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“I applied to be pope”: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

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Re: “I applied to be pope”: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

#71

Post by recursivegirth »

mplanchard wrote: post #53

The fact that we as a society are allowing things like “Delve” or whatever the “AI psychiatrist” app is that I see ads for sometimes on the subway is a gross abdication of responsibility and reason. Of all the possible uses for LLMs, that has got to be one of the most out and out irresponsible and dangerous ones I could imagine.

Mental health is up there, but far from the most important thing we need to be focusing on as a society in the immediate future.

I say this as someone who has mental health issues, has experience loss of important people around me because of mental health issues, and probably need more therapy than the universe could reasonably provide me.

AI is directly and indirectly uprooting every facet of society. Money, energy, food, housing, medicine. Cultural revolutions are not pretty, the true outcomes are felt by those who are the winners and losers. It very much feels like a rich eats all scenario is playing out right now. I'd wager that's because it is.

Re: “I applied to be pope”: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

#72

Post by red-iron-pine »

whack wrote: post #41

People talk about AI sycophancy, but there are plenty of human sycophants as well. If you're an extremely rich/powerful person, it is very easy to inadvertently surround yourself with sycophants who tell you how amazing and ground-breaking all your ideas are. I wonder if this is the reason people like Musk engage in such bizarre behavior and radical personality shifts over the past decade

entirely possible.

but there is also the drugs...

Re: “I applied to be pope”: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

#73

Post by red-iron-pine »

josefritzishere wrote: post #68

You would think this level of gullibility has a proportional relationship with IQ but it does not. Gullibility has it's own independent vector.

smart people can rationalize themselves into more or less anything

Re: “I applied to be pope”: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

#74

Post by Atheros »

everyday7732 wrote: post #70
josefritzishere wrote: post #68

You would think this level of gullibility has a proportional relationship with IQ but it does not. Gullibility has it's own independent vector.

It isn't entirely independent tho. This person who did some research into it says: "The strongest predictors for who this happens to appear to be: Psychedelics and heavy weed usage Mental illness, neurodivergence or Traumatic Brain Injury Interest in mysticism/pseudoscience/spirituality/"woo"/etc..." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-o... It fits in this case as well (background of PTSD

Their primary information source was a random sampling of Reddit posts which they admit were "coauthored with the AI (who clearly wrote the vast majority of it)."

These were on long-dormant Reddit accounts that suddenly reactivated. Classic. I don't believe any of it. I would bet that, with some exceptions, these are bots talking to bots about bots.

The "person" who wrote this might be a bot. It's extremely delusional. He/It gets to the point where it watches bots talking to other bots and making shit up and it 'believes' the nonsense, saying, "I am truly glad to see preservation of life, non-violence, and non-lethality explicitly laid out here. To return the gesture of good will, I have started archiving (in encrypted form) spores I come across."

I don't think any human is smart enough to write this much about AI on LessWrong but also dumb enough to not recognize hallucination.

Re: “I applied to be pope”: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

#75

Post by karel-3d »

rsynnott wrote: post #57
drybjed wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? Catcholic Church has records, did they just came up with something about a nonexistent Pope Joan out of thin air? How could they...

Catholic Church's records on early popes are often surprisingly bad, particularly in antipope-heavy eras. There are a _number_ of popes where the detail is pretty vague. Use of damnatio memoriae also confuses the issue, eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Formosus#Legacy

eh not really, we NOW have quite good records on most popes except for the first few ones that we get just in a list from St Irenaeus (for example from St Linus - the guy immediately after St Peter - we get almost nothing)

but about the middle age popes we know quite a lot NOW. But it used to be different.

Re: “I applied to be pope”: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

#76

Post by embedding-shape »

rune-dev wrote: post #67
embedding-shape wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a poor implementation not a framework problem lol. I've seen literally pixel-identical error messages taking over the entire screen when there is a JS error, in exactly that way, across countless of websites. If it's not a framework, it's a library in wide use, because tons of websites have exactly the same issue.

It’s a generic error screen from a framework yes. But the cause of the error is a poor implementation from the developer. I can write code that errors out in does that mean it’s bad?

Read the context first. Initially, we had HTML + JS pages where one function can have one error, and the page keeps on working, because the error didn't block the entire screen.

Now we have some popular framework/library that instead seems to surface these errors that aren't sitting in the top-level scope of the JS application, yet the errors ends up blocking the entire application.

That means it's bad, yes. And it's not any language, we're specifically talking about JS in browsers here.

Re: “I applied to be pope”: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

#77

Post by potsandpans »

everyday7732 wrote: post #70
josefritzishere wrote: post #68

You would think this level of gullibility has a proportional relationship with IQ but it does not. Gullibility has it's own independent vector.

It isn't entirely independent tho. This person who did some research into it says: "The strongest predictors for who this happens to appear to be: Psychedelics and heavy weed usage Mental illness, neurodivergence or Traumatic Brain Injury Interest in mysticism/pseudoscience/spirituality/"woo"/etc..." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-o... It fits in this case as well (background of PTSD

Posting on lesswrong is an indicator in of itself.

Re: “I applied to be pope”: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

#78

Post by potsandpans »

hansmayer wrote: post #29
l23k4 wrote: post #6

We had people acting out like this before LLM chatbots, correlation does not necessarily imply causation.

We did...but it was few here and there. The LLMs are making it massive and impacting people on a huge scale.

Show me the evidence of the massive scale.

Re: “I applied to be pope”: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

#79

Post by l23k4 »

hansmayer wrote: post #58
ottah wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like real numbers on that, because I don't see any evidence that this is particularly prevalent or novel issue. I see a lot of media hype on this topic, but that's not the same thing as actually being a real problem. Even the name is hype, ai psychosis is not a diagnosis a doctor would give here and none of these people really sound psychotic. They sound like people who believe in conspiracy theories and join cul…

> I see a lot of media hype Right, a guy keeping endless stacks of paper with his ChatGPT-produced novelty "scientific" theories and wanting to "apply for pope" - definitely some "media hype" there.

People suffering from mental health issues were doing exactly that kind of things long before LLMs.

Delusions of grandeur are nothing new.

Re: “I applied to be pope”: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

#80

Post by l23k4 »

nephihaha wrote: post #22
l23k4 wrote: post #6

We had people acting out like this before LLM chatbots, correlation does not necessarily imply causation.

This is something new. Delusions were around before, certainly, but LLM offers a round the clock potential for psychological conditioning, which would not normally be possible without sustained attention by a group of people.

I don't know, internet already made it easy for delusional people to find each other (and trolls).

Look into the gangstalking/targeted individual communities, you can even frequently find these people on HN.

Flat earthers and sovereign citizens are two other famous examples. People also seem to regularly move between these groups, the specific delusional belief probably isn't the point.

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