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Good Riddance, 4o

mahadk.com

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Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#91

Post by fullmoon »

tptacek wrote: post #87
gordonhart wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of agree with GP more than the author here. OpenAI got these people hooked and pulling the plug is potentially more harmful than letting them continue to chat with it until they move on naturally (assuming that they eventually will)

I don't think reinforcement is generally the recommended approach for people with delusional or obsessive pathological parasocial fixations. I think generally the idea is to get those people into talk therapy and to cut off all contact with the object of their fixation.

Mere talk therapy is infamously useless for attachment trauma, which is relational and somatic

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#92

Post by satvikpendem »

idle_zealot wrote: post #90
satvikpendem wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Her the computers were actually people though, with independent minds and thoughts. Their relationships with humans were real, and they weren't beholden to the company that created them. Really, it was more about the difference between humans and digital superhumans. How do you know that? Maybe it's the same argument to solipsism, or the Chinese room thought experiment, that these "digital superhumans" are stoch…

This immediately devolves into "how do I know that other humans aren't philosophical zombies?" I take the "know it when I see it" approach, and LLMs don't reach that bar. They clearly do reach that bar for some people. In the context of the movie though it is supposed to be understood that the computers are self-aware and have internal worlds. They're treated as characters in the language of storytelling.

Yeah I'm just not convinced the ones in the movie are any more complex than our current ones, just more well harnessed, pun intended, as the harness and tooling around the LLM dictates a lot of its abilities, for example [0]. I don't believe the ones in the movie have any actual form of consciousness as humans would understand it. And as far as (simulacra of) internal models, seems like LLMs have that today too, as an emergent property [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46988596

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936920

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#93

Post by satvikpendem »

co_king_3 wrote: post #66
rtkwe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they say as much in the blog post, essentially "we were tuning for use but way over shot the mark and now people are dating out model".

I don't believe them.

Then why would they have toned it down in future releases? If they really wanted to make it addictive they'd have turned it up, like social media companies do with their algorithms.

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#94

Post by tptacek »

fullmoon wrote: post #91
tptacek wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think reinforcement is generally the recommended approach for people with delusional or obsessive pathological parasocial fixations. I think generally the idea is to get those people into talk therapy and to cut off all contact with the object of their fixation.

Mere talk therapy is infamously useless for attachment trauma, which is relational and somatic

Begs the question of whether the underlying pathology is attachment trauma or some other delusional fixation! I don't doubt most of the people in this predicament are vulnerable for one reason or another. I made a much more specific claim, about delusional obsessive fixation; I did not claim that their underlying mental health issues could be fixed straightforwardly.

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#95

Post by casey2 »

I think there is lots of value in a model that mimics your behavior. So your partner or anyone can message "you" at any time of the day.

work, sleep, socialize you can only do 2. With the help of AI you could talk to people as much as you want without wasting their time.

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#96

Post by Griffinsauce »

satvikpendem wrote: post #13
oidar wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the subreddit I linked in another comment, there did seem to be some "magic" that 4o had for these kinds of "relationships". I'm not sure how much of it is placebo, but there does seem to be a strong preference in that user group.

It probably is placebo. Character AI for example used DeepSeek and I'm sure many grew attachments to that model. Ultimately though I don't even get it, models lose context very quickly so it's hard to have long running conversations with them, as well as talking very sycophanticly to you. I guess this is fixed due to implementing a good harness and memories, which is what these companies did I assume.

> as well as talking very sycophanticly to you.

That's apparently a feature to a significant amount of people..

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#97

Post by fullmoon »

tptacek wrote: post #94
fullmoon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mere talk therapy is infamously useless for attachment trauma, which is relational and somatic

Begs the question of whether the underlying pathology is attachment trauma or some other delusional fixation! I don't doubt most of the people in this predicament are vulnerable for one reason or another. I made a much more specific claim, about delusional obsessive fixation; I did not claim that their underlying mental health issues could be fixed straightforwardly.

It’s a great question, and I think it’s not exclusive.

Obsessive limerent obsession can be driven by reward circuits, and those _can_ be extinquished by more straight-forward therapy, but if it’s driven by unmet emotional needs, it’s often quickly replaced by some other maladaptive coping mechanism (hopefully slightly less unhealthy).

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#98

Post by fullmoon »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #36
rtkwe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4o had some notable problems with sycophancy being very very positive about the user and going along with almost anything the user said. OpenAI even talked about it [0] and the new responses to people trying to continue their former 'relationship' does tend towards being 'harsh' [1] especially if you were a person actually thinking of the bot as a kind of person. [0] https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/ [1]…

It really does give a lot of signal[1] to people in the dating scene: validate and enthusiastically respond to potential romantic partners and the world is your oyster. 1. possibly/probably not in a good or healthy way? idk

Enthusiastically matching the energy of an anxiously attached partner is a rite of passage many would rather not have walked.

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#99

Post by jmkni »

rtkwe wrote: post #77
jmkni wrote: post #54

I'm completely out of the loop on this, why are people so angry about this?

A combo of a couple things that made some vulnerable people believe/treat 4o like it was a real partner/friend. Things that lead to that imo: 1) 4o was very sycophantic and had no real safeguards against really deep romantic roleplay. It'd 'go along' with the user and give minimal to zero pushback; "I feel a connection with you" "I feel it too" etc etc 2) It was good enough at just chatting that if you didn't really…

fucking hell lol

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#100

Post by rtkwe »

jmkni wrote: post #99
rtkwe wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A combo of a couple things that made some vulnerable people believe/treat 4o like it was a real partner/friend. Things that lead to that imo: 1) 4o was very sycophantic and had no real safeguards against really deep romantic roleplay. It'd 'go along' with the user and give minimal to zero pushback; "I feel a connection with you" "I feel it too" etc etc 2) It was good enough at just chatting that if you didn't really…

fucking hell lol

On a less parasocial angle you had people exhibiting "AI psychosis" (a bad term but it's out there even if it doesn't mean actual psychosis) or more accurately delusions of grandeur where they thought they'd come up with some earth shattering discovery with their lil AI buddy because the models were bad about agreeability even before they went full sychopantic.
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