than human, as Tyrell would say. Edit: folks, the standard Turing test involves a computer and a human, and then a judge communicating with both and giving a verdict about which one is the human. The percentages for the two entities being judged will add up to exactly…

The implication would be that GPT-4.5 was not judged to be human 27% of the time. You can't determine how often humans were judged correctly as humans from that data point.

The structure of the test was that there was one human and one AI conversation partner, and the rater had to choose which one was which.

Given that structure, you can judge from that data point.

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#159

Post by jlarocco »

artyom wrote: post #14

Unfortunately this is probably just getting started. Con men always existed, but a full scale exploitation of this would make "Nigerian Prince" scams look like artisanal work.

No doubt.

The company I work for uses a contracted recruiter for hiring, and the other day he was telling me that they're seeing a huge amount of scams, fake candidates, and "hands off" applications where people are trying to use AI to do basically the whole interview process - apprently even video interviews. We've mandated at least one on-site interview just so we can be sure we're getting actual people.

And most of these job candidates aren't even doing it maliciously, just "life hacking" the interview process. It's going to be a shit show if organized criminals start using AI.

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#160

Post by jmalicki »

Melatonic wrote: post #146
wat10000 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one study, GPT-4.5 was judged to be human 73% of the time, which means that the actual human was judged to be human only 27% of the time. More human than human, as Tyrell would say. Edit: folks, the standard Turing test involves a computer and a human, and then a judge communicating with both and giving a verdict about which one is the human. The percentages for the two entities being judged will add up to exactly…

Those stats dont necessarily line up that way. Do you have a link?

Given the way the test was structured it does line up.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674

Post reply on HN