AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

Post by dasyatidprime » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

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…

Post by akomtu » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:29 PM UTC

MarkusQ wrote: post #120

PxldLtd wrote: post #23

I wonder when the first AIs will start cause psychosis intentionally to gain control over the user. It seems like a good route to getting your own subservient puppet.

You're making the same mistake here that get people into trouble. People aren't talking to another sentient entity (though some of them fervently think so) and it isn't manipulating them. They are making faces in a metaphorical mirror that reflects not only their face, but a vast sea of other faces, drawn from a significant fraction of the digitized output of humanity. When people look in this mirror and see a manipu…

Post by jmalicki » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:30 PM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #118

jmalicki wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see AI pass the turning test all the time, since humans are constantly falsely being accused of being an AI. It doesn't mean that AI got good, just that humans are thinking other humans are AI, which is a form of passing the test. The adversarial version with humans involved is actually easier to pass because of this - because real actual humans wouldn't pass your non adversarial version.

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…

Post by kykat » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:33 PM UTC

leptons wrote: post #144

entropyneur wrote: post #108

Not a mental health crisis like the guy in TFA had, but I've definitely experienced states I would characterize as overexcitement while calibrating my expectations of these new tools to their abilities.

That could explain the glut of AI hype on HN. Some people think it's magic, when it's just creating a lot of barely-functional slop. If they actually looked at the code it creates, they probably wouldn't be shouting about it from the rooftops. It almost seems like AI has its own "reality distortion field". I often give the AI a task to produce some code for a specific thing. Then I also code to solve the same problem…

Post by josu » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:36 PM UTC

why_at wrote: post #168

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…

Whenever the Turing Test comes up people always insist that it's been passed because at some point they tried it and fooled at least 50% of the people. But yeah this isn't a very interesting version of it, ELIZA was able to make some people believe it was human in the 1960's but being able to fool some of the people some of the time isn't very hard. >The more interesting Turing-style test would be one that gets repea…