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In Search of AI Psychosis

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181–190 of 258 posts

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#181
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes everyone with my political beliefs has a well-structured world model, everyone without my political beliefs is a model-free slop machine that just goes by vibes.

> Yes everyone with my political beliefs has a well-structured world model As nice as that would be, its only marginally less true. > everyone without my political beliefs is a model-free slop machine that just goes by vibes. Nah, some of them are evil on purpose. but like, in all seriousness. Politics is downstream of a world-model right? And the two predominant world models are giving very different predictions, ri…

It could also be that politics are downstream from emotions and world models are downstream from politics.

But I think both are true to an extent.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#182

It may not be full-blown psychosis, but I’ve seen multiple instances[0][1] of people getting “engaged” (ring and all) to their AI companions. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/s/oZXJ3TUhVC [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/s/nZpoziZO8W

Reading these posts terrifies me to a degree that I can’t explain.

Pornography should also be taken seriously and in my opinion, a more serious problem.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#183
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you say there are no world models, when I can literally draw out a simple one for you on demand? You can argue that's they're not the governing principle of cognition, but it seems farcical to say they don't even exist, when we are trying to explain them to eachother all the time.

No what you're describing is arbitrary and idiosyncratic. The brain doesn't use that to survive, it doesn't need them. Anything external to that is completely separate from thought. What you're describing is an arbitrary game for entertainment to fill up your time and confuse yourself and others. It has no relationship to the choices you would make to survive, and can only interfere with it. The "world model" you're…

I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but I wonder if you are not being overly reductive / pedantic.

What is there then?

What words (heh) do you use to distinguish between someone who makes more accurate predictions about the world than someone else?

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#184
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

You are spamming this and similar paragraphs all over this thread, and you come off as a crackpot.

It's science challenging CS. If there are no such things as symbols and metaphors in reality, and these are arbitrary, how possibly does it stay referential? It can't. It falls apart, language can't produce itself. It was denoted by Aristotle, the cognitive mapping people Okeefe, Moser, Kandel deciphered this in 1973 and now it feeds from mythological thought into AI "psychosis". Solve the problem at the source units, these descriptions like Alexander are arbitrary.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#185
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No what you're describing is arbitrary and idiosyncratic. The brain doesn't use that to survive, it doesn't need them. Anything external to that is completely separate from thought. What you're describing is an arbitrary game for entertainment to fill up your time and confuse yourself and others. It has no relationship to the choices you would make to survive, and can only interfere with it. The "world model" you're…

I think you might be confused about the expression "world model". In this context it clearly means that a person has an understanding of reality based on "math->physics->chemistry->biology->psychology" instead of "peer pressure->group identity" or whatever you see in QAnon or cults or whatever. If a person primarily evaluates the truth content of a statement based on identity or something instead of math/physics/etc…

That's not what world model means, neither in psychology or artificial intelligence — two fields Scott writes a lot about so he should know how the term is used or define how he uses it if he uses a non-typical definition.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#186

The description of the risk factors very much jibes with what I have seen in a friend recently. He is quite isolated, and spends most of his evenings writing using AI (he works in a blue-collar trade and wouldn't be typing stuff out by hand usually). He's convinced that he has discovered a grand theory of human connection / relationships / energy / physics, and keeps interrupting in conversation to explain how someth…

Not to get political but I suspect this kind of thing is also pretty analogous to how many otherwise normal but often unintelligent people get into things like neo-Nazism through online influencing. (I am just speculating that the person you're referring to is unintelligent.)

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#187
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are spamming this and similar paragraphs all over this thread, and you come off as a crackpot.

It's science challenging CS. If there are no such things as symbols and metaphors in reality, and these are arbitrary, how possibly does it stay referential? It can't. It falls apart, language can't produce itself. It was denoted by Aristotle, the cognitive mapping people Okeefe, Moser, Kandel deciphered this in 1973 and now it feeds from mythological thought into AI "psychosis". Solve the problem at the source units…

Your posts read like someone experiencing LLM psychosis.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#188

> First, much like LLMs, lots of people don’t really have world models. This is interesting and something I never considered in a broad sense. I have noticed how the majority of programmers I worked with do not have a mental model of the code or what it describes – it's basically vibing without an LLM, the result accidental. This is fine and perfectly workable. You need only a fraction of devs to purposefully shape t…

It's also absurdly wrong, and a quote that only a self-identified rationalist could smugly tout. Of course everyone has world models. Otherwise people would wander into traffic like headless chickens, if they'd even be capable of that. What he likely means is that not everyone explicitly things of possibilities in terms of probabilities that are a function of Bayesian updating. That does not imply the absence of worl…

[deleted]

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#189
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'biological' mental illness is tightly coupled to qualitative mental state, and bidirectionally at that. Not only do your chemicals influence your thoughts, your thoughts influence your chemicals, and it's possible for a vulnerable person to be pushed over the edge by either kind of input. We like to think that 'as long as nothing is chemically wrong' we're a-ok, but the truth is that it's possible for simple norma…

It is entirely uncontroversial that mental states affect the physical body. You've probably observed this yourself, directly, if you've ever had headaches or muscle tightness related to mental or emotional stress. We can use MRIs to directly observe brain differences due to habitual mental activities (e.g. professional chess players, polyglots, musicians.) It would be extremely odd if our bodies did not change as a r…

I think my question is more a question of how whether than whether, if that makes sense. There is something about "thought" affecting "matter" that feels spooky if there is a bidirectional relationship.

If thought / consciousness / mind is purely downstream of physics, no spookiness. If somehow experienced states of mind can reach back and cause physical effects... that feels harder to explain. It feels like a sort of violation, somehow, of determinism.

Again though, as above, I'm basically a day into reading and thinking about this, so it might just be the case that I haven't understood the consensus yet and maybe it's not spooky at all. (I don't think this is the case though - just a quick skim through the Wikipedia page on "the hard problem of consciousness" seems to suggest a lot of closely related debate)

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#190

> We see that the nightmare scenario - a person with no previous psychosis history or risk factor becoming fully psychotic - was uncommon, at only 10% of cases. Most people either had a previous psychosis history known to the respondent, or had some obvious risk factor, or were merely crackpots rather than full psychotics. It's unfortunate to see the author take this tack. This is essentially taking the conventional…

One of the questions that sets up the premise of the article in the first paragraph is, "Are the chatbots really driving people crazy, or just catching the attention of people who were crazy already?" That's why he's honing in on that specific scenario to determine if chatbots are uniquely crazy-making or something. The professional psychiatrist author is not unaware of the things you're saying. They're just not the…

Well yeah, that's a false dichotomy. If you're vulnerable and a chatbot sends you into a spiral of psychosis, your pre-existing vulnerability doesn't negate the fact that a harm has been done to you. If you have a heart condition, and I shoot you with a Taser, and it kills you… I've killed you. You weren't "already dead" just because you were vulnerable.
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