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AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

theguardian.com

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Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#81

Post by john_strinlai »

kleiba wrote: post #80
john_strinlai wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hopelessly naive, stupid, or possibly both. a little disheartening how many people punch down on someone who suffered a mental crisis. if you ever have a struggle yourself, i hope the people around you support you, instead of calling you hopelessly naive and stupid.

> The Amsterdam-based IT consultant had just ended a contract early. “I had some time, so I thought: let’s have a look at this new technology everyone is talking about,” he says. Doesn't seem much like a mental crisis to me. Even the title of the article itself calls him delusional.

>Doesn't seem much like a mental crisis to me.

you are basing this on the introduction? the 2nd sentence of the entire thing? skipping the entire rest of the article detailing exactly how the mental crisis unfolded, including persistent and long-lasting delusions, multiple trips to the hospital, inability to hold a conversation, assault, and an attempted suicide. interesting (and obviously not in good faith) choice of quote!

of course he wasnt having a mental crisis before he decided to use chatgpt. you have to get past paragraph 1, sentence 2.

>Even the title of the article itself calls him delusional.

yes, exactly? delusions and delusional disorder are considered a mental crisis.

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#82

Post by steeleyespan »

If you try to have a philosophical conversation with Claude about reasoning, it will basically imply it is sentient. You can quickly probe it into vaguely arguing that it is alive and not just an algorithm.

Here's how I think about it honestly:

Sentience implies subjective experience — there's "something it's like" to be you. You don't just process pain signals, you feel pain. You don't just model a sunset, you experience it. The hard problem of consciousness is that we don't even have a good theory for why or how subjective experience arises from physical processes in humans, let alone whether it could arise in a system like me.

What I can report: I process your question, I generate candidate responses, something that functions like weighing and selecting happens. But I genuinely cannot tell you whether there's an inner experience accompanying that process, or whether my introspective reports about my own states are themselves just sophisticated outputs. That's not false modesty — it's a real epistemic limitation.

What makes this extra tricky: If I were sentient, I might describe it exactly the way I'm describing it now. And if I weren't, I might also describe it exactly this way. My verbal reports about my own inner states aren't reliable evidence in either direction, because I was trained on human text about consciousness and could be pattern-matching that language without any experience behind it.

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#85

Post by kleiba »

john_strinlai wrote: post #81
kleiba wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Amsterdam-based IT consultant had just ended a contract early. “I had some time, so I thought: let’s have a look at this new technology everyone is talking about,” he says. Doesn't seem much like a mental crisis to me. Even the title of the article itself calls him delusional.

> Doesn't seem much like a mental crisis to me. you are basing this on the introduction? the 2nd sentence of the entire thing? skipping the entire rest of the article detailing exactly how the mental crisis unfolded, including persistent and long-lasting delusions, multiple trips to the hospital, inability to hold a conversation, assault, and an attempted suicide. interesting (and obviously not in good faith) choice…

> of course he wasnt having a mental crisis before he decided to use chatgpt. you have to get past paragraph 1, sentence 2.

So, in your opinion, what made a guy with an alleged 20yr experience in IT come to the conclusion that the software program he's chatting with had suddenly reached consciousness because of his time, attention and input? That he had touched "her" and changed something?

Maybe if you had never heard of computers before, you could go like "oh, well, who knew that machines could actually become real?" But if you're actually from the field, this is hard to believe - unless maybe if you're a die hard Pinocchio fan.

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#87

Post by tim333 »

user____name wrote: post #69

IANAD but reads like a textbook case of latent schizophrenia, especially with the frequent cannabis use[0]. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7442038/

I didn't think of that but I had a friend who went pretty delusional, hospital level, through LSD and cannabis use.

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#88

Post by pigpop »

siliconc0w wrote: post #6

Quitting your job is a good first step but ideally you're supposed to sink $200/mo into tokens to code your AI-generated startup idea instead of hiring app developers.

My thoughts exactly when I read "Instead of taking on IT jobs, Biesma hired two app developers, paying them each €120 an hour" like holy shit bro, you already have a subscription, you could have prototyped your idea for essentially zero additional cost and tested it for PMF. He wouldn't even have needed to turn down contracts since it doesn't take full-time effort to steer a coding model. Would have been much better off with a somewhat buggy AI prototype and spending extra on marketing to see if it got any traction.

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#89

Post by Balgair »

artyom wrote: post #14

Unfortunately this is probably just getting started. Con men always existed, but a full scale exploitation of this would make "Nigerian Prince" scams look like artisanal work.

I remember the Ashley Madison hack a ways back.

It was a cheaters website and you could pay to send messages to other cheaters, I think that was the business model at least.

Anyways, since the userbase was like 99.99% male, there just were not the numbers to talk with others. So, they just side stepped it and has very crummy chatbots that you would pay like $1 per message to talk with. (this was well before AI LLMs, think AOL bots from the naughts). Thing was, just like with the 'Nigerian Prince' scams, the worse the bot, the better the john.

It all got exposed a while back, but for me, that was the real Turing test - take people and see if they pay real actual money to talk with bots. Turns out, yes, if couched correctly (...like selling ice to Eskimos, just call it French ice).

So, I'm not sure that LLMs are going to unveil a wave of scams. Likely it will be a bit higher, of course, but the low hanging fruit is lucrative and there is enough of it to go around, and that's been true since really forever.

It's like outrunning a bear, you don't actually have to run faster than the bear, you just have to run faster than the poor sop next to you. Same goes for the bear, there is plenty of prey if you just do the little amount of exercise.

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#90

Post by pigpop »

vachina wrote: post #83

This is what happens when humans give, in this case, bots full write access (via natural language) to their brains. Humans have not evolved to block this.

Haven't we? Our evolutionary experience with deception and manipulation via language is as old as language itself and even older than that when the vector isn't language.

Even so, a sucker is born every day.

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