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People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

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Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#71

Post by sorcerer-mar »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #37
mastodon_acc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conventional cable news media isn’t tailor made to an individual, doesn’t have live back and forth positive feedback loops. This is significantly way worse then conventional cable news media

I am not sure it’s worse. Cable news media and then social networks have contributed to a massive manipulation of public opinions. And it’s mostly negative and fearful. Maybe individual experiences will be more positive. ChatGPT doesn’t push me into this eternal rage cycle as news and social media do.

We're like an eye's blink into the age of LLMs... it took decades for television to reach the truly pathological state it's currently in.

Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#72

Post by bittercynic »

AIPedant wrote: post #20
moojacob wrote: post #7

This is what happens when you start optimizing for getting people to spend as much time in your product as possible. (I'm not sure if OpenAI was doing this, if anyone knows better please correct me)

I often bring up the NYT story about a lady who fell in love with ChatGPT, particularly this bit: In December, OpenAI announced a $200-per-month premium plan for “unlimited access.” Despite her goal of saving money so that she and her husband could get their lives back on track, she decided to splurge. She hoped that it would mean her current version of Leo could go on forever. But it meant only that she no longer hi…

I'd be interested to learn what fraction of ChatGPT revenue is from this kind of user.

Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#73

Post by sorcerer-mar »

patrickhogan1 wrote: post #66
Barrin92 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>’90s and early ’00s about kids who couldn’t tear themselves away from their computers. Fear was overblown, but made headlines. How was it overblown, we now have a non-trivial amount of completely de-socialized men in particular who live in online cults with real world impact. If there's one lesson from the last few decades it is that the people who were concerned about the impact of mass media on intelligence, physi…

That's fair. You are correct on potential for addiction. But let's be honest - most of these people, the ones the article is taking about, where they think they are some messiah, would have just latched onto some pre-internet cult regardless. Where sycophancy and love bombing was perfected. Though I do see the problem of AI assistants being much more accessible, so likely many more drawn in. https://en.wikipedia.org/…

> where they think they are some messiah, would have just latched onto some pre-internet cult regardless.

You have no way to know that. It's way, way harder to find your way to a cult than to download one of the hottest consumer apps ever created... obviously.

Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#75

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #33

Anyone remember the media stories from the mid-90's about people who were obsessed with the internet and were losing their families because they spent hours every day on the computer addicted to the internet? People gonna people. Journalists gonna journalist.

Why do you think those stories weren't true? The median teenager in 2023 spent four hours per day on social media (https://news.gallup.com/poll/512576/teens-spend-average-hour...). It seems clear that internet addiction was real, and it just won so decisively that we accept it as a fact of life.

Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#77

Post by crooked-v »

kaycey2022 wrote: post #60

Looks like Chatgpt persists some context information across chats and doesn't ever delete these profiles. Worst case would be for this to persist across users. That isn't unlikely given the stories of them leaking API keys etc.

> Looks like Chatgpt persists some context information across chats and doesn't ever delete these profiles.

People say this, but I haven't seen anything that's convinced me that any 'secret' memory functionality is true. It seems much more likely that people are just more predictable than they like to think.

Re: People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

#80

Post by hashiyakshmi »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #33

Anyone remember the media stories from the mid-90's about people who were obsessed with the internet and were losing their families because they spent hours every day on the computer addicted to the internet? People gonna people. Journalists gonna journalist.

That really doesn't sound at all comparable to what the article is describing though.
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