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

In Search of AI Psychosis

astralcodexten.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–258 of 258 posts

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#251

Post by bccdee »

lmm wrote: post #245
bccdee wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They wanted to report specifically his birth/legal name, with no plausible public interest reason. Siskind is a public figure and his name was already publicly known. He wanted a special exception to NYT's normal reporting practices. > Realistically private/public is a spectrum not a binary IIRC his name would autocomplete as a suggested search term in the Google search bar even before the article was published. He…

> He wanted a special exception to NYT's normal reporting practices. The NYT had already profiled e.g. Kendrick Lamar without mentioning his birth/legal name, so he certainly wasn't asking for something unprecedented.

Siskind is a practicing psychiatrist, which is relevant to his profile. Using his real name makes it possible to discuss that. Putting Kendrick's surname ("Duckworth") into the profile adds nothing.

Siskind is a public figure—I don't know why so many people think he is entitled to demand that NYT only discuss him in the ways he wants to be discussed (i.e. not connecting his blog to his physciatric practice).

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#252

Post by lmm »

bccdee wrote: post #251
lmm wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He wanted a special exception to NYT's normal reporting practices. The NYT had already profiled e.g. Kendrick Lamar without mentioning his birth/legal name, so he certainly wasn't asking for something unprecedented.

Siskind is a practicing psychiatrist, which is relevant to his profile. Using his real name makes it possible to discuss that. Putting Kendrick's surname ("Duckworth") into the profile adds nothing. Siskind is a public figure—I don't know why so many people think he is entitled to demand that NYT only discuss him in the ways he wants to be discussed (i.e. not connecting his blog to his physciatric practice).

> Siskind is a practicing psychiatrist, which is relevant to his profile. Using his real name makes it possible to discuss that.

The NYT of all entities should be comfortable talking about whether someone has particular qualifications or a particular job without feeling the need to publish their birth/legal name.

> Siskind is a public figure—I don't know why so many people think he is entitled to demand that NYT only discuss him in the ways he wants to be discussed (i.e. not connecting his blog to his physciatric practice).

Again the NYT of all entities should understand that there are good reasons to hide people's private details. People get very angry about some of the things Alexander writes, there are plausible threats of violence against him, and even if there weren't, everyone agrees that names are private information that shouldn't be published without good reason. His blog is public, the fact of him being or not being a practising psychiatrist may be in the public interest to talk about, but where's the argument that that means you need to publish his name specifically?

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#253

Post by bccdee »

lmm wrote: post #252
bccdee wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siskind is a practicing psychiatrist, which is relevant to his profile. Using his real name makes it possible to discuss that. Putting Kendrick's surname ("Duckworth") into the profile adds nothing. Siskind is a public figure—I don't know why so many people think he is entitled to demand that NYT only discuss him in the ways he wants to be discussed (i.e. not connecting his blog to his physciatric practice).

> Siskind is a practicing psychiatrist, which is relevant to his profile. Using his real name makes it possible to discuss that. The NYT of all entities should be comfortable talking about whether someone has particular qualifications or a particular job without feeling the need to publish their birth/legal name. > Siskind is a public figure—I don't know why so many people think he is entitled to demand that NYT only…

> there are good reasons to hide people's private details

They do, and they do grant anonymity sometimes. But it's their call, and they made the call. They're not a PR firm; they have no obligation to be kind or gentle in their coverage. If they wanted, they'd be fully within their rights to publish a noxious hitpiece on the man. They were much milder than I'd have been. Siskind's said some awful stuff.

> everyone agrees that names are private information that shouldn't be published without good reason

The NYT doesn't. They use the real identities of the people they cover by default (that's generally how news works), and consider anonymity a privilege granted under special circumstances.

> where's the argument that that means you need to publish his name specifically

Because I would not want to give my business to a man who's recorded as thinking that Black people are genetically stupid. I'm not really interested in litigating Siskind's political views—I don't think this is the place for it—but I won't gloss over them. They're pretty foul.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#254

Post by snapcaster »

AstralStorm wrote: post #136
anon84873628 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So it seems very spooky on its face that somehow thoughts themselves could have a bidirectional relationship with chemistry. There's no scientific reason to believe thoughts affect the chemistry at all. (Currently at least, but I'm not betting money we'll find one in the future). When Scott Alexander talks about feedback loops like bipolar disorder and sleep, he's talking about much higher level concepts. I don't re…

Sure the thoughts can influence your chemical state. Scott even provides an example. Suppose you become so engrossed in your weird idea you start to lose sleep over it... Or start to feel anxious about it. At some point, your induced stress will cause relevant biological changes. Not necessarily directly. PTSD indeed is likely an overload of a normal learning and stress mechanism.

It's chemicals all the way down

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#255

Post by bccdee »

nis0s wrote: post #98

I would have preferred to reserve the term AI psychosis for agentic or autonomous systems experiencing adverse effects from model collapse. While people being impressionable and affected by forces of societal change is not a new phenomenon, I agree that this type of behavior deserves its own label. As long as AI doesn’t have its own feelings, it doesn’t make sense to feel any kind of attachment towards it, or be infl…

…but it's not narcissism. It's psychosis. Those are both specific things.

> In psychopathology, psychosis is a condition in which one is unable to distinguish, in one's experience of life, between what is and is not real.

> Narcissism is a self-centered personality style characterized as having an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one's own needs, often at the expense of others.

What we're discussing is a form of psychosis, not narcissism.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#256

Post by epiccoleman »

bccdee wrote: post #250
epiccoleman wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely share this intuition - it almost, in some sense, feels like the only thing we can really know . It makes it rather tough for me to accept the sibling comments arguing that "actually, the answer is that consciousness is an illusion." That just seems... transparently experientally false, to me.

Here's my issue, though: Consider that our thoughts are encoded in physical matter. Something about the arrangement of the chemicals and charges in our brain holds our thoughts as real-world objects, just as ink and paper can hold a piece of writing. Given a piece of paper with some information written on it, does the contents of the message tell you anything about the paper itself? The message may say "this paper wa…

> So just because we feel conscious—just because strong feelings of consciousness, of "me-being-here"-ness, are written into the substrate of our brains—why should that tell us anything?

It's a fact about the universe that it feels a certain way to have a certain "brain state" - just like it's a fact about the universe that certain arrangements of ink and cellulose molecules comprise a piece of paper with a message written on it.

That fits perfectly well into a fully materialistic view of the universe. Where it starts to feel spooky to me is the question of whether thoughts themselves could have some sort of causal effect on the brain. Could a person with a healthy brain be lying safely in bed and "think themselves" into something "unhealthy?" Could I have a "realization" that somehow destabilizes my mind? It seems at least plausible that this can and does happen.

Maybe the conscious experience is pure side-effect - not causal at all. But even if the ultimate "truth" of that series of events is "a series of chemical reactions occurred which caused a long term destabilization of that individual's conscious experience," it feels incomplete somehow to try to describe that event without reference to the experiential component of it.

Whether we posit spooky downward causation or stick to pure materialism, there still seems to be a series of experiential phenomena in our universe which our current scientific approach seems unable to touch. That's not to say that we never could understand consciousness in purely material terms or that we could never devise experiments that help us describe it - it just seems like a big gap in our understanding of nature to me.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#257

Post by everdrive »

reidalert wrote: post #131

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…

People didn't previously have "social junk food" as an option, so they would either need to normalize to those around them, or give up socializing for good. And almost no one is ready for that second option. Social media, LLMs, and even books at TV to some extent provide a bridge to loneliness by being more immediately enticing but in the long term less fulfilling.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#258

Post by achierius »

anon84873628 wrote: post #87
achierius wrote: post #17

> 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…

> professional psychiatrist author

This is a fair point: I'm familiar with Scott Alexander but somehow didn't know he was a psychiatrist, so that part of my point was unfair.

Nevertheless, I think the broader argument still stands. I think that it's at best unhelpful and at worst actively harmful (in the sense of carrying water for AI forms who would happily drive people mad as long as it didn't hurt their stock price) to pretend it's possible to draw a line between "people with risk factors" and "normal people". Everyone is art risk to some extent -- e.g. nobody is too far from financial crisis and homelessness, a major risk factor on its own. Talking about how "people who weren't crazy already" are less at risk ignores the fact that 99%+ of people who "are crazy already" were at some point not crazy, and the path between is often surprisingly smooth. It does us as a society no good if we pretend "normal people" don't have to worry about this phenomenon -- especially when having some kooky ideas was enough to get bucketed in "not normal" for this particular survey

Post reply on HN