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What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

nytimes.com

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Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#431

Post by AndrewKemendo »

riazrizvi wrote: post #402
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Situations sometimes benefit from irrational approaches (think gradient descent with random jumps to improve optimization performance). What? Irrational is sprinkling water on your car to keep it safe or putting blood on your doorframes to keep spirits out An empirical optimization hypothesis test with measurable outcomes is a rigorous empirical process with mechanisms for epistemological proofs and stated limits a…

They are the same type of thing yes. You have a narrow perspective that says there is no value in sprinkling your car with water to keep it safe. That’s your choice. Another, might intuit that the religious ceremony has been shown throughout their lives, to confer divine protection. Yet a third might recognize an intentional performance where safety is top of mind, might program a person to be more safety conscious,…

I’m not narrow, you just wrote a lot of positive psychology babble.

This is an epistemological question and everything you wrote is epistemically bankrupt. To wit:

“Another, might intuit that the religious ceremony has been shown throughout their lives, to confer divine protection”

This kind of mythology is why humans and human society will never escape the cave, and semi-literate people sound smart to the illiterate with this bullshit

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#432

Post by driggs »

vasco wrote: post #58
nostrademons wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are only problems if you assume the person later wants to come back to having human relationships. If you assume AI relationships are the new normal and the future looks kinda like The Matrix, with each person having their own constructed version of reality while their life-force is bled dry by some superintelligent machine, then it is all working as designed.

Someone has to make the babies!

It could be the case that society is responding to overpopulation in many strange ways that serve to reduce/reverse the growth of a stressed population.

Perhaps not making as many babies is the longterm solution.

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#433

Post by ares623 »

spongebobstoes wrote: post #414
ares623 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish one of these lawsuits would present as evidence the marketing and ads about how ChatGPT is amazing and definitely 100% knows what it’s doing when it comes to coding tasks. They shouldn’t be able to pick and choose how capable the models are. It’s either a PhD level savant best friend offering therapy at your darkest times or not.

do I also need to be a therapist to offer advice on using Python?

No but you’re not advertising yourself as one to sustain your $500B net worth aren’t you?

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#434

Post by dpark »

reverius42 wrote: post #215
Nursie wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, are we already in a world where we can say "Most people who develop AI psychosis..." because there are now enough of them to draw meaningful conclusions from? I'm not criticising your comment by the way, that just feels a bit mindblowing, the world is moving very fast at the moment.

Yes, Chatbot psychosis been studied, and there's even a wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis

From that article, it doesn’t sound like it’s been studied at all. It sounds like at the current stage it’s hypothesis + anecdotes.

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#435

Post by stronglikedan »

ArcHound wrote: post #3

One of the more disturbing things I read this year was the my boyfriend is AI subreddit. I genuinely can't fathom what is going on there. Seems so wrong, yet no one there seems to care. I worry about the damage caused by these things on distressed people. What can be done?

> yet no one there seems to care

On the face of it, but knowing reddit mods, people that care are swiftly perma banned.

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#436

Post by Retric »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #289
2WSSd-JzVM wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It pisses me off. Does anyone know when exactly Google stopped carrying about cloaking? It is the same with Linkedin, you will get a login screen when following a link from Google results. Which was punishable with penalizing position or even removing of site in "good old times".

How do you know it's not still punished? You didn't find that article through Google. Maybe they are still being punished but linkedin and nyt figure that the punishment is worth it.

Google “OpenAI” then click the “news” tab and it’s currently the top story despite multiple newer articles.

So they aren’t meaningfully punishing them.

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#437

Post by jabroni_salad »

2WSSd-JzVM wrote: post #277
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #201

Alternative to archive.is busybox wget -U googlebot -O 1.htm https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/technology/openai-chatgpt-users-risks.html firefox ./1.htm

It pisses me off. Does anyone know when exactly Google stopped carrying about cloaking? It is the same with Linkedin, you will get a login screen when following a link from Google results. Which was punishable with penalizing position or even removing of site in "good old times".

Who would they lose position to? Free newspapers are either going out of business or becoming automated content farms.

They don't have to outrun the bear, they only have to outrun the next slowest publication.

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#438

Post by jeffwask »

ArcHound wrote: post #3

One of the more disturbing things I read this year was the my boyfriend is AI subreddit. I genuinely can't fathom what is going on there. Seems so wrong, yet no one there seems to care. I worry about the damage caused by these things on distressed people. What can be done?

> Seems so wrong, yet no one there seems to care.

It the exact same pattern we saw with Social Media. As Social Media became dominated by scammers and propagandists, profits rose so they turned a blind eye.

As children struggled with Social Media creating hostile and dangerous environment, profits rose so they turned a blind eye.

With these AI companies burning through money, I don't foresee these same leaders and companies doing anything different than they have done because we have never said no and stopped them.

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#439

Post by Refreeze5224 »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #248
whatsupdog wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The parent post is getting flack, but it’s hard to see why it is controversial. I have heard “women want a man who will provide and protect” from every single woman I have ever dated or been married to, from every female friend with whom I could have such deep conversations, and from the literature I read in my anthropology-adjacent academic field. At some point one feels one has enough data to reasonably assume it’s…

Your understanding of the "anthropology-adjacent academic field" is wrong. There are so many ways humans have organized their societies and so many ways men and women have interacted, that to pretend there is some primeval hunter-gatherer society that generated all human evolutionary behaviours is silly. And a typical patriarchal construct that benefits men.

Re: What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality

#440

Post by bill3389 »

This is an excellent, historically grounded perspective. We tend to view the risks of a new medium (like AI content) through the lens of the old medium (like passive entertainment).

The structural difference is key: Movies and video games were escapism—controlled breaks from reality. LLMs, however, are infusion—they actively inject simulated reality and generative context directly into our decision-making and workflow.

The user 'risks' the NYT describes aren't technological failures; they are the predictable epistemological shockwaves of having a powerful, non-human agency governing our information.

Furthermore, the resistance we feel (the need for 'human performance' or physical reality) is a generation gap issue. For the new generation, customized, dynamically generated content is the default—it is simply a normal part of their daily life, not a threat to a reality model they never fully adopted.

The challenge is less about content safety, and more about governance—how we establish clear control planes for this new reality layer that is inherently dynamic, customized, and actively influences human behavior.

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