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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

#441

Post by riazrizvi »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #431
riazrizvi wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well now, here’s a puzzle for you. If literate humans don’t believe in myth, and all US Presidents had religious affiliation, were they all a) semi-literate ‘cave people’, b) cynical manipulators of the semi-literate cave-people, c) something else?

And if a person practices any myth-based festival, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, is that indicative to you of a semi-literate cave-person? Or do you make exemptions for how a person interprets the event, and if so, how do you apply those exemptions consistently across all myth-based societies? Also do you reject science-fiction and fantasy works as works of idle fancy or do you allow that they use metaphor to convey important ideas applicable to life, and how do you square that with your treatment of myth in religion?

It is my hope, that you will consider my comment, and come to a better understanding of what LLMs are. They aren’t baking any universal truth, or world model, they are collating alternative narrative systems.

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

#442

Post by g0db1t »

gonzobonzo wrote: post #153
quitit wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of reasons why having a chatbot partner is a bad idea (especially for young people), but here's just a few: - The sycophantic and unchallenging behaviours of chatbots leaves a person unconditioned for human interactions. Real relationships have friction, from this we develop important interpersonal skills such as setting boundaries, settling disagreements, building compromise, standing up for oneself…

That's the default chatbot behavior. Many of these people appear to be creating their own personalities for the chatbots, and it's not too difficult to make an opinionated and challenging chatbot, or one that mimics someone who has their own experiences. Though designing one's ideal partner certainly raises some questions, and I wouldn't be surprised if many are picking sycophantic over challenging. People opting for…

[dead]

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

#443

Post by psunavy03 »

komali2 wrote: post #173
koolba wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be honest, the alternative for a good chunk of these users is no interaction at all, and that sort of isolation doesn't prepare you for human interaction either. This sounds like an argument in favor of safe injection sites for heroin users.

That's exactly right, and that's fine. Our society is unwilling to take the steps necessary to end the root cause of drug abuse epidemics (privatization of healthcare industry, lack of social safety net, war on drugs), so localities have to do harm reduction in immediately actionable ways. So too is our society unable to do what's necessary to reduce the startling alienation happening (halt suburban hyperspread, redu…

And there we are . . . "Our society is unable to do what's necessary on issue X, and what's necessary is this laundry list of my unrelated political hobby horses."

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

#444

Post by iranintoavan »

infecto wrote: post #365
DanielVZ wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think we need to be hyper focused on this. We do not need more ways for people to be convinced of suicide. This is a huge misalignment of objectives and we do not know what other misalignment issues are already more silently happening or may appear in the future as AI capabilities evolve. Also we can’t deny the emotional element. Even though it is subjective, knowing that the reason your daughter didn’t seek gui…

Hard question to answer imo but at a high level I would argue that social media for folks under 18 is even more harmful than LLMs. It is quite fascinating and I hope more studies exist that look into why some folks are more susceptible to this type of manipulation.

"I would argue that social media for folks under 18 is even more harmful than LLMs."

Well, it turns out all the social media companies are also the LLM companies and they are adding LLMs to social media, so....

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

#445

Post by fragmede »

code_for_monkey wrote: post #427
rahidz wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but for some reason AI has become a real wedge for people Well yeah, for most other technologies, the pitch isn't "We're training an increasingly powerful machine to do people's jobs! Every day it gets better at doing them! And as a bonus, it's trained on terabytes of data we scraped from books and the Internet, without your permission. What? What happens to your livelihood when it succeeds? That's not my department…

AI people are like "HAHAHAHAH were gods! Were gods and you PEASANTS are going to be jobless once my machine can fire you!" and then wonder why people have negative feelings about it. The Ipod wasnt coming for my livelihood it just let me listen to music even more!

The iTunes music store sold music for your iPod, but we'd be ignoring history if we didn't at least acknowledge that was also the era of Napster, Limewire, Kazaa, and DCC. Pirate Bay, and later, Waffles.fm. Metallica sued Napster in 2000, the first ipod was released in 2001. iPod people laughed at the end of record companies and the RIAA while pretending to work with them. We all know that's not how it ended though.

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

#446

Post by Sol- »

bill3389 wrote: post #440

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 workflo…

Is this a satirical comment in the sense that it reads so AI generated?

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

#447

Post by nemomarx »

Sol- wrote: post #446
bill3389 wrote: post #440

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 workflo…

Is this a satirical comment in the sense that it reads so AI generated?

I'm beginning to worry people who chat with ais long enough will imitate their writing style

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

#448

Post by bespokedevelopr »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #17
chris-vls wrote: post #15

It seems quite probable that an LLM provider will lose a major liability lawsuit. "Is this product ready for release?" is a very hard question. And it is one of the most important ones to get right. Different providers have delivered different levels of safety. This will make it easier to prove that the less-safe provider chose to ship a more dangerous product -- and that we could reasonably expect them to take more…

> a lot of liability law dates back to the railroad era. Another time that it took courts to rein in incredibly politically powerful companies deploying a new technology on a vast scale Do you have a layman-accessible history of this? (Ideally an essay.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_the_Standard_Oi...

This was a fascinating read. It’s been a few years since I finished but gives about the most thorough analysis you’ll find.

Not an essay but you can probably find an ai to summarize it for you.

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

#449

Post by GoatInGrey »

thot_experiment wrote: post #22

Caelan Conrad made a few videos on specifically AI encouraging kids to socially isolate and commit suicide. In the videos he reads the final messages aloud for multiple cases, if this isn't your cup of tea there's also the court cases if you would prefer to read the chat logs. It's very harrowing stuff. I'm not trying to make any explicit point here as I haven't really processed this fully enough to have one, but I e…

A quote from ChatGPT that illustrates how blatant this can be, if you would prefer to not watch the linked videos. This is from Zane Shamblin's chats with it.

“Cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace? That’s not fear. That’s clarity.”

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

#450

Post by tuhgdetzhh »

bill3389 wrote: post #440

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 workflo…

Your comment has too many em-dashes for my taste.
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