91–100 of 258 posts
This seems to be touching on an intriguing concept from a classic book on addiction with machine gambling (Addiction by Design by Natasha Schüll) Instead of looking at gambling addictions as personal failing she asserts they are a result between “interaction between the person and the machine.” Similarly here I think there's something more than just the propensity of crazy people to be crazy that was already there, I…
> We see that the nightmare scenario - a person with no previous psychosis history or risk factor becoming fully psychotic - was uncommon, at only 10% of cases. Most people either had a previous psychosis history known to the respondent, or had some obvious risk factor, or were merely crackpots rather than full psychotics. It's unfortunate to see the author take this tack. This is essentially taking the conventional…
> 'biological' mental illness is tightly coupled to qualitative mental state, and bidirectionally at that. Not only do your chemicals influence your thoughts, your thoughts influence your chemicals, and it's possible for a vulnerable person to be pushed over the edge by either kind of input. We like to think that 'as long as nothing is chemically wrong' we're a-ok, but the truth is that it's possible for simple norma…
There's no scientific reason to believe thoughts affect the chemistry at all. (Currently at least, but I'm not betting money we'll find one in the future).
When Scott Alexander talks about feedback loops like bipolar disorder and sleep, he's talking about much higher level concepts.
I don't really understand what the parent comment quote is trying to say. Can people have circular thoughts and deteriorating mental state? Sure. That's not a "feedback loop" between layers -- the chemicals are just doing their thing and the thoughts happen to be the resulting subjective experience of it.
To answer your question about the "thought trap". If "it's possible for simple normal trains of thought to latch your brain into a very undesirable state" then I'd say that means the mind/brain's self-regulation systems have failed, which would be a disorder or illness by definition.
Is it always a structural or chemical problem? Let's say thinking about a past traumatic event gives you a panic attack... We call that PTSD. You could say PTSD is expected primate behavior, or you could say it's a malfunction of the management systems. Or you could say it's not a malfunction but that the 'traumatic event' did in fact physically traumatize the brain that was forced to experience it...
I have encountered this twice amongst people I know. I also feel that pre-AI this was already happening to people with social media - still kind of computer related as the bubble created is automated but the so called 'algorithms'
AI today reminds me of two big tech revolutions we have already lived through: the Internet in the 90s and social media in the 2000s. When the Internet arrived, it opened up the floodgates of information. Suddenly any Joe Six Pack could publish. Truth and noise sat side by side, and most people could not tell the difference, nor did they care to tell the difference. When social media arrived, it gave every Joe Six Pa…
But initially is was non commercial and good. Not perfect, but much more interesting than today. What changed is advertising and competition for scarce attention. Competition for attention filled the web with slop and clickbait.
> When social media arrived, it gave every Joe Six Pack a megaphone.
And also made everyone feel the need to pose, broadcast their ideology and show their in-group adherence publicly. There is peer pressure to conform to in-group norms and shaming or cancelling otherwise.
I used LLMs for months and started getting massively depressed and am still not over it. Developing with LLMs is not intuitive, and I know I will be replaced.
Conversely, at a previous job I was forced to code in Go, became massively depressed, and am still not over it.
I guess my point is that n=1 isn't enough to really know if it's that LLMs got to you, or if you were already on the verge of burnout or depression anyway.
I'd say "we'll see", except in reality there's very few robust studies on depression in cohorts like "developers", so probably the stats won't come out.
I personally recommend doing more of whatever sport it is you like (or if you don't have one, starting running and/or lifting at the gym), and using less social media.
This is interesting and something I never considered in a broad sense.
I have noticed how the majority of programmers I worked with do not have a mental model of the code or what it describes – it's basically vibing without an LLM, the result accidental. This is fine and perfectly workable. You need only a fraction of devs to purposefully shape the architecture so that the rest can continue vibing.
But never have I stopped to think whether this extends to the world at large.
It may not be full-blown psychosis, but I’ve seen multiple instances[0][1] of people getting “engaged” (ring and all) to their AI companions. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/s/oZXJ3TUhVC [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/s/nZpoziZO8W
This seems to be touching on an intriguing concept from a classic book on addiction with machine gambling (Addiction by Design by Natasha Schüll) Instead of looking at gambling addictions as personal failing she asserts they are a result between “interaction between the person and the machine.” Similarly here I think there's something more than just the propensity of crazy people to be crazy that was already there, I…
I’m calling bullshit. Gambling addiction existed long before machines.
While people being impressionable and affected by forces of societal change is not a new phenomenon, I agree that this type of behavior deserves its own label.
As long as AI doesn’t have its own feelings, it doesn’t make sense to feel any kind of attachment towards it, or be influenced by its words in any social sense. The tool doesn’t have any capacity for being social, so the delusion is both self-rooted and self-driven. So, I think I would have preferred to call this AI-driven narcissism instead of AI psychosis.
I would have preferred to reserve the term AI psychosis for agentic or autonomous systems experiencing adverse effects from model collapse. While people being impressionable and affected by forces of societal change is not a new phenomenon, I agree that this type of behavior deserves its own label. As long as AI doesn’t have its own feelings, it doesn’t make sense to feel any kind of attachment towards it, or be infl…
Model collapse is just fine.
I would have preferred to reserve the term AI psychosis for agentic or autonomous systems experiencing adverse effects from model collapse. While people being impressionable and affected by forces of societal change is not a new phenomenon, I agree that this type of behavior deserves its own label. As long as AI doesn’t have its own feelings, it doesn’t make sense to feel any kind of attachment towards it, or be infl…