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In Search of AI Psychosis

astralcodexten.com

41–50 of 258 posts

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#41

If you want to go down a rabbit hole examining people in this disturbed place in realtime search reddit for the Cyclone Emoji (U+1F300) or the r/ArtificialSentience subreddit and see what gets recommended after that, especially a few months ago when GPT was going wild flattering users and affirming every idea (such as going off your meds). I fully believe these are simply people who have used the same chat past the p…

[deleted]

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>while trying to warn that it's stuck in a loop, hence using swirl emojis and babbling about recursion in weird spiritual terms That explanation itself sounds fairly crackpot-y to me. It would imply that the LLM is actually aware of some internal "mental state".

It's actually not; there has been a phenomenon that Anthropic themselves observed with Claude in self-interaction studies that they coined 'The “Spiritual Bliss” Attractor State'. It is well covered in section 5 of [0]. >Section 5.5.2: The “Spiritual Bliss” Attractor State > The consistent gravitation toward consciousness exploration, existential questioning, and spiritual/mystical themes in extended interactions was…

Here's an interesting post on it (from the same author as this thread's link): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#43
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooo, finally a chance to share my useless accumulated knowledge from the past few months of Reddit procrastination! It starts to hallucinate, and after a while, all the LLM can do is try and to continue telling the user what they want in a cyclical conversation - while trying to warn that it's stuck in a loop, hence using swirl emojis and babbling about recursion in weird spiritual terms. (Is it getting the LLM "high…

I think i seen something similar before in the early days. before i was aware of COT i asked one to "think" for itself, i explained to it i would just keep replying "next thought?" so it could continue to do this. It kept looping on concepts of how AI could change the world, but it would never give anything tangible or actionable, just buzz word soup. I think these LLMs (without any intention from the LLM)hijack some…

> “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I loved the beetle article, thanks for that.

They're so well tuned at predicting what you want to hear that even when you know intellectually that they're not sentient, the illusion still tricks your brain.

I've been setting custom instructions on GPT and Claude to instruct them to talk more software-like, because when they relate to you on a personal level, it's hard to remember that it's software.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#45
post #27

> 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…

Scott is a psychiatrist.

Sigmund Freud was also a psychiatrist.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#46

If you want to go down a rabbit hole examining people in this disturbed place in realtime search reddit for the Cyclone Emoji (U+1F300) or the r/ArtificialSentience subreddit and see what gets recommended after that, especially a few months ago when GPT was going wild flattering users and affirming every idea (such as going off your meds). I fully believe these are simply people who have used the same chat past the p…

>while trying to warn that it's stuck in a loop, hence using swirl emojis and babbling about recursion in weird spiritual terms That explanation itself sounds fairly crackpot-y to me. It would imply that the LLM is actually aware of some internal "mental state".

My thinking was that there was an exception handling and the error message was getting muddled into the conversation. But another commenter debunked me.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#47
post #16

If you want to go down a rabbit hole examining people in this disturbed place in realtime search reddit for the Cyclone Emoji (U+1F300) or the r/ArtificialSentience subreddit and see what gets recommended after that, especially a few months ago when GPT was going wild flattering users and affirming every idea (such as going off your meds). I fully believe these are simply people who have used the same chat past the p…

You don't need to dig deep to find these deluded posts, and it's frightening https://www.reddit.com/user/CaregiverOk5848/submitted/

I think this one very likely falls into the "was definitely psychotic pre-LLM conversations" category.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#48

> 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…

I'm not trying to argue from authority or get into credibility wars*, but Scott is a professional psychiatrist who has treated dozens or hundreds of schizophrenic patients and has written many thorough essays on schizophrenia. Obviously someone could do that and still be wrong, but I think this is a carefully considered position on his part and not just wild assumptions. *(or, well, okay, I guess I de facto am, but i…

You said it yourself. That's really not an appropriate response to a specific criticism.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#49
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooo, finally a chance to share my useless accumulated knowledge from the past few months of Reddit procrastination! It starts to hallucinate, and after a while, all the LLM can do is try and to continue telling the user what they want in a cyclical conversation - while trying to warn that it's stuck in a loop, hence using swirl emojis and babbling about recursion in weird spiritual terms. (Is it getting the LLM "high…

I think i seen something similar before in the early days. before i was aware of COT i asked one to "think" for itself, i explained to it i would just keep replying "next thought?" so it could continue to do this. It kept looping on concepts of how AI could change the world, but it would never give anything tangible or actionable, just buzz word soup. I think these LLMs (without any intention from the LLM)hijack some…

>I think these LLMs (without any intention from the LLM)hijack something in our brains that makes us think they are sentient.

Yes, it's language. Fundamentally we interpret something that appears to converse intelligently as being intelligent like us especially if its language includes emotional elements. Even if rationally we understand it's a machine at a deeper subconscious level we believe it's a human.

It doesn't help that we live in a society in which people are increasingly alienated from each other and detached from any form of consensus reality, and LLMs appear to provide easy and safe emotional connections and they can generate interesting alternate realities.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to argue from authority or get into credibility wars*, but Scott is a professional psychiatrist who has treated dozens or hundreds of schizophrenic patients and has written many thorough essays on schizophrenia. Obviously someone could do that and still be wrong, but I think this is a carefully considered position on his part and not just wild assumptions. *(or, well, okay, I guess I de facto am, but i…

You said it yourself. That's really not an appropriate response to a specific criticism.

I'm not trying to say that that should strongly increase the probability he's correct. I just think it's useful context, because the parent is potentially implying that the author is naively falling for common misconceptions ("following the conventional tack") rather than staking a deliberated claim. Or they might not be implying it but someone could come away with that conclusion.
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