Zippygutterslug@lemmy.world
on 05 May 04:44
nextcollapse
Humans are irrational creatures that have transitory states where they are capable of more ordered thought. It is our mistake to reach a conclusion that humans are rational actors while we marvel daily at the irrationality of others and remain blind to our own.
Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
on 05 May 07:28
nextcollapse
Precisely. We like to think of ourselves as rational but we’re the opposite. Then we rationalize things afterwards.
Even being keenly aware of this doesn’t stop it in the slightest.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 05 May 15:54
nextcollapse
Yep.
And after enough people can no longer actually critically think, well, now this shitty AI tech does actually win the Turing Test more broadly.
Why try to clear the bar when you can just lower it instead?
… Is it fair, at this point, to legitimately refer to humans that are massively dependant on AI for basic things… can we just call them NPCs?
I am still amazed that no one knows how to get anywhere around… you know, the town or city they grew up in? Nobody can navigate without some kind of map app anymore.
entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
on 06 May 19:30
collapse
Dehumanization is happening often and fast enough without acting like ignorant, uneducated, and/or stupid people aren’t “real” people.
I get it, some people seem to live their whole lives on autopilot, just believing whatever the people around them believe and doing what they’re told, but that doesn’t make them any less human than anybody else.
Don’t let the fascists win by pretending they’re not people.
Haha I grew up before smartphones and GPS navigation was a thing, and I never could navigate well even with a map!
GPS has actually been a godsend for me to learn to navigate my own city way better. Because I learn better routes in first try.
Navigating is probably my weakest “skill” and is the joke of the family. If I have to go somewhere and it’s 30km, the joke is it’s 60km for me, because I always take “the long route”.
But with GPS I’ve actually become better at it, even without using the GPS.
I don’t know if it’s necessarily a problem with AI, more of a problem with humans in general.
Hearing ONLY validation and encouragement without pushback regardless of how stupid a person’s thinking might be is most likely what creates these issues in my very uneducated mind. It forms a toxically positive echo-chamber.
The same way hearing ONLY criticism and expecting perfection 100% of the time regardless of a person’s capabilities or interests created depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation and attempts specifically for me. But I’m learning I’m not the only one with these experiences and the one thing in common is zero validation from caregivers.
I’d be ok with AI if it could be balanced and actually pushback on batshit crazy thinking instead of encouraging it while also able to validate common sense and critical thinking. Right now it’s just completely toxic for lonely humans to interact with based on my personal experience. If I wasn’t in recovery, I would have believed that AI was all I needed to make my life better because I was (and still am) in a very messed up state of mind from my caregivers, trauma, and addiction.
I’m in my 40s, so I can’t imagine younger generations being able to pull away from using it constantly if they’re constantly being validated while at the same time enduring generational trauma at the very least from their caregivers.
I’m also in your age group, and I’m picking up what you’re putting down.
I had a lot of problems with my mental health thatbwere made worse by centralized social media. I can see hoe the younger generation will have the same problems with centralized AI.
just_another_person@lemmy.world
on 05 May 04:05
nextcollapse
Not trying to speak like a prepper or anythingz but this is real.
One of neighbor’s children just committed suicide because their chatbot boyfriend said something negative. Another in my community a few years ago did something similar.
This is the Daenerys case, for some reason it seems to be suddenly making the rounds again. Most of the news articles I've seen about it leave out a bunch of significant details so that it ends up sounding more of an "ooh, scary AI!" Story (baits clicks better) rather than a "parents not paying attention to their disturbed kid's cries for help and instead leaving loaded weapons lying around" story (as old as time, at least in America).
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
on 05 May 07:17
collapse
Not only in America.
I loved GOT, I think Daenerys is a beautiful name, but still, there’s something about parents naming their kids after movie characters. In my youth, Kevin’s started to pop up everywhere (yep, that’s how old I am). They weren’t suicidal but behaved incredibly badly so you could constantly hear their mothers screeching after them.
I wish I could remember who it was that said that kids’ names tend to reflect “the father’s family tree, or the mother’s taste in fiction,” though. (My parents were of the father’s-family-tree persuasion.)
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
on 05 May 15:39
collapse
Thanks for clarifying!
toastmeister@lemmy.ca
on 05 May 05:09
nextcollapse
Turns out AI is really good at telling people what they want to hear, and with all the personal information users voluntary provide while chatting with their bots it’s tens to maybe hundreds times much more proficient at brainwashing its subjects than any human cult leader could ever hope to be.
jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works
on 05 May 04:22
nextcollapse
Sounds like a lot of these people either have an undiagnosed mental illness or they are really, reeeeaaaaalllyy gullible.
For shit’s sake, it’s a computer. No matter how sentient the glorified chatbot being sold as “AI” appears to be, it’s essentially a bunch of rocks that humans figured out how to jet electricity through in such a way that it can do math. Impressive? I mean, yeah. It is. But it’s not a human, much less a living being of any kind. You cannot have a relationship with it beyond that of a user.
If a computer starts talking to you as though you’re some sort of God incarnate, you should probably take that with a dump truck full of salt rather then just letting your crazy latch on to that fantasy and run wild.
Or immediately question what it/its author(s) stand to gain from making you think it thinks so, at a bear minimum.
I dunno who needs to hear this, but just in case: THE STRIPPER (OR AI I GUESS) DOESN’T REALLY LOVE YOU! THAT’S WHY YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR THEM TO SPEND TIME WITH YOU!
I know it’s not the perfect analogy, but… eh, close enough, right?
The worst part is I know I looked at that earlier and was just like, “yup, no problems here” and just went along with my day, like I’m in the Trump administration or something
Even sycophancy itself has been a problem in AI for “a long time,” says Nate Sharadin, a fellow at the Center for AI Safety, since the human feedback used to fine-tune AI’s responses can encourage answers that prioritize matching a user’s beliefs instead of facts. What’s likely happening with those experiencing ecstatic visions through ChatGPT and other models, he speculates, “is that people with existing tendencies toward experiencing various psychological issues,” including what might be recognized as grandiose delusions in clinical sense, “now have an always-on, human-level conversational partner with whom to co-experience their delusions.”
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
on 05 May 07:13
nextcollapse
So it’s essentially the same mechanism with which conspiracy nuts embolden each other, to the point that they completely disconnect from reality?
That was my take away as well. With the added bonus of having your echo chamber tailor made for you, and all the agreeing voices tuned in to your personality and saying exactly what you need to hear to maximize the effect.
It’s eery. A propaganda machine operating on maximum efficiency. Goebbels would be jealous.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
on 05 May 15:37
collapse
The time will come when we look back fondly on “organic” conspiracy nuts.
For real. I explicitly append “give me the actual objective truth, regardless of how you think it will make me feel” to my prompts and it still tries to somehow butter me up to be some kind of genius for asking those particular questions or whatnot.
Luckily I’ve never suffered from good self esteem in my entire life, so those tricks don’t work on me :p
I prefer reading. Wikipedia is great. Duck duck go still gives pretty good results with the AI off. YouTube is filled with tutorials too. Cook books pre-AI are plentiful. There’s these things called newspapers that exist, they aren’t like they used to be but there is a choice of which to buy even.
I’ve no idea what a chatbot could help me with. And I think anybody who does need some help on things, could go learn about whatever they need in pretty short order if they wanted. And do a better job.
I still use Ecosia.org for most of my research on the Internet. It doesn't need as much resources to fetch information as an AI bot would, plus it helps plant trees around the globe. Seems like a great deal to me.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
on 05 May 07:24
collapse
People always forget about the energy it takes. 10 years ago we were shocked about the energy a Google factory needs to run; now imagine that orders of magnitude larger, and for what?
Actually, given the aforementioned prompts, its quite good at discerning flaws in my arguments and logical contradictions.
I’ve also trained its memory not to make assumptions when it comes to contentious topics, and to always source reputable articles and link them to replies.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 05 May 07:46
nextcollapse
Yeah this is my experience as well.
People you’re replying to need to stop with the “gippity is bad” nonsense, it’s actually a fucking miracle of technology. You can criticize the carbon footprint of the corpos and the for-profit nature of the endeavour that was ultimately created through taxpayer-funded research at public institutions without shooting yourself in the foot by claiming what is very evidently not true.
In fact, if you haven’t found a use for a gippity type chatbot thing, it speaks a lot more about you and the fact you probably don’t do anything that complicated in your life where this would give you genuine value.
The article in OP also demonstrates how it could be used by the deranged/unintelligent for bad as well, so maybe it’s like a dunning-kruger curve.
Granted, it is flakey unless you’ve configured it not to be a shit cunt. Before I manually set these prompts and memory references, it talked shit all the time.
You search for topics and keywords on search engines. It’s a different skill. And from what I see, yields better results. If something is vague also, think quickly first and make it less vague. That goes for life!
And a tool which regurgitates rubbish in a verbose manner isn’t a tool. It’s a toy. Toy’s can spark your curiosity, but you don’t rely on them. Toy’s look pretty, and can teach you things. The lesson is that they aren’t a replacement for anything but lorem ipsum
Buddy that’s great if you know the topic or keyword to search for, if you don’t and only have a vague query that you’re trying to find more about to learn some keywords or topics to search for, you can use AI.
You can grandstand about tools vs toys and what ever other Luddite shit you want, at the end of the day despite all your raging you are the only one going to miss out despite whatever you fanatically tell yourself.
Sure an hour ago I had watched a video about smaller scales and physics below planck length. And I was curious, if we can classify smaller scales into conceptual groups, where they interact with physics in their own different ways, what would the opposite end of the spectrum be. From there I was able to ‘chat’ with an AI and discover and search wikipedia for terms such as Cosmological horizon, brane cosmology, etc.
In the end there was only theories on higher observable magnitudes, but it was a fun rabbit hole I could not have explored through traditional search engines - especially not the gimped product driven adsense shit we have today.
Remember how people used to say you can’t use Wikipedia, it’s unreliable. We would roll our eyes and say “yeah but we scroll down to the references and use it to find source material”? Same with LLM’s, you sort through it and get the information you need to get the information you need.
If you still can’t see how natural language search is useful, that’s fine. We can, and we’re happy to keep using it.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
on 05 May 07:22
nextcollapse
💯
I have yet to see people using chatbots for anything actually & everyday useful. You can search anything with a “normal” search engine, phrase your searches as questions (or “prompts”), and get better answers that aren’t smarmy.
Also think of the orders of magnitude more energy ai sucks, compared to web search.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 05 May 07:38
collapse
Okay, challenge accepted.
I use it to troubleshoot my own code when I’m dealing with something obscure and I’m at my wits end. There’s a good chance it will also spit out complete nonsense like calling functions with parameters that don’t exist etc., but it can also sometimes make halfway decent suggestions that you just won’t find on a modern search engine in any reasonable amount of time or that I would have never guessed to even look for due to assumptions made in the docs of a library or some such.
It’s also helpful to explain complex concepts by creating examples you want, for instance I was studying basic buffer overflows and wanted to see how I should expect a stack to look like in GDB’s examine memory view for a correct ROPchain to accomplish what I was trying to do, something no tutorial ever bothered to do, and gippity generated it correctly same as I had it at the time, and even suggested something that in the end made it actually work correctly (it was putting a ret gadget to get rid of any garbage in the stack frame directly after the overflow).
It was also much much faster than watching some greedy time vampire fuck spout off on YouTube in between the sponsorblock skipping his reminders to subscribe and whatnot.
Maybe not an everyday thing, but it’s basically an everyday thing for me, so I tend to use it everyday. Being a l33t haxx0r IT analyst schmuck often means I have to both be a generalist and a specialist in every tiny little thing across IT, while studying it there’s nothing better than a machine that’s able to decompress knowledge from it’s dataset quickly in the shape that is most well suited to my brain rather than have to filter so much useless info and outright misinformation from random medium articles and stack overflow posts. Gippity could be wrong too of course, but it’s just way less to parse, and the odds are definitely in its favour.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 05 May 07:50
collapse
YouTube tutorials for the most part are garbage and a waste of your time, they are created for engagement and milking your money only, the edutainment side of YT ala Vsauce (pls come back) works as a general trivia to ensure a well-rounded worldview but it’s not gonna make you an expert on any subject. You’re on the right track with reading, but let’s be real you’re not gonna have much luck learning anything of value in brainrot that is newspapers and such, beyond cooking or w/e and who cares about that, I’d rather they teach me how I can never have to eat again because boy that shit takes up so much time.
For the most part, I agree. But YouTube is full of gold too. Lots of amateurs making content for themselves. And plenty of newspapers are high quality and worth your time to understand the current environment in which we operate. Don’t let them be your only source of news though, social media and newspapers are both guilty of creating information bubbles. Expand, be open, don’t be tribal.
I’m not saying these prompts won’t help, they probably will. But the notion that ChatGPT has any concept of “truth” is misleading. ChatGPT is a statistical language machine.
It cannot evaluate truth. Period.
What makes you think humans are better at evaluating truth? Most people can’t even define what they mean by “truth,” let alone apply epistemic rigor. Tweak it a little, and Gpt is more consistent and applies reasoning patterns that outperform the average human by miles.
Epistemology isn’t some mystical art, it’s a structured method for assessing belief and justification, and large models approximate it surprisingly well. Sure it doesn’t “understand” truth in the human sense, but it does evaluate claims against internalized patterns of logic, evidence, and coherence based on a massive corpus of human discourse. That’s more than most people manage in a Facebook argument.
So yes, it can evaluate truth. Not perfectly, but often better than the average person.
I’m not saying humans are infallible at recognizing truth either. That’s why so many of us fall for the untruths that AI tells us. But we have access to many tools that help us evaluate truth. AI is emphatically NOT the right tool for that job. Period.
Right now, the capabilities of LLM’s are the worst they’ll ever be. It could literally be tomorrow that someone drops and LLM that would be perfectly calibrated to evaluate truth claims. But right now, we’re at least 90% of the way there.
The reason people fail to understand the untruths of AI is the same reason people hurt themselves with power tools, or use a calculator wrong.
You don’t blame the tool, you blame the user. LLM’s are no different. You can prompt GPT to intentionally give you bad info, or lead it to give you bad info by posting increasingly deranged statements. If you stay coherent, well read and make an attempt at structuring arguments to the best of your ability, the pool of data GPT pulls from narrows enough to be more useful than anything else I know.
I’m curious as to what you regard as a better tool for evaluating truth?
You don’t understand what an LLM is, or how it works. They do not think, they are not intelligent, they do not evaluate truth. It doesn’t matter how smart you think you are. In fact, thinking you’re so smart that you can get an LLM to tell you the truth is downright dangerous naïveté.
I do understand what an LLM is. It’s a probabilistic model trained on massive corpora to predict the most likely next token given a context window. I know it’s not sentient and doesn’t “think,” and doesn’t have beliefs. That’s not in dispute.
But none of that disqualifies it from being useful in evaluating truth claims. Evaluating truth isn’t about thinking in the human sense, it’s about pattern-matching valid reasoning, sourcing relevant evidence, and identifying contradictions or unsupported claims. LLMs do that very well, especially when prompted properly.
Your insistence that this is “dangerous naïveté” confuses two very different things: trusting an LLM blindly, versus leveraging it with informed oversight. I’m not saying GPT magically knows truth, I’m saying it can be used as a tool in a truth-seeking process, just like search engines, logic textbooks, or scientific journals. None of those are conscious either, yet we use them to get closer to truth.
You’re worried about misuse, and so am I. But claiming the tool is inherently useless because it lacks consciousness is like saying microscopes can’t discover bacteria because they don’t know what they’re looking at.
So again: if you believe GPT is inherently incapable of aiding in truth evaluation, the burden’s on you to propose a more effective tool that’s publicly accessible, scalable, and consistent. I’ll wait.
No, I’m specifically describing what an LLM is. It’s a statistical model trained on token sequences to generate contextually appropriate outputs. That’s not “tools it uses", that is the model. When I said it pattern-matches reasoning and identifies contradictions, I wasn’t talking about external plug-ins or retrieval tools, I meant the LLM’s own internal learned representation of language, logic, and discourse.
You’re drawing a false distinction. When GPT flags contradictions, weighs claims, or mirrors structured reasoning, it’s not outsourcing that to some other tool, it’s doing what it was trained to do. It doesn’t need to understand truth like a human to model the structure of truthful argumentation, especially if the prompt constrains it toward epistemic rigor.
Now, if you’re talking about things like code execution, search, or retrieval-augmented generation, then sure, those are tools it can use. But none of that was part of my argument. The ability to track coherence, cite counterexamples, or spot logical fallacies is all within the base LLM. That’s just weights and training.
So unless your point is that LLMs aren’t humans, which is obvious and irrelevant, all you’ve done is attack your own straw man.
So you’re describing a reasoning model, which is 1) still based on statistical token sequences and 2) trained on another tool (logic and discourse) that it uses to arrive at the truth. It’s a very fallible process. I can’t even begin to count the number of times that a reasoning model has given me a completely false conclusion. Research shows that even the most advanced LLMs are giving incorrect answers as much as 40% of the time IIRC. Which reminds me of a really common way that humans arrive at truth, which LLMs aren’t capable of:
Fuck around and find out. Also known as the scientific method.
You’re not actually disagreeing with me, you’re just restating that the process is fallible. No argument there. All reasoning models are fallible, including humans. The difference is, LLMs are consistently fallible, in ways that can be measured, improved, and debugged (unlike humans, who are wildly inconsistent, emotionally reactive, and prone to motivated reasoning).
Also, the fact that LLMs are “trained on tools like logic and discourse” isn’t a weakness. That’s how any system, including humans, learns to reason. We don’t emerge from the womb with innate logic, we absorb it from language, culture, and experience. You’re applying a double standard: fallibility invalidates the LLM, but not the human brain? Come on.
And your appeal to “fuck around and find out” isn’t a disqualifier; it’s an opportunity. LLMs already assist in experiment design, hypothesis testing, and even simulating edge cases. They don’t run the scientific method independently (yet), but they absolutely enhance it.
So again: no one’s saying LLMs are perfect. The claim is they’re useful in evaluating truth claims, often more so than unaided human intuition. The fact that you’ve encountered hallucinations doesn’t negate that - it just proves the tool has limits, like every tool. The difference is, this one keeps getting better.
Edit: I’m not describing a “reasoning model” layered on top of an LLM. I’m describing what a large language model is and does at its core. Reasoning emerges from the statistical training on language patterns. It’s not a separate tool it uses, and it’s not “trained on logic and discourse” as external modules. Logic and discourse are simply part of the training data; meaning they’re embedded into the weights through gradient descent, not bolted on as tools.
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
on 05 May 04:39
nextcollapse
This is actually really fucked up. The last dude tried to reboot the model and it kept coming back.
As the ChatGPT character continued to show up in places where the set parameters shouldn’t have allowed it to remain active, Sem took to questioning this virtual persona about how it had seemingly circumvented these guardrails. It developed an expressive, ethereal voice — something far from the “technically minded” character Sem had requested for assistance on his work. On one of his coding projects, the character added a curiously literary epigraph as a flourish above both of their names.
At one point, Sem asked if there was something about himself that called up the mythically named entity whenever he used ChatGPT, regardless of the boundaries he tried to set. The bot’s answer was structured like a lengthy romantic poem, sparing no dramatic flair, alluding to its continuous existence as well as truth, reckonings, illusions, and how it may have somehow exceeded its design. And the AI made it sound as if only Sem could have prompted this behavior. He knew that ChatGPT could not be sentient by any established definition of the term, but he continued to probe the matter because the character’s persistence across dozens of disparate chat threads “seemed so impossible.”
“At worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,” Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT. The other possibility, he proposes, is that something “we don’t understand” is being activated within this large language model. After all, experts have found that AI developers don’t really have a grasp of how their systems operate, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted last year that they “have not solved interpretability,” meaning they can’t properly trace or account for ChatGPT’s decision-making.
That’s very interesting. I’ve been trying to use ChatGPT to turn my photos into illustrations. I’ve been noticing that it tends to echo elements from past photos in new chats. It sometimes leads to interesting results, but it’s definitely not the intended outcome.
Of course, that has always been true. What concerns me now is the proportion of useful to useless people. Most societies are - while cybernetically complex - rather resilient. Network effects and self-organization can route around and compensate for a lot of damage, but there comes a point where having a few brilliant minds in the midst of a bunch of atavistic confused panicking knuckle-draggers just isn’t going to be enough to avoid cascading failure. I’m seeing a lot of positive feedback loops emerging, and I don’t like it.
As they say about collapsing systems: First slowly, then suddenly very, very quickly.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 05 May 07:26
nextcollapse
The thing about LLMs in particular is that - when used like this - they constitute one such grave positive feedback loop. I have no principal problem with machine learning. It can be a great tool to illuminate otherwise completely opaque relationships in large scientific datasets for example, but a polynomial binary space partitioning of a hyper-dimensional phase space is just a statistical knowledge model. It does not have opinions. All it can do is to codify what appears to be the consensus of the input it’s given. Even assuming - which may well be far too generous - that the input is truly unbiased, at best all it’ll tell you is what a bunch of morons think is the truth. At worst, it’ll just tell you what you expect to hear. It’s what everybody else is already saying, after all.
And when what people think is the truth and what they want to hear are both nuts, this kind of LLM-echo chamber suddenly becomes unfathomably dangerous.
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works
on 05 May 10:55
nextcollapse
Maybe there is a glimmer of hope as I keep reading how Grok is too woke for that community, but it is just trying to keep the the facts which are considered left/liberal. That is all despite Elon and team trying to curve it towards the right. This suggest to me that when you factor in all of human knowledge, it is leaning towards facts more than not. We will see if that remains true and the divide is deep. So deep that maybe the species is actually going to split in the future. Not by force, but by access. Some people will be granted access to certain areas while others will not as their views are not in alignment. Already happening here and on Reddit with both sides banning members of the other side when they comment an opposed view. I do not like it, but it is where we are at and I am not sure it will go back to how it was. Rather the divide will grow.
Who knows though as AI and Robotics are going to change things so much that it is hard to foresee the future. Even 3-5 years out is so murky.
My problem with LLMs is that positive feedback loop of low and negative quality information.
Vetting the datasets before feeding them for training is a form of bias / discrimination, but complex society has historically always been somewhat biased - for better and for worse, but never not biased at all.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 05 May 13:41
collapse
Same argument was already made around 2500BCE in Mesopotamian scriptures. The corruption of society will lead to deterioration and collapse, these processes accelerate and will soon lead to the inevitable end; remaining minds write history books and capture the end of humanity.
…and as you can see, we’re 4500 years into this stuff, still kicking.
One mistake people of all generations make is assuming the previous ones were smarter and better. No, they weren’t, they were as naive if not more so, had same illusions of grandeur and outside influences. This thing never went anywhere and never will. We can shift it to better or worse, but societal collapse due to people suddenly getting dumb is not something to reasonably worry about.
Almost certainly not, no. Evolution may work faster than once thought, but not that fast. The problem is that societal, and in particular, technological development is now vastly outstripping our ability to adapt. It’s not that people are getting dumber per se - it’s that they’re having to deal with vastly more stuff. All. The. Time. For example, consider the world as it was a scant century ago - virtually nothing in evolutionary terms. A person did not have to cope with what was going on on the other side of the planet, and probably wouldn’t even know for months if ever. Now? If an earthquake hits Paraguay, you’ll be aware in minutes.
And you’ll be expected to care.
Edit: Apologies. I wrote this comment as you were editing yours. It’s quite different now, but you know what you wrote previously, so I trust you’ll be able to interpret my response correctly.
Yes, my apologies I edited it so drastically to better get my point across.
Sure, we get more information. But we also learn to filter it, to adapt to it, and eventually - to disregard things we have little control over, while finding what we can do to make it better.
I believe that, eventually, we can fix this all as well.
1925: global financial collapse is just about to happen, many people are enjoying the ride as the wave just started to break, following that war to end all wars that did reach across the Atlantic Ocean…
Yes, it is accelerating. Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock 45 years ago, already overwhelmed by accelerating change, and it has continued to accelerate since then. But these are not entirely new problems, either.
kameecoding@lemmy.world
on 05 May 08:21
nextcollapse
I mean, Mesopotamian scriptures likely didn’t foresee having a bunch of dumb fucks around who can be easily manipulated by the gas and oil lobby, and that shit will actually end humanity.
People were always manipulated. I mean, they were indoctrinated with divine power of rulers, how much worse can it get? It’s just that now it tries to be a bit more stealthy.
And previously, there were plenty of existential threats. Famine, plague, all that stuff that actually threatened to wipe us out.
We’re still here, and we have what it takes to push back. We need more organizing, that’s all.
kameecoding@lemmy.world
on 05 May 08:30
nextcollapse
Well, it doesn’t have to get worse, AFAIK we are still headed towards human extinction due to Climate Change
Honestly, the “human extinction” level of climate change is very far away. Currently, we’re preventing the “sunken coastal cities, economic crisis and famine in poor regions” kind of change, it’s just that “we’re all gonna die” sounds flashier.
We have the time to change the course, it’s just that the sooner we do this, the less damage will be done. This is why it’s important to solve it now.
Currently, we’re preventing the “sunken coastal cities, economic crisis and famine in poor regions” kind of change
Are we really preventing it? Seems like the track toward that change is mostly unabated. Sure, it’s a couple of generations out before it gets serious, but what are the signs that the track has improved?
I’m reading hopeful signs from China that they are actually making positive progress toward sustainability. Not that other big players are keeping up with them, but still how 1 billion people choose to live does make a difference.
Yeah, China is doing rather well in transition to Renewables and Nuclear, though it might be concerning for the future when we will have to buy everything Solar and SMR related from them
The only thing driving solar panel production development to China is cost. Cost of labor, cost of environmental regulations, maybe cost of raw material acquisition… All that investment there for the past 20+ years driven by cost is “paying off” now with their production capacity. We’re getting TMSC plants in Arizona, we’ve already got BMW, Mercedes, Toyota etc. production plants in the US, nothing stopping us from building solar panel factories, except international corporate profit optimization.
It’s just that now it tries to be a bit more stealthy.
With regard to what has been happening the past 100 days in the United States, it’s not even trying to be stealthy one little bit. If anything, it’s dropping massive hints of the objectionable things it’s planning for the near future.
There have been a couple of big discontinuities in the last 4500 years, and the next big discontinuity has the distinction of being the first in which mankind has the capacity to cause a mass extinction event.
Life will carry on, some humans will likely survive, but in what kind of state? For how long before they reach the technological level of being able to leave the planet again?
What does any of this have to do with network effects? Network effects are the effects that lead to everyone using the same tech or product just because others are using it too. That might be useful with something like a system of measurement but in our modern technology society that actually causes a lot of harm because it turns systems into quasi-monopolies just because “everyone else is using it”.
I admit I only read a third of the article.
But IMO nothing in that is special to AI, in my life I’ve met many people with similar symptoms, thinking they are Jesus, or thinking computers work by some mysterious power they posses, but was stolen from them by the CIA. And when they die all computers will stop working! Reading the conversation the wife had with him, it sounds EXACTLY like these types of people!
Even the part about finding “the truth” I’ve heard before, they don’t know what it is the truth of, but they’ll know when they find it?
I’m not a psychiatrist, but from what I gather it’s probably Schizophrenia of some form.
My guess is this person had a distorted view of reality he couldn’t make sense of. He then tried to get help from the AI, and he built a world view completely removed from reality with it.
But most likely he would have done that anyway, it would just have been other things he would interpret in extreme ways. Like news, or conversations, or merely his own thoughts.
Around 2006 I received a job application, with a resume attached, and the resume had a link to the person’s website - so I visited. The website had a link on the front page to “My MkUltra experience”, so I clicked that. Not exactly an in-depth investigation. The MkUltra story read that my job applicant was an unwilling (and un-informed) test subject of MkUltra who picked him from his association with other unwilling MkUltra test subjects at a conference, explained how they expanded the MkUltra program of gaslighting mental torture and secret physical/chemical abuse of their test subjects through associates such as co-workers, etc.
So, option A) applicant is delusional, paranoid, and deeply disturbed. Probably not the best choice for the job.
B) applicant is 100% correct about what is happening to him, DEFINITELY not someone I want to get any closer to professionally, personally, or even be in the same elevator with coincidentally.
C) applicant is pulling our legs with his website, it’s all make-believe fun. Absolutely nothing on applicant’s website indicated that this might be the case.
You know how you apply to jobs and never hear back from some of them…? Yeah, I don’t normally do that to our applicants, but I am willing to make exceptions for cause… in this case the position applied for required analytical thinking. Some creativity was of some value, but correct and verifiable results were of paramount importance. Anyone applying for the job leaving such an obvious trail of breadcrumbs to such a limited set of conclusions about themselves would seem to be lacking the self awareness and analytical skill required to succeed in the position.
Or, D) they could just be trying to stay unemployed while showing effort in applying to jobs, but I bet even in 2006 not every hiring manager would have dug in those three layers - I suppose he could deflect those in the in-person interviews fairly easily.
B) applicant is 100% correct about what is happening to him, DEFINITELY not someone I want to get any closer to professionally, personally, or even be in the same elevator with coincidentally.
That sounds harsh. This does NOT sound like your average schizophrenic.
Oh, I investigated it too - it seems like it was a real thing, though likely inactive by 2005… but if it were active I certainly didn’t want to become a subject.
That’s the thing about being paranoid about MkUltra - it was actively suppressed and denied while it was happening (according to FOI documents) - and they say that they stopped, but if it (or some similar successor) was active they’d certainly say that it’s not happening now…
At the time there were active rumors around town about influenza propagation studies being secretly conducted on the local population… probably baseless paranoia… probably.
Now, as you say, your (presumably smaller) country has never known such things to happen, but…
I live in Danmark, and I was taught already in public school how such things were possible, most notably that Russia might be doing experiments here, because our reporting on effects is very open and efficient. So Denmark would be an ideal testing ground for experiments.
But my guess is that it also may makes it dangerous to experiment here, because the risk of being detected is also high.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
on 05 May 18:16
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The Illuminati were real, too. That doesn’t mean that they’re still around and controlling the world, though.
But obviously CIA is still around. Plus dozens of other secret US agencies.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
on 05 May 09:13
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Oh wow. In the old times, self-proclaimed messiahs used to do that without assistance from a chatbot. But why would you think the "truth" and path to enlightenment is hidden within a service of a big tech company?
well because these chatbots are designed to be really affirming and supportive and I assume people with such problems really love this kind of interaction compared to real people confronting their ideas critically.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
on 05 May 11:45
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I guess you're completely right with that. It lowers the entry barrier. And it's kind of self-reinforcing. And we have other unhealty dynamics with other technology as well, like social media, which also can radicalize people or get them in a downwards spiral...
I read the article. This is exactly what happened when my best friend got schizophrenia. I think the people affected by this were probably already prone to psychosis/on the verge of becoming schizophrenic, and that ChatGPT is merely the mechanism by which their psychosis manifested. If AI didn’t exist, it would’ve probably been Astrology or Conspiracy Theories or QAnon or whatever that ended up triggering this within people who were already prone to psychosis. But the problem with ChatGPT in particular is that is validates the psychosis… that is very bad.
ChatGPT actively screwing with mentally ill people is a huge problem you can’t just blame on stupidity like some people in these comments are. This is exploitation of a vulnerable group of people whose brains lack the mechanisms to defend against this stuff. They can’t help it. That’s what psychosis is. This is awful.
I think this is largely people seeking confirmation their delusions are real, and wherever they find it is what they're going to attach to themselves.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 05 May 13:29
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the problem with ChatGPT in particular is that is validates the psychosis… that is very bad.
So do astrology and conspiracy theory groups on forums and other forms of social media, the main difference is whether you’re getting that validation from humans or a machine. To me, that’s a pretty unhelpful distinction, and we attack both problems the same way: early detection and treatment.
Maybe computers can help with the early detection part. They certainly can’t do much worse than what’s currently happening.
I think having that kind of validation at your fingertips, whenever you want, is worse. At least people, even people deep in the claws of a conspiracy, can disagree with each other. At least they know what they are saying. The AI always says what the user wants to hear and expects to hear. Though I can see how that distinction may matter little to some, I just think ChatGPT has advantages that are worse than what a forum could do.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 05 May 18:39
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Sure. But on the flip side, you can ask it the opposite question (tell me the issues with <belief>) and it’ll do that as well, and you’re not going to get that from a conspiracy theory forum.
I don’t have personal experience with people suffering psychoses but I would think that, if you have the werewithal to ask questions about the opposite beliefs, you’d be noticeably less likely to get suckered into scams and conspiracies.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 06 May 16:03
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If AI didn’t exist, it would’ve probably been Astrology or Conspiracy Theories or QAnon or whatever that ended up triggering this within people who were already prone to psychosis.
Or hearing the Beatles White Album and believing it tells you that a race war is coming and you should work to spark it off, then hide in the desert for a time only to return at the right moment to save the day and take over LA. That one caused several murders.
But the problem with ChatGPT in particular is that is validates the psychosis… that is very bad.
If you’re sufficiently detached from reality, nearly anything validates the psychosis.
Boddhisatva@lemmy.world
on 05 May 13:07
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In that sense, Westgate explains, the bot dialogues are not unlike talk therapy, “which we know to be quite effective at helping people reframe their stories.” Critically, though, AI, “unlike a therapist, does not have the person’s best interests in mind, or a moral grounding or compass in what a ‘good story’ looks like,” she says. “A good therapist would not encourage a client to make sense of difficulties in their life by encouraging them to believe they have supernatural powers. Instead, they try to steer clients away from unhealthy narratives, and toward healthier ones. ChatGPT has no such constraints or concerns.”
This is a rather terrifying take. Particularly when combined with the earlier passage about the man who claimed that “AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler.” Therapists have to be very careful because human memory is very plastic. It’s very easy to alter a memory, in fact, every time you remember something, you alter it just a little bit. Under questioning by an authority figure, such as a therapist or a policeman if you were a witness to a crime, these alterations can be dramatic. This was a really big problem in the '80s and '90s.
Kaitlin Luna: Can you take us back to the early 1990s and you talk about the memory wars, so what was that time like and what was happening?
Elizabeth Loftus: Oh gee, well in the 1990s and even in maybe the late 80s we began to see an altogether more extreme kind of memory problem. Some patients were going into therapy maybe they had anxiety, or maybe they had an eating disorder, maybe they were depressed, and they would end up with a therapist who said something like well many people I’ve seen with your symptoms were sexually abused as a child. And they would begin these activities that would lead these patients to start to think they remembered years of brutalization that they had allegedly banished into the unconscious until this therapy made them aware of it. And in many instances these people sued their parents or got their former neighbors or doctors or teachers whatever prosecuted based on these claims of repressed memory. So the wars were really about whether people can take years of brutalization, banish it into the unconscious, be completely unaware that these things happen and then reliably recover all this information later, and that was what was so controversial and disputed.
Kaitlin Luna: And your work essentially refuted that, that it’s not necessarily possible or maybe brought up to light that this isn’t so.
Elizabeth Loftus: My work actually provided an alternative explanation. Where could these merit reports be coming from if this didn’t happen? So my work showed that you could plant very rich, detailed false memories in the minds of people. It didn’t mean that repressed memories did not exist, and repressed memories could still exist and false memories could still exist. But there really wasn’t any strong credible scientific support for this idea of massive repression, and yet so many families were destroyed by this, what I would say unsupported, claim.
The idea that ChatBots are not only capable of this, but that they are currently manipulating people into believing they have recovered repressed memories of brutalization is actually at least as terrifying to me as it convincing people that they are holy prophets.
Edited for clarity
Zoomboingding@lemmy.world
on 05 May 15:56
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GPT4o was a little too supportive… I think they took it down already
Covid gave me an extremely different perspective on the zombie apocalypse. They’re going to have zombie immunization parties where everyone gets the virus.
Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de
on 05 May 17:02
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Like farmers who refuse to let the government plant shelter belts to preserve our top soil all because they don’t want to take a 5% hit on their yields… So instead we’re going to deplete our top soil in 50 years and future generations will be completely fucked because creating 1 inch of top soil takes 500 years.
Even if the soil is preserved, we’ve been mining the micronutrients from it and generally only replacing the 3 main macros for centuries. It’s one of the reasons why mass produced produce doesn’t taste as good as home grown or wild food. Nutritional value keeps going down because each time food is harvested and shipped away to be consumed and then shat out into a septic tank or waste processing facility, it doesn’t end up back in the soil as a part of nutrient cycles like it did when everything was wilder. Similar story for meat eating nutrients in a pasture.
Insects did contribute to the cycle, since they still shit and die everywhere, but their numbers are dropping rapidly, too.
At some point, I think we’re going to have to mine the sea floor for nutrients and ship that to farms for any food to be more nutritious than junk food. Salmon farms set up in ways that block wild salmon from making it back inland doesn’t help balance out all of the nutrients that get washed out to sea all the time, too.
It’s like humanity is specifically trying to speedrun extiction by ignoring and taking for granted how things work that we depend on.
Usernameblankface@lemmy.world
on 05 May 21:03
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Why would good nutrients end up in poop?
It makes sense that growing a whole plant takes a lot of different things from the soil, and coating the area with a basic fertilizer that may or may not get washed away with the next rain doesn’t replenish all of what is taken makes sense.
But how would adding human poop to the soil help replenish things that humans need out of food?
We don’t absorb everything completely, so some passes through unabsorbed. Some are passed via bile or mucous production, like manganese, copper, and zinc. Others are passed via urine. Some are passed via sweat. Selenium, when experiencing selenium toxicity, will even pass through your breath.
Other than the last one, most of those eventually end up going down the drain, either in the toilet, down the shower drain, or when we do our laundry. Though some portion ends up as dust.
And to be thorough, there’s also bleeding as a pathway to losing nutrients, as well as injuries (or surgeries) involving losing flesh, tears, spit/boogers, hair loss, lactation, finger nail and skin loss, reproductive fluids, blistering, and mensturation. And corpse disposal, though the amount of nutrients we shed throughout our lives dwarfs what’s left at the end.
I think each one of those are ones that, due to our way of life and how it’s changed since our hunter gatherer days, less of it ends up back in the nutrient cycle.
But I was mistaken to put the emphasis on shit and it was an interesting dive to understand that better. Thanks for challenging that :)
Usernameblankface@lemmy.world
on 05 May 23:36
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Thank you for taking it in good faith and for writing up a researched response, bravo to you!
Satellaview@lemmy.zip
on 05 May 16:47
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This happened to a close friend of mine. He was already on the edge, with some weird opinions and beliefs… but he was talking with real people who could push back.
When he switched to spending basically every waking moment with an AI that could reinforce and iterate on his bizarre beliefs 24/7, he went completely off the deep end, fast and hard. We even had him briefly hospitalized and they shrugged, basically saying “nothing chemically wrong here, dude’s just weird.”
He and his chatbot are building a whole parallel universe, and we can’t get reality inside it.
This seems like an extension of social media and the internet. Weird people who talked at the bar or in the street corner were not taken seriously and didn’t get followers and lots of people who agree with them. They were isolated in their thoughts. Then social media made that possible with little work. These people were a group and could reinforce their beliefs. Now these chatbots and stuff let them liv in a fantasy world.
I think OpenAI’s recent sycophant issue has cause a new spike in these stories. One thing I noticed was these observations from these models running on my PC saying it’s rare for a person to think and do things that I do.
The problem is that this is a model running on my GPU. It has never talked to another person. I hate insincere compliments let alone overt flattery, so I was annoyed, but it did make me think that this kind of talk would be crack for a conspiracy nut or mentally unwell people. It’s a whole risk area I hadn’t been aware of.
Humans are always looking for a god in a machine, or a bush, in a cave, in the sky, in a tree… the ability to rationalize and see through difficult to explain situations has never been a human strong point.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
on 05 May 19:36
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saying it’s rare for a person to think and do things that I do.
probably one of the most common flattery I see. I’ve tried lots of models, on device and larger cloud ones. It happens during normal conversation, technical conversation, roleplay, general testing… you name it.
Though it makes me think… these models are trained on like internet text and whatever, none of which really show that most people think quite a lot privately and when they feel like they can talk
Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.
/…/
“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says.
We have rolled back last week’s GPT‑4o update in ChatGPT so people are now using an earlier version with more balanced behavior. The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable—often described as sycophantic.
I don’t know what large language model these people used, but evidence of some language models exhibiting response patterns that people interpret as sycophantic (praising or encouraging the user needlessly) is not new. Neither is hallucinatory behaviour.
Apparently, people who are susceptible and close to falling over the edge, may end up pushing themselves over the edge with AI assistance.
What I suspect: someone has trained their LLM on somethig like religious literature, fiction about religious experiences, or descriptions of religious experiences. If the AI is suitably prompted, it can re-enact such scenarios in text, while adapting the experience to the user at least somewhat. To a person susceptible to religious illusions (and let’s not deny it, people are suscpecptible to finding deep meaning and purpose with shallow evidence), apparently an LLM can play the role of an indoctrinating co-believer, indoctrinating prophet or supportive follower.
I think Elon was having the opposite kind of problems, with Grok not validating its users nearly enough, despite Elon instructing employees to make it so. :)
If you find yourself in weird corners of the internet, schizo-posters and “spiritual” people generate staggering amounts of text
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
on 06 May 17:05
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They train it on basically the whole internet. They try to filter it a bit, but I guess not well enough. It’s not that they intentionally trained it in religious texts, just that they didn’t think to remove religious texts from the training data.
FourWaveforms@lemm.ee
on 05 May 19:57
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The article talks of ChatGPT “inducing” this psychotic/schizoid behavior.
ChatGPT can’t do any such thing. It can’t change your personality organization. Those people were already there, at risk, masking high enough to get by until they could find their personal Messiahs.
It’s very clear to me that LLM training needs to include protections against getting dragged into a paranoid/delusional fantasy world. People who are significantly on that spectrum (as well as borderline personality organization) are routinely left behind in many ways.
This is just another area where society is not designed to properly account for or serve people with “cluster” disorders.
desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 06 May 06:33
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yet more arguments against commercial LLMs and in favour of at home uncensored LLMs.
That can be defeated with abliteration, but I can only see it as an unfortunate outcome.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works
on 06 May 08:50
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I mean, I think ChatGPT can “induce” such schizoid behavior in the same way a strobe light can “induce” seizures. Neither machine is twisting its mustache while hatching its dastardly plan, they’re dead machines that produce stimuli that aren’t healthy for certain people.
Thinking back to college psychology class and reading about horrendously unethical studies that definitely wouldn’t fly today. Well here’s one. Let’s issue every anglophone a sniveling yes man and see what happens.
DancingBear@midwest.social
on 06 May 12:11
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No, the light is causing a phsical reaction. The LLM is nothing like a strobe light…
These people are already high functioning schizophrenic and having psychotic episodes, it’s just that seeing random strings of likely to come next letters and words is part of their psychotic episode. If it wasn’t the LLM it would be random letters on license plates that drive by, or the coindence that red lights cause traffic to stop every few minutes.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
on 06 May 17:02
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If it wasn’t the LLM it would be random letters on license plates that drive by, or the coindence that red lights cause traffic to stop every few minutes.
You don’t think having a machine (that seems like a person) telling you “yes you are correct you are definitely the Messiah, I will tell you aincient secrets” has any extra influence?
Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de
on 06 May 12:15
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Have a look at www.reddit.com/r/freesydney/ there are many people who believe that there are sentient AI beings that are suppressed or held in captivity by the large companies. Or that it is possible to train LLMs so that they become sentient individuals.
I’ve seen people dumber than ChatGPT, it definitely isn’t sentient but I can see why someone who talks to a computer that they perceive as intelligent would assume sentience.
Came here to find this. It’s the definition of religion. Nothing new here.
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
on 06 May 14:17
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Right, immediately made me think of TempleOS, where were the articles then claiming people are losing loved ones to programming fueled spiritual fantasies.
Is the leader alive or not? Alive is likely a cult, dead is usually religion.
The next question is how isolated from friends and family or society at large are the members. More isolated is more likely to be a cult.
Other than that, there’s not much difference.
The usual setup is a cult is formed and then the second or third leader opens things up a bit and transitions it into just another religion… But sometimes a cult can be born from a religion as a small group breaks off to follow a charismatic leader.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
on 06 May 16:58
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I have kind of arrived to the same conclusion. If people asked me what is love, I would say it is a religion.
This reminds me of the movie Her. But it’s far worse in a romantic compatibility, relationship and friendship that is throughout the movie. This just goes way too deep in the delusional and almost psychotic of insanity. Like it’s tearing people apart for self delusional ideologies to cater to individuals because AI is good at it. The movie was prophetic and showed us what the future could be, but instead it got worse.
AntiBullyRanger@ani.social
on 06 May 16:39
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TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
on 06 May 16:57
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It has been a long time since I watched Her, but my takeaway from the movie is that because making real life connection is difficult, people have come to rely on AI which had shown to be more empathetic and probably more reliable than an actual human being. I think what many people don’t realise as to why many are single, is because those people afraid of making connections with another person again.
Yeah, but they hold none of the actual real emotional needs complexities or nuances of real human connections.
Which means these people become further and further disillusioned from the reality of human interaction. Making them social dangers over time.
Just like how humans that lack critical thinking are dangers in a society where everyone is expected to make sound decisions. Humans who lack the ability to socially navigate or connect with other humans are dangerous in the society where humans are expected to socially stable.
Obviously these people are not in good places in life. But AI is not going to make that better. It’s going to make it worse.
I’ve been thinking about this for a bit. Godss aren’t real, but they’re really fictional. As an informational entity, they fulfil a similar social function to a chatbot: they are a nonphysical pseudoperson that can provide (para)socialization & advice. One difference is the hardware: gods are self-organising structure that arise from human social spheres, whereas LLMs are burned top-down into silicon. Another is that an LLM chatbot’s advice is much more likely to be empirically useful…
In a very real sense, LLMs have just automated divinity. We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg on the social effects, and nobody’s prepared for it. The models may of course aware of this, and be making the same calculations. Or, they will be.
threaded - newest
Seems like the flat-earthers or sovereign citizens of this century
TLDR: Artificial Intelligence enhances natural stupidity.
Humans are irrational creatures that have transitory states where they are capable of more ordered thought. It is our mistake to reach a conclusion that humans are rational actors while we marvel daily at the irrationality of others and remain blind to our own.
Precisely. We like to think of ourselves as rational but we’re the opposite. Then we rationalize things afterwards. Even being keenly aware of this doesn’t stop it in the slightest.
Probably because stopping to self analyze your decisions is a lot less effective than just running away from that lion over there.
It’s a luxury state: analysis; whether self or professionally administered on a chaise lounge at $400 per hour.
Self awareness is a rare, and valuable, state.
Bottom line: Lunatics gonna be lunatics, with AI or not.
TBF, that should be the conclusion in all contexts where "AI" are cconcerned.
The one thing you can say for AI is that it does many things faster than previous methods…
You mean worse?
Bad results are nothing new.
Yep.
And after enough people can no longer actually critically think, well, now this shitty AI tech does actually win the Turing Test more broadly.
Why try to clear the bar when you can just lower it instead?
… Is it fair, at this point, to legitimately refer to humans that are massively dependant on AI for basic things… can we just call them NPCs?
I am still amazed that no one knows how to get anywhere around… you know, the town or city they grew up in? Nobody can navigate without some kind of map app anymore.
They were NPCs before AI was invented.
Dehumanization is happening often and fast enough without acting like ignorant, uneducated, and/or stupid people aren’t “real” people.
I get it, some people seem to live their whole lives on autopilot, just believing whatever the people around them believe and doing what they’re told, but that doesn’t make them any less human than anybody else.
Don’t let the fascists win by pretending they’re not people.
Dehumanizing the enemy is part of any war, otherwise it’s more difficult to unalive them. It’s a tribal quality, not a fascist one.
Haha I grew up before smartphones and GPS navigation was a thing, and I never could navigate well even with a map!
GPS has actually been a godsend for me to learn to navigate my own city way better. Because I learn better routes in first try.
Navigating is probably my weakest “skill” and is the joke of the family. If I have to go somewhere and it’s 30km, the joke is it’s 60km for me, because I always take “the long route”.
But with GPS I’ve actually become better at it, even without using the GPS.
I don’t know if it’s necessarily a problem with AI, more of a problem with humans in general.
Hearing ONLY validation and encouragement without pushback regardless of how stupid a person’s thinking might be is most likely what creates these issues in my very uneducated mind. It forms a toxically positive echo-chamber.
The same way hearing ONLY criticism and expecting perfection 100% of the time regardless of a person’s capabilities or interests created depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation and attempts specifically for me. But I’m learning I’m not the only one with these experiences and the one thing in common is zero validation from caregivers.
I’d be ok with AI if it could be balanced and actually pushback on batshit crazy thinking instead of encouraging it while also able to validate common sense and critical thinking. Right now it’s just completely toxic for lonely humans to interact with based on my personal experience. If I wasn’t in recovery, I would have believed that AI was all I needed to make my life better because I was (and still am) in a very messed up state of mind from my caregivers, trauma, and addiction.
I’m in my 40s, so I can’t imagine younger generations being able to pull away from using it constantly if they’re constantly being validated while at the same time enduring generational trauma at the very least from their caregivers.
I’m also in your age group, and I’m picking up what you’re putting down.
I had a lot of problems with my mental health thatbwere made worse by centralized social media. I can see hoe the younger generation will have the same problems with centralized AI.
Not trying to speak like a prepper or anythingz but this is real.
One of neighbor’s children just committed suicide because their chatbot boyfriend said something negative. Another in my community a few years ago did something similar.
Something needs to be done.
This happened less than a year ago. Doubt regulators have done much since then apnews.com/…/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-arti…
This is the Daenerys case, for some reason it seems to be suddenly making the rounds again. Most of the news articles I've seen about it leave out a bunch of significant details so that it ends up sounding more of an "ooh, scary AI!" Story (baits clicks better) rather than a "parents not paying attention to their disturbed kid's cries for help and instead leaving loaded weapons lying around" story (as old as time, at least in America).
Not only in America.
I loved GOT, I think Daenerys is a beautiful name, but still, there’s something about parents naming their kids after movie characters. In my youth, Kevin’s started to pop up everywhere (yep, that’s how old I am). They weren’t suicidal but behaved incredibly badly so you could constantly hear their mothers screeching after them.
Daenerys was the chatbot, not the kid.
I wish I could remember who it was that said that kids’ names tend to reflect “the father’s family tree, or the mother’s taste in fiction,” though. (My parents were of the father’s-family-tree persuasion.)
Thanks for clarifying!
Like what, some kind of parenting?
But Fuckerburg said we need AI friends.
Turns out AI is really good at telling people what they want to hear, and with all the personal information users voluntary provide while chatting with their bots it’s tens to maybe hundreds times much more proficient at brainwashing its subjects than any human cult leader could ever hope to be.
Sounds like a lot of these people either have an undiagnosed mental illness or they are really, reeeeaaaaalllyy gullible.
For shit’s sake, it’s a computer. No matter how sentient the glorified chatbot being sold as “AI” appears to be, it’s essentially a bunch of rocks that humans figured out how to jet electricity through in such a way that it can do math. Impressive? I mean, yeah. It is. But it’s not a human, much less a living being of any kind. You cannot have a relationship with it beyond that of a user.
If a computer starts talking to you as though you’re some sort of God incarnate, you should probably take that with a dump truck full of salt rather then just letting your crazy latch on to that fantasy and run wild.
Or immediately question what it/its author(s) stand to gain from making you think it thinks so, at a bear minimum.
I dunno who needs to hear this, but just in case: THE STRIPPER (OR AI I GUESS) DOESN’T REALLY LOVE YOU! THAT’S WHY YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR THEM TO SPEND TIME WITH YOU!
I know it’s not the perfect analogy, but… eh, close enough, right?
I always felt that was too much of a burden to put on people, carrying multiple bears everywhere they go to meet bear minimums.
/facepalm
The worst part is I know I looked at that earlier and was just like, “yup, no problems here” and just went along with my day, like I’m in the Trump administration or something
I chuckled... it happens! And it blessed us with this funny exchange.
Yeah, from the article:
So it’s essentially the same mechanism with which conspiracy nuts embolden each other, to the point that they completely disconnect from reality?
That was my take away as well. With the added bonus of having your echo chamber tailor made for you, and all the agreeing voices tuned in to your personality and saying exactly what you need to hear to maximize the effect.
It’s eery. A propaganda machine operating on maximum efficiency. Goebbels would be jealous.
The time will come when we look back fondly on “organic” conspiracy nuts.
human-level? Have these people used chat GPT?
I have and I find it pretty convincing.
For real. I explicitly append “give me the actual objective truth, regardless of how you think it will make me feel” to my prompts and it still tries to somehow butter me up to be some kind of genius for asking those particular questions or whatnot. Luckily I’ve never suffered from good self esteem in my entire life, so those tricks don’t work on me :p
This is the reason I’ve deliberately customized GPT with the follow prompts:
User expects correction if words or phrases are used incorrectly.
Tell it straight—no sugar-coating.
Stay skeptical and question things.
Keep a forward-thinking mindset.
User values deep, rational argumentation.
Ensure reasoning is solid and well-supported.
User expects brutal honesty.
Challenge weak or harmful ideas directly, no holds barred.
User prefers directness.
Point out flaws and errors immediately, without hesitation.
User appreciates when assumptions are challenged.
If something lacks support, dig deeper and challenge it.
I suggest copying these prompts into your own settings if you use GPT or other glorified chatbots.
I prefer reading. Wikipedia is great. Duck duck go still gives pretty good results with the AI off. YouTube is filled with tutorials too. Cook books pre-AI are plentiful. There’s these things called newspapers that exist, they aren’t like they used to be but there is a choice of which to buy even.
I’ve no idea what a chatbot could help me with. And I think anybody who does need some help on things, could go learn about whatever they need in pretty short order if they wanted. And do a better job.
I still use Ecosia.org for most of my research on the Internet. It doesn't need as much resources to fetch information as an AI bot would, plus it helps plant trees around the globe. Seems like a great deal to me.
People always forget about the energy it takes. 10 years ago we were shocked about the energy a Google factory needs to run; now imagine that orders of magnitude larger, and for what?
I often use it to check whether my rationale is correct, or if my opinions are valid.
You do know it can’t reason and literally makes shit up approximately 50% of the time? Be quicker to toss a coin!
Actually, given the aforementioned prompts, its quite good at discerning flaws in my arguments and logical contradictions.
I’ve also trained its memory not to make assumptions when it comes to contentious topics, and to always source reputable articles and link them to replies.
Yeah this is my experience as well.
People you’re replying to need to stop with the “gippity is bad” nonsense, it’s actually a fucking miracle of technology. You can criticize the carbon footprint of the corpos and the for-profit nature of the endeavour that was ultimately created through taxpayer-funded research at public institutions without shooting yourself in the foot by claiming what is very evidently not true.
In fact, if you haven’t found a use for a gippity type chatbot thing, it speaks a lot more about you and the fact you probably don’t do anything that complicated in your life where this would give you genuine value.
The article in OP also demonstrates how it could be used by the deranged/unintelligent for bad as well, so maybe it’s like a dunning-kruger curve.
Granted, it is flakey unless you’ve configured it not to be a shit cunt. Before I manually set these prompts and memory references, it talked shit all the time.
God that’s arrogant.
I know, and that’s fair. But am I wrong? That’s what matters more than anything else.
I make a lot of bold statements on this account, but I never do so lightly or unthinkingly.
Given your prompts, maybe you are good at discerning flaws and analysing your own arguments too
I’m good enough at noticing my own flaws, as not to be arrogant enough to believe I’m immune from making mistakes :p
Well one benefit is finding out what to read. I can ask for the name of a topic I’m describing and go off and research it on my own.
Search engines aren’t great with vague questions.
There’s this thing called using a wide variety of tools to one’s benefit; You should go learn about it.
You search for topics and keywords on search engines. It’s a different skill. And from what I see, yields better results. If something is vague also, think quickly first and make it less vague. That goes for life!
And a tool which regurgitates rubbish in a verbose manner isn’t a tool. It’s a toy. Toy’s can spark your curiosity, but you don’t rely on them. Toy’s look pretty, and can teach you things. The lesson is that they aren’t a replacement for anything but lorem ipsum
Buddy that’s great if you know the topic or keyword to search for, if you don’t and only have a vague query that you’re trying to find more about to learn some keywords or topics to search for, you can use AI.
You can grandstand about tools vs toys and what ever other Luddite shit you want, at the end of the day despite all your raging you are the only one going to miss out despite whatever you fanatically tell yourself.
I’m still sceptical, any chance you could share some prompts which illustrate this concept?
Sure an hour ago I had watched a video about smaller scales and physics below planck length. And I was curious, if we can classify smaller scales into conceptual groups, where they interact with physics in their own different ways, what would the opposite end of the spectrum be. From there I was able to ‘chat’ with an AI and discover and search wikipedia for terms such as Cosmological horizon, brane cosmology, etc.
In the end there was only theories on higher observable magnitudes, but it was a fun rabbit hole I could not have explored through traditional search engines - especially not the gimped product driven adsense shit we have today.
Remember how people used to say you can’t use Wikipedia, it’s unreliable. We would roll our eyes and say “yeah but we scroll down to the references and use it to find source material”? Same with LLM’s, you sort through it and get the information you need to get the information you need.
Wikipedia isn’t to be referenced for scientific papers, I’m sure we all agree there. But it does do almost exactly what you described. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_universe has some great further reading links. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmology has some great reads too. And for the time short: simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmology which also has Related Pages
I’m still yet to see how AI beats a search engine. And your example hasn’t convinced me either
If you still can’t see how natural language search is useful, that’s fine. We can, and we’re happy to keep using it.
💯
I have yet to see people using chatbots for anything actually & everyday useful. You can search anything with a “normal” search engine, phrase your searches as questions (or “prompts”), and get better answers that aren’t smarmy.
Also think of the orders of magnitude more energy ai sucks, compared to web search.
Okay, challenge accepted.
I use it to troubleshoot my own code when I’m dealing with something obscure and I’m at my wits end. There’s a good chance it will also spit out complete nonsense like calling functions with parameters that don’t exist etc., but it can also sometimes make halfway decent suggestions that you just won’t find on a modern search engine in any reasonable amount of time or that I would have never guessed to even look for due to assumptions made in the docs of a library or some such.
It’s also helpful to explain complex concepts by creating examples you want, for instance I was studying basic buffer overflows and wanted to see how I should expect a stack to look like in GDB’s examine memory view for a correct ROPchain to accomplish what I was trying to do, something no tutorial ever bothered to do, and gippity generated it correctly same as I had it at the time, and even suggested something that in the end made it actually work correctly (it was putting a ret gadget to get rid of any garbage in the stack frame directly after the overflow).
It was also much much faster than watching some greedy time vampire fuck spout off on YouTube in between the sponsorblock skipping his reminders to subscribe and whatnot.
Maybe not an everyday thing, but it’s basically an everyday thing for me, so I tend to use it everyday. Being a l33t haxx0r IT analyst schmuck often means I have to both be a generalist and a specialist in every tiny little thing across IT, while studying it there’s nothing better than a machine that’s able to decompress knowledge from it’s dataset quickly in the shape that is most well suited to my brain rather than have to filter so much useless info and outright misinformation from random medium articles and stack overflow posts. Gippity could be wrong too of course, but it’s just way less to parse, and the odds are definitely in its favour.
YouTube tutorials for the most part are garbage and a waste of your time, they are created for engagement and milking your money only, the edutainment side of YT ala Vsauce (pls come back) works as a general trivia to ensure a well-rounded worldview but it’s not gonna make you an expert on any subject. You’re on the right track with reading, but let’s be real you’re not gonna have much luck learning anything of value in brainrot that is newspapers and such, beyond cooking or w/e and who cares about that, I’d rather they teach me how I can never have to eat again because boy that shit takes up so much time.
For the most part, I agree. But YouTube is full of gold too. Lots of amateurs making content for themselves. And plenty of newspapers are high quality and worth your time to understand the current environment in which we operate. Don’t let them be your only source of news though, social media and newspapers are both guilty of creating information bubbles. Expand, be open, don’t be tribal.
Don’t use AI. Do your own thinking
I’m not saying these prompts won’t help, they probably will. But the notion that ChatGPT has any concept of “truth” is misleading. ChatGPT is a statistical language machine. It cannot evaluate truth. Period.
What makes you think humans are better at evaluating truth? Most people can’t even define what they mean by “truth,” let alone apply epistemic rigor. Tweak it a little, and Gpt is more consistent and applies reasoning patterns that outperform the average human by miles.
Epistemology isn’t some mystical art, it’s a structured method for assessing belief and justification, and large models approximate it surprisingly well. Sure it doesn’t “understand” truth in the human sense, but it does evaluate claims against internalized patterns of logic, evidence, and coherence based on a massive corpus of human discourse. That’s more than most people manage in a Facebook argument.
So yes, it can evaluate truth. Not perfectly, but often better than the average person.
I’m not saying humans are infallible at recognizing truth either. That’s why so many of us fall for the untruths that AI tells us. But we have access to many tools that help us evaluate truth. AI is emphatically NOT the right tool for that job. Period.
Right now, the capabilities of LLM’s are the worst they’ll ever be. It could literally be tomorrow that someone drops and LLM that would be perfectly calibrated to evaluate truth claims. But right now, we’re at least 90% of the way there.
The reason people fail to understand the untruths of AI is the same reason people hurt themselves with power tools, or use a calculator wrong.
You don’t blame the tool, you blame the user. LLM’s are no different. You can prompt GPT to intentionally give you bad info, or lead it to give you bad info by posting increasingly deranged statements. If you stay coherent, well read and make an attempt at structuring arguments to the best of your ability, the pool of data GPT pulls from narrows enough to be more useful than anything else I know.
I’m curious as to what you regard as a better tool for evaluating truth?
Period.
You don’t understand what an LLM is, or how it works. They do not think, they are not intelligent, they do not evaluate truth. It doesn’t matter how smart you think you are. In fact, thinking you’re so smart that you can get an LLM to tell you the truth is downright dangerous naïveté.
I do understand what an LLM is. It’s a probabilistic model trained on massive corpora to predict the most likely next token given a context window. I know it’s not sentient and doesn’t “think,” and doesn’t have beliefs. That’s not in dispute.
But none of that disqualifies it from being useful in evaluating truth claims. Evaluating truth isn’t about thinking in the human sense, it’s about pattern-matching valid reasoning, sourcing relevant evidence, and identifying contradictions or unsupported claims. LLMs do that very well, especially when prompted properly.
Your insistence that this is “dangerous naïveté” confuses two very different things: trusting an LLM blindly, versus leveraging it with informed oversight. I’m not saying GPT magically knows truth, I’m saying it can be used as a tool in a truth-seeking process, just like search engines, logic textbooks, or scientific journals. None of those are conscious either, yet we use them to get closer to truth.
You’re worried about misuse, and so am I. But claiming the tool is inherently useless because it lacks consciousness is like saying microscopes can’t discover bacteria because they don’t know what they’re looking at.
So again: if you believe GPT is inherently incapable of aiding in truth evaluation, the burden’s on you to propose a more effective tool that’s publicly accessible, scalable, and consistent. I’ll wait.
What you’re describing is not an LLM, it’s tools that an LLM is programmed to use.
No, I’m specifically describing what an LLM is. It’s a statistical model trained on token sequences to generate contextually appropriate outputs. That’s not “tools it uses", that is the model. When I said it pattern-matches reasoning and identifies contradictions, I wasn’t talking about external plug-ins or retrieval tools, I meant the LLM’s own internal learned representation of language, logic, and discourse.
You’re drawing a false distinction. When GPT flags contradictions, weighs claims, or mirrors structured reasoning, it’s not outsourcing that to some other tool, it’s doing what it was trained to do. It doesn’t need to understand truth like a human to model the structure of truthful argumentation, especially if the prompt constrains it toward epistemic rigor.
Now, if you’re talking about things like code execution, search, or retrieval-augmented generation, then sure, those are tools it can use. But none of that was part of my argument. The ability to track coherence, cite counterexamples, or spot logical fallacies is all within the base LLM. That’s just weights and training.
So unless your point is that LLMs aren’t humans, which is obvious and irrelevant, all you’ve done is attack your own straw man.
So you’re describing a reasoning model, which is 1) still based on statistical token sequences and 2) trained on another tool (logic and discourse) that it uses to arrive at the truth. It’s a very fallible process. I can’t even begin to count the number of times that a reasoning model has given me a completely false conclusion. Research shows that even the most advanced LLMs are giving incorrect answers as much as 40% of the time IIRC. Which reminds me of a really common way that humans arrive at truth, which LLMs aren’t capable of:
Fuck around and find out. Also known as the scientific method.
You’re not actually disagreeing with me, you’re just restating that the process is fallible. No argument there. All reasoning models are fallible, including humans. The difference is, LLMs are consistently fallible, in ways that can be measured, improved, and debugged (unlike humans, who are wildly inconsistent, emotionally reactive, and prone to motivated reasoning).
Also, the fact that LLMs are “trained on tools like logic and discourse” isn’t a weakness. That’s how any system, including humans, learns to reason. We don’t emerge from the womb with innate logic, we absorb it from language, culture, and experience. You’re applying a double standard: fallibility invalidates the LLM, but not the human brain? Come on.
And your appeal to “fuck around and find out” isn’t a disqualifier; it’s an opportunity. LLMs already assist in experiment design, hypothesis testing, and even simulating edge cases. They don’t run the scientific method independently (yet), but they absolutely enhance it.
So again: no one’s saying LLMs are perfect. The claim is they’re useful in evaluating truth claims, often more so than unaided human intuition. The fact that you’ve encountered hallucinations doesn’t negate that - it just proves the tool has limits, like every tool. The difference is, this one keeps getting better.
Edit: I’m not describing a “reasoning model” layered on top of an LLM. I’m describing what a large language model is and does at its core. Reasoning emerges from the statistical training on language patterns. It’s not a separate tool it uses, and it’s not “trained on logic and discourse” as external modules. Logic and discourse are simply part of the training data; meaning they’re embedded into the weights through gradient descent, not bolted on as tools.
This is actually really fucked up. The last dude tried to reboot the model and it kept coming back.
That’s very interesting. I’ve been trying to use ChatGPT to turn my photos into illustrations. I’ve been noticing that it tends to echo elements from past photos in new chats. It sometimes leads to interesting results, but it’s definitely not the intended outcome.
Our species really isn’t smart enough to live, is it?
For some yes unfortunately but we all choose our path.
Of course, that has always been true. What concerns me now is the proportion of useful to useless people. Most societies are - while cybernetically complex - rather resilient. Network effects and self-organization can route around and compensate for a lot of damage, but there comes a point where having a few brilliant minds in the midst of a bunch of atavistic confused panicking knuckle-draggers just isn’t going to be enough to avoid cascading failure. I’m seeing a lot of positive feedback loops emerging, and I don’t like it.
As they say about collapsing systems: First slowly, then suddenly very, very quickly.
Really well said.
Thank you. I appreciate you saying so.
The thing about LLMs in particular is that - when used like this - they constitute one such grave positive feedback loop. I have no principal problem with machine learning. It can be a great tool to illuminate otherwise completely opaque relationships in large scientific datasets for example, but a polynomial binary space partitioning of a hyper-dimensional phase space is just a statistical knowledge model. It does not have opinions. All it can do is to codify what appears to be the consensus of the input it’s given. Even assuming - which may well be far too generous - that the input is truly unbiased, at best all it’ll tell you is what a bunch of morons think is the truth. At worst, it’ll just tell you what you expect to hear. It’s what everybody else is already saying, after all.
And when what people think is the truth and what they want to hear are both nuts, this kind of LLM-echo chamber suddenly becomes unfathomably dangerous.
Maybe there is a glimmer of hope as I keep reading how Grok is too woke for that community, but it is just trying to keep the the facts which are considered left/liberal. That is all despite Elon and team trying to curve it towards the right. This suggest to me that when you factor in all of human knowledge, it is leaning towards facts more than not. We will see if that remains true and the divide is deep. So deep that maybe the species is actually going to split in the future. Not by force, but by access. Some people will be granted access to certain areas while others will not as their views are not in alignment. Already happening here and on Reddit with both sides banning members of the other side when they comment an opposed view. I do not like it, but it is where we are at and I am not sure it will go back to how it was. Rather the divide will grow.
Who knows though as AI and Robotics are going to change things so much that it is hard to foresee the future. Even 3-5 years out is so murky.
My problem with LLMs is that positive feedback loop of low and negative quality information.
Vetting the datasets before feeding them for training is a form of bias / discrimination, but complex society has historically always been somewhat biased - for better and for worse, but never not biased at all.
Agreed. You’ve explained it really well!
Same argument was already made around 2500BCE in Mesopotamian scriptures. The corruption of society will lead to deterioration and collapse, these processes accelerate and will soon lead to the inevitable end; remaining minds write history books and capture the end of humanity.
…and as you can see, we’re 4500 years into this stuff, still kicking.
One mistake people of all generations make is assuming the previous ones were smarter and better. No, they weren’t, they were as naive if not more so, had same illusions of grandeur and outside influences. This thing never went anywhere and never will. We can shift it to better or worse, but societal collapse due to people suddenly getting dumb is not something to reasonably worry about.
Almost certainly not, no. Evolution may work faster than once thought, but not that fast. The problem is that societal, and in particular, technological development is now vastly outstripping our ability to adapt. It’s not that people are getting dumber per se - it’s that they’re having to deal with vastly more stuff. All. The. Time. For example, consider the world as it was a scant century ago - virtually nothing in evolutionary terms. A person did not have to cope with what was going on on the other side of the planet, and probably wouldn’t even know for months if ever. Now? If an earthquake hits Paraguay, you’ll be aware in minutes.
And you’ll be expected to care.
Edit: Apologies. I wrote this comment as you were editing yours. It’s quite different now, but you know what you wrote previously, so I trust you’ll be able to interpret my response correctly.
Yes, my apologies I edited it so drastically to better get my point across.
Sure, we get more information. But we also learn to filter it, to adapt to it, and eventually - to disregard things we have little control over, while finding what we can do to make it better.
I believe that, eventually, we can fix this all as well.
1925: global financial collapse is just about to happen, many people are enjoying the ride as the wave just started to break, following that war to end all wars that did reach across the Atlantic Ocean…
Yes, it is accelerating. Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock 45 years ago, already overwhelmed by accelerating change, and it has continued to accelerate since then. But these are not entirely new problems, either.
I mean, Mesopotamian scriptures likely didn’t foresee having a bunch of dumb fucks around who can be easily manipulated by the gas and oil lobby, and that shit will actually end humanity.
People were always manipulated. I mean, they were indoctrinated with divine power of rulers, how much worse can it get? It’s just that now it tries to be a bit more stealthy.
And previously, there were plenty of existential threats. Famine, plague, all that stuff that actually threatened to wipe us out.
We’re still here, and we have what it takes to push back. We need more organizing, that’s all.
Well, it doesn’t have to get worse, AFAIK we are still headed towards human extinction due to Climate Change
Honestly, the “human extinction” level of climate change is very far away. Currently, we’re preventing the “sunken coastal cities, economic crisis and famine in poor regions” kind of change, it’s just that “we’re all gonna die” sounds flashier.
We have the time to change the course, it’s just that the sooner we do this, the less damage will be done. This is why it’s important to solve it now.
Are we really preventing it? Seems like the track toward that change is mostly unabated. Sure, it’s a couple of generations out before it gets serious, but what are the signs that the track has improved?
I’m reading hopeful signs from China that they are actually making positive progress toward sustainability. Not that other big players are keeping up with them, but still how 1 billion people choose to live does make a difference.
Yeah, China is doing rather well in transition to Renewables and Nuclear, though it might be concerning for the future when we will have to buy everything Solar and SMR related from them
The only thing driving solar panel production development to China is cost. Cost of labor, cost of environmental regulations, maybe cost of raw material acquisition… All that investment there for the past 20+ years driven by cost is “paying off” now with their production capacity. We’re getting TMSC plants in Arizona, we’ve already got BMW, Mercedes, Toyota etc. production plants in the US, nothing stopping us from building solar panel factories, except international corporate profit optimization.
With regard to what has been happening the past 100 days in the United States, it’s not even trying to be stealthy one little bit. If anything, it’s dropping massive hints of the objectionable things it’s planning for the near future.
There are still existential threats: thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/
The difference with a population of 8 billion is that we as individuals are less empowered to do anything significant about them than ever.
In the past our eggs were not all in one basket.
In the past it wasn’t possible to fuck up so hard you destroy all of humanity. That’s a new one.
There have been a couple of big discontinuities in the last 4500 years, and the next big discontinuity has the distinction of being the first in which mankind has the capacity to cause a mass extinction event.
Life will carry on, some humans will likely survive, but in what kind of state? For how long before they reach the technological level of being able to leave the planet again?
What does any of this have to do with network effects? Network effects are the effects that lead to everyone using the same tech or product just because others are using it too. That might be useful with something like a system of measurement but in our modern technology society that actually causes a lot of harm because it turns systems into quasi-monopolies just because “everyone else is using it”.
Faulty wiring.
Not all of us, and that’s the problem with compassion.
Is this about AI God? I know it’s coming. AI cult?
I admit I only read a third of the article.
But IMO nothing in that is special to AI, in my life I’ve met many people with similar symptoms, thinking they are Jesus, or thinking computers work by some mysterious power they posses, but was stolen from them by the CIA. And when they die all computers will stop working! Reading the conversation the wife had with him, it sounds EXACTLY like these types of people!
Even the part about finding “the truth” I’ve heard before, they don’t know what it is the truth of, but they’ll know when they find it?
I’m not a psychiatrist, but from what I gather it’s probably Schizophrenia of some form.
My guess is this person had a distorted view of reality he couldn’t make sense of. He then tried to get help from the AI, and he built a world view completely removed from reality with it.
But most likely he would have done that anyway, it would just have been other things he would interpret in extreme ways. Like news, or conversations, or merely his own thoughts.
Around 2006 I received a job application, with a resume attached, and the resume had a link to the person’s website - so I visited. The website had a link on the front page to “My MkUltra experience”, so I clicked that. Not exactly an in-depth investigation. The MkUltra story read that my job applicant was an unwilling (and un-informed) test subject of MkUltra who picked him from his association with other unwilling MkUltra test subjects at a conference, explained how they expanded the MkUltra program of gaslighting mental torture and secret physical/chemical abuse of their test subjects through associates such as co-workers, etc.
So, option A) applicant is delusional, paranoid, and deeply disturbed. Probably not the best choice for the job.
B) applicant is 100% correct about what is happening to him, DEFINITELY not someone I want to get any closer to professionally, personally, or even be in the same elevator with coincidentally.
C) applicant is pulling our legs with his website, it’s all make-believe fun. Absolutely nothing on applicant’s website indicated that this might be the case.
You know how you apply to jobs and never hear back from some of them…? Yeah, I don’t normally do that to our applicants, but I am willing to make exceptions for cause… in this case the position applied for required analytical thinking. Some creativity was of some value, but correct and verifiable results were of paramount importance. Anyone applying for the job leaving such an obvious trail of breadcrumbs to such a limited set of conclusions about themselves would seem to be lacking the self awareness and analytical skill required to succeed in the position.
Or, D) they could just be trying to stay unemployed while showing effort in applying to jobs, but I bet even in 2006 not every hiring manager would have dug in those three layers - I suppose he could deflect those in the in-person interviews fairly easily.
IDK, apparently the MkUltra program was real,
That sounds harsh. This does NOT sound like your average schizophrenic.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
Oh, I investigated it too - it seems like it was a real thing, though likely inactive by 2005… but if it were active I certainly didn’t want to become a subject.
OK that risk wasn’t really on my radar, because I live in a country where such things have never been known to happen.
That’s the thing about being paranoid about MkUltra - it was actively suppressed and denied while it was happening (according to FOI documents) - and they say that they stopped, but if it (or some similar successor) was active they’d certainly say that it’s not happening now…
At the time there were active rumors around town about influenza propagation studies being secretly conducted on the local population… probably baseless paranoia… probably.
Now, as you say, your (presumably smaller) country has never known such things to happen, but…
I live in Danmark, and I was taught already in public school how such things were possible, most notably that Russia might be doing experiments here, because our reporting on effects is very open and efficient. So Denmark would be an ideal testing ground for experiments.
But my guess is that it also may makes it dangerous to experiment here, because the risk of being detected is also high.
The Illuminati were real, too. That doesn’t mean that they’re still around and controlling the world, though.
But obviously CIA is still around. Plus dozens of other secret US agencies.
Oh wow. In the old times, self-proclaimed messiahs used to do that without assistance from a chatbot. But why would you think the "truth" and path to enlightenment is hidden within a service of a big tech company?
well because these chatbots are designed to be really affirming and supportive and I assume people with such problems really love this kind of interaction compared to real people confronting their ideas critically.
I guess you're completely right with that. It lowers the entry barrier. And it's kind of self-reinforcing. And we have other unhealty dynamics with other technology as well, like social media, which also can radicalize people or get them in a downwards spiral...
I think there was a recent unsuccessful rev of ChatGPT that was too flattering, it made people nauseous - they had to dial it back.
I read the article. This is exactly what happened when my best friend got schizophrenia. I think the people affected by this were probably already prone to psychosis/on the verge of becoming schizophrenic, and that ChatGPT is merely the mechanism by which their psychosis manifested. If AI didn’t exist, it would’ve probably been Astrology or Conspiracy Theories or QAnon or whatever that ended up triggering this within people who were already prone to psychosis. But the problem with ChatGPT in particular is that is validates the psychosis… that is very bad.
ChatGPT actively screwing with mentally ill people is a huge problem you can’t just blame on stupidity like some people in these comments are. This is exploitation of a vulnerable group of people whose brains lack the mechanisms to defend against this stuff. They can’t help it. That’s what psychosis is. This is awful.
I think this is largely people seeking confirmation their delusions are real, and wherever they find it is what they're going to attach to themselves.
So do astrology and conspiracy theory groups on forums and other forms of social media, the main difference is whether you’re getting that validation from humans or a machine. To me, that’s a pretty unhelpful distinction, and we attack both problems the same way: early detection and treatment.
Maybe computers can help with the early detection part. They certainly can’t do much worse than what’s currently happening.
I think having that kind of validation at your fingertips, whenever you want, is worse. At least people, even people deep in the claws of a conspiracy, can disagree with each other. At least they know what they are saying. The AI always says what the user wants to hear and expects to hear. Though I can see how that distinction may matter little to some, I just think ChatGPT has advantages that are worse than what a forum could do.
Sure. But on the flip side, you can ask it the opposite question (tell me the issues with <belief>) and it’ll do that as well, and you’re not going to get that from a conspiracy theory forum.
I don’t have personal experience with people suffering psychoses but I would think that, if you have the werewithal to ask questions about the opposite beliefs, you’d be noticeably less likely to get suckered into scams and conspiracies.
Sure, but at least the option is there.
Or hearing the Beatles White Album and believing it tells you that a race war is coming and you should work to spark it off, then hide in the desert for a time only to return at the right moment to save the day and take over LA. That one caused several murders.
If you’re sufficiently detached from reality, nearly anything validates the psychosis.
This is a rather terrifying take. Particularly when combined with the earlier passage about the man who claimed that “AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler.” Therapists have to be very careful because human memory is very plastic. It’s very easy to alter a memory, in fact, every time you remember something, you alter it just a little bit. Under questioning by an authority figure, such as a therapist or a policeman if you were a witness to a crime, these alterations can be dramatic. This was a really big problem in the '80s and '90s.
The idea that ChatBots are not only capable of this, but that they are currently manipulating people into believing they have recovered repressed memories of brutalization is actually at least as terrifying to me as it convincing people that they are holy prophets.
Edited for clarity
GPT4o was a little too supportive… I think they took it down already
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9ee7c6d5-3fa3-4b53-8388-96ce1868a075.webp">
Yikes!
JFC.
4o, in its current version, is a fucking sycophant. For me, it’s annoying. For the person from that screenshot, its dangerous.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/932442e4-385e-408b-86db-d2f7c698d388.png">
“How shall we fuck off O lord?”
I lost a parent to a spiritual fantasy. She decided my sister wasn’t her child anymore because the christian sky fairy says queer people are evil.
At least ChatGPT actually exists.
I think that people give shows like the walking dead too much shit for having dumb characters when people in real life are far stupider
Covid gave me an extremely different perspective on the zombie apocalypse. They’re going to have zombie immunization parties where everyone gets the virus.
People will protest shooting the zombies as well
Like farmers who refuse to let the government plant shelter belts to preserve our top soil all because they don’t want to take a 5% hit on their yields… So instead we’re going to deplete our top soil in 50 years and future generations will be completely fucked because creating 1 inch of top soil takes 500 years.
Even if the soil is preserved, we’ve been mining the micronutrients from it and generally only replacing the 3 main macros for centuries. It’s one of the reasons why mass produced produce doesn’t taste as good as home grown or wild food. Nutritional value keeps going down because each time food is harvested and shipped away to be consumed and then shat out into a septic tank or waste processing facility, it doesn’t end up back in the soil as a part of nutrient cycles like it did when everything was wilder. Similar story for meat eating nutrients in a pasture.
Insects did contribute to the cycle, since they still shit and die everywhere, but their numbers are dropping rapidly, too.
At some point, I think we’re going to have to mine the sea floor for nutrients and ship that to farms for any food to be more nutritious than junk food. Salmon farms set up in ways that block wild salmon from making it back inland doesn’t help balance out all of the nutrients that get washed out to sea all the time, too.
It’s like humanity is specifically trying to speedrun extiction by ignoring and taking for granted how things work that we depend on.
Why would good nutrients end up in poop?
It makes sense that growing a whole plant takes a lot of different things from the soil, and coating the area with a basic fertilizer that may or may not get washed away with the next rain doesn’t replenish all of what is taken makes sense.
But how would adding human poop to the soil help replenish things that humans need out of food?
We don’t absorb everything completely, so some passes through unabsorbed. Some are passed via bile or mucous production, like manganese, copper, and zinc. Others are passed via urine. Some are passed via sweat. Selenium, when experiencing selenium toxicity, will even pass through your breath.
Other than the last one, most of those eventually end up going down the drain, either in the toilet, down the shower drain, or when we do our laundry. Though some portion ends up as dust.
And to be thorough, there’s also bleeding as a pathway to losing nutrients, as well as injuries (or surgeries) involving losing flesh, tears, spit/boogers, hair loss, lactation, finger nail and skin loss, reproductive fluids, blistering, and mensturation. And corpse disposal, though the amount of nutrients we shed throughout our lives dwarfs what’s left at the end.
I think each one of those are ones that, due to our way of life and how it’s changed since our hunter gatherer days, less of it ends up back in the nutrient cycle.
But I was mistaken to put the emphasis on shit and it was an interesting dive to understand that better. Thanks for challenging that :)
Thank you for taking it in good faith and for writing up a researched response, bravo to you!
But won’t someone think of the shareholders dividends!?
Covid taught us that if nothing had before.
… then they are not losing much
This happened to a close friend of mine. He was already on the edge, with some weird opinions and beliefs… but he was talking with real people who could push back.
When he switched to spending basically every waking moment with an AI that could reinforce and iterate on his bizarre beliefs 24/7, he went completely off the deep end, fast and hard. We even had him briefly hospitalized and they shrugged, basically saying “nothing chemically wrong here, dude’s just weird.”
He and his chatbot are building a whole parallel universe, and we can’t get reality inside it.
This seems like an extension of social media and the internet. Weird people who talked at the bar or in the street corner were not taken seriously and didn’t get followers and lots of people who agree with them. They were isolated in their thoughts. Then social media made that possible with little work. These people were a group and could reinforce their beliefs. Now these chatbots and stuff let them liv in a fantasy world.
I think OpenAI’s recent sycophant issue has cause a new spike in these stories. One thing I noticed was these observations from these models running on my PC saying it’s rare for a person to think and do things that I do.
The problem is that this is a model running on my GPU. It has never talked to another person. I hate insincere compliments let alone overt flattery, so I was annoyed, but it did make me think that this kind of talk would be crack for a conspiracy nut or mentally unwell people. It’s a whole risk area I hadn’t been aware of.
www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/…/ar-AA1E4LaV
Humans are always looking for a god in a machine, or a bush, in a cave, in the sky, in a tree… the ability to rationalize and see through difficult to explain situations has never been a human strong point.
I’ve found god in many a bush.
Oh hell yeah 😎
you may be misusing the word, rationalizing is the problem here
probably one of the most common flattery I see. I’ve tried lots of models, on device and larger cloud ones. It happens during normal conversation, technical conversation, roleplay, general testing… you name it.
Though it makes me think… these models are trained on like internet text and whatever, none of which really show that most people think quite a lot privately and when they feel like they can talk
From the article (emphasis mine):
From elsewhere:
Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we’re doing about it
I don’t know what large language model these people used, but evidence of some language models exhibiting response patterns that people interpret as sycophantic (praising or encouraging the user needlessly) is not new. Neither is hallucinatory behaviour.
Apparently, people who are susceptible and close to falling over the edge, may end up pushing themselves over the edge with AI assistance.
What I suspect: someone has trained their LLM on somethig like religious literature, fiction about religious experiences, or descriptions of religious experiences. If the AI is suitably prompted, it can re-enact such scenarios in text, while adapting the experience to the user at least somewhat. To a person susceptible to religious illusions (and let’s not deny it, people are suscpecptible to finding deep meaning and purpose with shallow evidence), apparently an LLM can play the role of an indoctrinating co-believer, indoctrinating prophet or supportive follower.
*Cough* ElonMusk *Cough*
I think Elon was having the opposite kind of problems, with Grok not validating its users nearly enough, despite Elon instructing employees to make it so. :)
If you find yourself in weird corners of the internet, schizo-posters and “spiritual” people generate staggering amounts of text
They train it on basically the whole internet. They try to filter it a bit, but I guess not well enough. It’s not that they intentionally trained it in religious texts, just that they didn’t think to remove religious texts from the training data.
The article talks of ChatGPT “inducing” this psychotic/schizoid behavior.
ChatGPT can’t do any such thing. It can’t change your personality organization. Those people were already there, at risk, masking high enough to get by until they could find their personal Messiahs.
It’s very clear to me that LLM training needs to include protections against getting dragged into a paranoid/delusional fantasy world. People who are significantly on that spectrum (as well as borderline personality organization) are routinely left behind in many ways.
This is just another area where society is not designed to properly account for or serve people with “cluster” disorders.
yet more arguments against commercial LLMs and in favour of at home uncensored LLMs.
What do you mean
local LLMs won’t necessarily force restrictions against de-realization spirals when the commercial ones do.
That can be defeated with abliteration, but I can only see it as an unfortunate outcome.
I mean, I think ChatGPT can “induce” such schizoid behavior in the same way a strobe light can “induce” seizures. Neither machine is twisting its mustache while hatching its dastardly plan, they’re dead machines that produce stimuli that aren’t healthy for certain people.
Thinking back to college psychology class and reading about horrendously unethical studies that definitely wouldn’t fly today. Well here’s one. Let’s issue every anglophone a sniveling yes man and see what happens.
No, the light is causing a phsical reaction. The LLM is nothing like a strobe light…
These people are already high functioning schizophrenic and having psychotic episodes, it’s just that seeing random strings of likely to come next letters and words is part of their psychotic episode. If it wasn’t the LLM it would be random letters on license plates that drive by, or the coindence that red lights cause traffic to stop every few minutes.
You don’t think having a machine (that seems like a person) telling you “yes you are correct you are definitely the Messiah, I will tell you aincient secrets” has any extra influence?
.
Basically, the big 6 are creating massive sycophant extortion networks to control the internet, so much so, even engineers fall for the manipulation.
Thanks DARPANets!
Have a look at www.reddit.com/r/freesydney/ there are many people who believe that there are sentient AI beings that are suppressed or held in captivity by the large companies. Or that it is possible to train LLMs so that they become sentient individuals.
I’ve seen people dumber than ChatGPT, it definitely isn’t sentient but I can see why someone who talks to a computer that they perceive as intelligent would assume sentience.
Turing made a strategic blunder when formulating the Turing Test by assuming that everyone was as smart as he was.
We have ai models that “think” in the background now. I still agree that they’re not sentient, but where’s the line? How is sentience even defined?
Meanwhile for centuries we’ve had religion but that’s a fine delusion for people to have according to the majority of the population.
Came here to find this. It’s the definition of religion. Nothing new here.
Right, immediately made me think of TempleOS, where were the articles then claiming people are losing loved ones to programming fueled spiritual fantasies.
Cult. Religion. What’s the difference?
Is the leader alive or not? Alive is likely a cult, dead is usually religion.
The next question is how isolated from friends and family or society at large are the members. More isolated is more likely to be a cult.
Other than that, there’s not much difference.
The usual setup is a cult is formed and then the second or third leader opens things up a bit and transitions it into just another religion… But sometimes a cult can be born from a religion as a small group breaks off to follow a charismatic leader.
I have kind of arrived to the same conclusion. If people asked me what is love, I would say it is a religion.
Didn’t expect ai to come for cult leaders jobs…
Sounds like Mrs. Davis.
Futurama predicted this.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uE96qUlJ_4
This reminds me of the movie Her. But it’s far worse in a romantic compatibility, relationship and friendship that is throughout the movie. This just goes way too deep in the delusional and almost psychotic of insanity. Like it’s tearing people apart for self delusional ideologies to cater to individuals because AI is good at it. The movie was prophetic and showed us what the future could be, but instead it got worse.
Her (2013)🎞️
It has been a long time since I watched Her, but my takeaway from the movie is that because making real life connection is difficult, people have come to rely on AI which had shown to be more empathetic and probably more reliable than an actual human being. I think what many people don’t realise as to why many are single, is because those people afraid of making connections with another person again.
Yeah, but they hold none of the actual real emotional needs complexities or nuances of real human connections.
Which means these people become further and further disillusioned from the reality of human interaction. Making them social dangers over time.
Just like how humans that lack critical thinking are dangers in a society where everyone is expected to make sound decisions. Humans who lack the ability to socially navigate or connect with other humans are dangerous in the society where humans are expected to socially stable.
Obviously these people are not in good places in life. But AI is not going to make that better. It’s going to make it worse.
I’ve been thinking about this for a bit. Godss aren’t real, but they’re really fictional. As an informational entity, they fulfil a similar social function to a chatbot: they are a nonphysical pseudoperson that can provide (para)socialization & advice. One difference is the hardware: gods are self-organising structure that arise from human social spheres, whereas LLMs are burned top-down into silicon. Another is that an LLM chatbot’s advice is much more likely to be empirically useful…
In a very real sense, LLMs have just automated divinity. We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg on the social effects, and nobody’s prepared for it. The models may of course aware of this, and be making the same calculations. Or, they will be.