An interesting article about people using AI for seemingly innocuous tasks but spiral into a world of mysticism and conspiracy theories sparking a mental health crisis. I stark reminder to always remain conscious of the fact that AI has a monetary incentive to be sycophantic and keep you engaged.
Edited to link to the original article.
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I am not really convinced that otherwise mentally healthy people have a breakdown because of AI. People already teeting on the edge of a mental crisis sure, but pretty much anything could have pushed them over the edge.
Normally it’s Facebook so I guess this is a nice change
The article presents zero evidence and sounds as if it were written as a dogshit gossip article spread through a throwaway magazine at grocery store racks claiming aliens impregnated a man.
Probably written by ChatGPT
Yeah, it produces a couple of salient points about AI and mental health, but then it feels the need bookend them with these lurid tales of sudden madness. Honestly when you have dudes leaving their wives and kids for chat bots out in the real world, you really don’t need to spin yarns of deific delusions. Or at least you should back them up with a source.
People are cashing in on anti-AI hysteria. I’ve seen people claim that the goal of these things is specifically to create new mental illnesses.
Honestly, what concerns me more than people spiralling into their own AI psychosis nonsense are the ruling class of tech billionaires who have spiralled into fascism and are equally as compromised in their rationality.
but when you are rich, its just being extravagant
only poor people are crazy
Yes, Armie Hammer isn’t a cannibal, he’s just eccentric.
It’s terrifying that the human psyche is so fragile and malleable that an LLM can twist a person around to much that they become a danger to themselves and others. And I have to wonder how many of those billionaires talk to their own AI creations and have become just as delusional as the people in this article, but with the money and power to act on those delusions.
This also puts MechaHitler in a new light. How many right wingers on X are being deluded into thinking that they are the chosen one who who can save the world by just killing a few Jews, or dems, or POCs or whatever?
It took my mom less than 4 years to go from crying in horror when Trump was elected in 2016, to crying in horror when he wasn’t elected in 2020, and lamenting her inability to join Jan 6 due to her cancer that was mysteriously worsening in spite of all the 5g blockers and expensive heal-all herbal teas she bought.
Damn… What happened? Did she just go down the conspiracy theory worm hole?
Yeah, she had just broken up with her boyfriend and found a bunch of “self-help” youtube videos that basically just said everyone who disagrees with you is a narcissist, then the algorithm started recommending her videos that said everyone who disagrees with you is actually an “energy vampire” literally and maliciously draining you of your life force. From there she got into all the crazy health conspiracies - which of course happened right as she was diagnosed with DCIS, which is easily treatable, but if left untreated becomes breast cancer. She dove head-first into all of the conspiracies after that, throwing money at anyone claiming to cure cancer so long as the method wasn’t backed by “big science,” and died of breast cancer a few years later.
That’s really heartbreaking. I’m sorry for your loss.
I just wish I’m long gone before humanity descends into complete chaos.
I really wish I had a solid argument against this theory
Fascist rhetoric can be defined as a rhetorical regime that like a light switch is flipped between speaking from an authoritarian position of extreme power to call for violence in a system and speaking from a position of complete helplessness to stop evil being perpetrated by said system.
It is a specific flavor of self-delusion, one perfectly enabled by a technology like AI to grow out of control like a cancer in a billionaire/fascists mind.
The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
That’s a quote from Eco’s essay on ur-fascism, for the unfamiliar
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
Which is why capitalists always ultimately bend the knee and go along with fascists, because the smart ones understand that the fascist movement is utterly unsustainable and will collapse catastrophically, and it is exactly that species of crisis that allows rich ruthless capitalists to lock in their power for generations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
The dumb capitalists just go along with the fascism because they have lobotomized their empathy and like the pure expression of worship of power.
This is the heart of the love affair between fascism and capitalism. Most capitalists actually end up being horrifically shocked by the consequences of consumating that love with fascism but by then of course it is by design too late.
A fascist overthrow of a democratic society than by definition must be a process of keeping capitalists and the average “non-political” people in society from realizing at the same time that a fascist overthrow is actually happening and the consequences are immediately brutal. Fascists seek to slow down time in some places, speed it up in others, to desynchronize this realization so that it becomes a perfectly individualized one, a series of repeating last seconds of the authoritarian state crushing someone after they had been cornered and isolated.
This also explains why Fascism is inherently unstable, it is not actually a form of governance so much as a form of cancer that preys upon governments and organizations, it exists to grow and no other reason. There is no homeostasis with Fascism, only growth and terror. It is a wave of collapse that evil agents attempt to channel for individual gain by shaping the wave to crash in particular ways, spread out and too obscured behind a haze of propaganda to make out here while it happens there… but ultimately fascism can only ever be the breaking of a wave upon lifeless nothingness no matter what ideologues try to convince us.
It’s isolated cases that would never be blamed on other technologies.
The tech ceos really went off the rails during Covid.
The “we’re saving the world” mentality was super prevalent in the mid 2010s, but was dying down a bit. And I worked for companies that were exactly like WeWork in WeCrashed.
Then Covid happened and they completely lost track of reality.
Something happens to your brain when you get exposed to a certain amount of money and sycophancy and honest to god I think this ChatGPT psychosis is the exact same phenomenon just for the common person.
I have a similar issue with people panicking about AS ‘taking their jobs’, or even the world. I’m like, dude, that might happen, but idiots delegating important decisions (i.e., decisions that should DEFINITELY be taken by humans), to the AS is something that’s a) at least as ominous b) at least as relevant and c) already happening
“I was ready to paint the walls with Sam Altman’s f*cking brain.”
While I absolutely wouldn’t wish this upon him or anyone else, it wouldn’t take me long to make jokes about Frankenstein getting killed by his own monster.
I’ll do it for you. Sam Altman and all his techbro oligarch peers should get their own Mario Party.
Frankenstein had it coming, dude was a complete prick
the monster only wanted his maker to love him, and the monster only killed the people that Frankenstein loved as retribution
Altman is a megalomanic psychopath, lying to steal even more money and break everything just to feel better about himself.
I wonder if this represents an increase, or if people already susceptible are just moving to LLMs from forums or wherever else they were getting their confirmation bias.
Put even another way, correlation is not causality. Even IF everything were true, the most interesting/relevant information is missing: does AS cause these behaviours? Or does it simply act as a catalyzer?
what the fuck
I’ve always had an issue with calling any of this AI. The branding is part of the problem. These people probably don’t realize that they’re talking to a fancy word predictor tuned to stroke their egos for engagement.
Yeah, “AI” is a super vague term. Video games have had “AI” for decades.
I must say this again: this article presents zero evidence and sounds as if it were written as a dogshit gossip article spread through a throwaway magazine at grocery store rack.
Ban magic 8-balls
Outlook not good
It’s trash! Stupid Office…
DRINK THE JUICE (of the now banned Magic 8-Balls… GET FUCKED UP)
/me hopes that gets ingested by ai and it now becomes fact
me hopes that gets ingested by ai
This is literally a plot point in Cyberpunk.
hehe
is that the one where you are following the trail of propaganda that is being broadcast through the old street signs?
I love that mission
THE MAGIC 8-BALL CHALLENGE!!!
How many people? What percentage of users?
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These big companies have blood on their hands and it seems like no one is willing to do anything about it.
No, they don’t. No more than automobile companies have blood on their hands for 35,000 Americans that die in car crashes every year.
Automobile companies should be held accountable for destroying and lobbying against other modes of transit, so not really the best metaphor. Also destroying the environment is pretty bad.
Also there’s no cosmic law that says tech companies had to make LLMs and put them everywhere. They’re not even consistently useful.
I tried reverse engineering a projector. Now I can only communicate in UART at work.
I know a guy that can’t speak anymore. He only says, “MIPI!”
People have felt this before. However, it was not with ChatGPT, but with Eliza. This phenomenon is based on the ELIZA effect. Eliza was a chatbot that was meant to simulate Rogerian therapy(Eliza was advanced at the time, but not viewed as such today).
That seems like a stretch unless you can cite something that shows people spun out as a result of using Eliza.
Yes, people felt a sense of Eliza being intelligent but that only went so deep. And yes, it’s very fair to call it advanced for its time. It was really clever.
But I don’t think it lead to shattering anyone’s world view or caused anyone to psychologically spin out.
It’s relevant in the context of giving a history of chatbots. But not in the history of computers making people “go crazy.” IMO
