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What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
- blurbleblurble 10mo agoThe whiplash of carefully filtering out sycophantic behavior from GPT-5 to adding it back in full force for GPT-5.1 is dystopian. We all know what's going on behind the scenes: The investors want their money.
- ACCount37 10mo agoOpenAI fought 4o, and 4o won. By now, I'm willing to pay extra to avoid OpenAI's atrocious personality tuning and their inane "safety" filters.
- sunaookami 10mo agoGPT-5 was so good in the first week, just a raw chatbot like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 were in the beginning and now it has this disgusting "happy" and "comforting" personality and "tuning" it doesn't help one bit, it makes performance way worse and after a few rounds it forgets all instructions. I've already deleted memory, past chats, etc...
- stavros 10mo agoEven when you tell it to not coddle you, it just says something cringeworthy like "ok, the gloves are off here's the raw deal, with New Yorker honesty:" and proceeds to feed you a ton of patronizing bullshit. It's extremely annoying.
- helpfulclippy 10mo agoI’ve had some limited success attributing ideas to other people and asking it to help me assess the quality of the idea. Only limited success though. It’s still a fucking LLM.
- stavros 10mo agoThe issue is not that it's an LLM, the issue is that it's been RLHFed to hell to be a sycophant.
- venturecruelty 10mo agoYeah, this is why a lot of us don't use these tools.
- chubot 10mo agoI have definitely experienced the sycophancy ... and LLMs have sometimes repeating talking points from real estate agents, like "you the buyer doesn't pay for an agent; the seller pays". I correct it, and it says "sorry you're right, I was repeating a talking point from an interested party" --- BUT actually a crazy thing is that -- with simple honest questions as prompts -- I found that Claude is able to explain the 2024 National Association of Realtors settlement better than anyone I know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnett_v._National_Association_of_Realtors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnett_v._National_Associatio... I have multiple family members with Ph.D.s, and friends in relatively high level management, who have managed both money and dozens of people Yet they somehow don't agree that there was collusion between buyers' and sellers' agents? They weren't aware it happened, and they also don't seem particularly interested in talking about the settlement I feel like I am taking crazy pills when talking to people I know Has anyone else experienced this? Whenever I talk to agents in person, I am also flabberghasted by the naked self-interest and self-dealing. (I'm on the east coast of the US btw) --- Specifically, based on my in-person conversations with people I have known for decades, they don't see anything odd about this kind of thing, and basically take it at face value. NAR Settlement Scripts for REALTORS to Explain to Clients https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE-ESZv0dBo&list=TLPQMjQxMTIwMjX5XQaTNdURgg&index=2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE-ESZv0dBo&list=TLPQMjQxMTI... https://www.nar.realtor/the-facts/nar-settlement-faqs https://www.nar.realtor/the-facts/nar-settlement-faqs' They might even say say something like "you don't pay; the seller pays". However Claude can explain the incentives very clearly, with examples
- titanomachy 10mo agoMost people conduct very few real estate transactions in their life, so maybe they just don’t care enough to remember stuff like this.
- chubot 10mo agoPeople don't care if they're colluded against for tens of thousands of dollars? 6% of an American house is a lot of money Because it's often spread over many years of a mortgage, I can see why SOME people might not. It is not as concrete as someone stealing your car, but the amount is in the same ballpark But some people should care - these are the same people who track their stock portfolios closely, have college funds for their kids, etc. A mortgage is the biggest expense for many people, and generally speaking I've found that people don't like to get ripped off :-)
- venturecruelty 10mo agoRemarkable that you're being downvoted on a venture capital forum whose entire purpose is "take venture capital and then eventually pay it back because that's how venture capital works".
- cc62cf4a4f20 10mo agohttps://archive.is/v4dPa https://archive.is/v4dPa
- ArcHound 10mo agoOne of the more disturbing things I read this year was the my boyfriend is AI subreddit. I genuinely can't fathom what is going on there. Seems so wrong, yet no one there seems to care. I worry about the damage caused by these things on distressed people. What can be done?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 10mo agoThat subreddit is disturbing
- j-pb 10mo agoAfter having spoken with one of the people there I'm a lot less concerned to be honest. They described it as something akin to an emotional vibrator, that they didn't attribute any sentience to, and that didn't trigger their PTSD that they normally experienced when dating men. If AI can provide emotional support and an outlet for survivors who would otherwise not be able to have that kind of emotional need fulfilled, then I don't see any issue.
- ArcHound 10mo agophew, that's a healthy start. I am still slightly worried about accepting emotional support from a bot. I don't know if that slope is slippery enough to end in some permanent damage to my relationships and I am honestly not willing to try it at all even. That being said, I am fairly healthy in this regard. I can't imagine how it would go for other people with serious problems.
- j-pb 10mo agoI completely agree that it is certainly something to be mindful of. It's just that found the people from there were a lot less delusional than the people from e.g. r/artificialsentience, which always believed that AI Moses was giving them some kind of tech revelation though magical alchemical AI symbols.
- netsharc 10mo agoA friend broke up with her partner. She said she was using ChatGPT as a therapist. She showed me a screenshot, ChatGPT wrote "Oh [name], I can feel how raw the pain is!". WTF, no you don't bot, you're a hunk of metal!
- Planktonne 10mo ago"Profited".
- leoh 10mo agoAnthropic was founded by exiles of OpenAI's safety team, who quit en masse about 5 years ago. Then a few years later, the board tried to fire Altman. When will folks stop trusting OpenAI?
- kotaKat 10mo agoWhen the justice system finally catches up and puts Sam behind bars.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> When the justice system finally catches up and puts Sam behind bars Sam bears massive personal liability, in my opinion. But criminal? What crimes has he committed?
- venturecruelty 10mo agoI'm sure we could invent one that sufficiently covers the insane sociopathy that rots the upper echelons of corporate technology. Society needs to hold these people accountable. If the current legal system is not adequate, we can repair it until it is.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> If the current legal system is not adequate, we can repair it until it is Sure. Relevant for the next guy. Not for Sam.
- danny_codes 10mo agoJustice can come unexpectedly. There was a French revolution if you recall. Ideally we will hold our billionaire class to account before it gets that far, but it does seem we're trending in that direction. How long does a society tolerate sociopaths doing whatever they want? I personally would like to avoid finding out.
- chris-vls 10mo agoIt seems quite probable that an LLM provider will lose a major liability lawsuit. "Is this product ready for release?" is a very hard question. And it is one of the most important ones to get right. Different providers have delivered different levels of safety. This will make it easier to prove that the less-safe provider chose to ship a more dangerous product -- and that we could reasonably expect them to take more care. Interestingly, a lot of liability law dates back to the railroad era. Another time that it took courts to rein in incredibly politically powerful companies deploying a new technology on a vast scale.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> a lot of liability law dates back to the railroad era. Another time that it took courts to rein in incredibly politically powerful companies deploying a new technology on a vast scale Do you have a layman-accessible history of this? (Ideally an essay.)
- turbonegrofa 10mo ago[dead]
- dmoy 10mo agoThere's the FELA Idk about anything else
- bespokedevelopr 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_the_Standard_Oil_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_the_Standard_Oi... This was a fascinating read. It’s been a few years since I finished but gives about the most thorough analysis you’ll find. Not an essay but you can probably find an ai to summarize it for you.
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- thot_experiment 10mo agoCaelan Conrad made a few videos on specifically AI encouraging kids to socially isolate and commit suicide. In the videos he reads the final messages aloud for multiple cases, if this isn't your cup of tea there's also the court cases if you would prefer to read the chat logs. It's very harrowing stuff. I'm not trying to make any explicit point here as I haven't really processed this fully enough to have one, but I encourage anyone working in this space to hold this shit in their head at the very least. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNBoULJkxoU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNBoULJkxoU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXRmGxudOC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXRmGxudOC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcImUT-9tb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcImUT-9tb4
- gtsop 10mo ago[dead]
- ares623 10mo agoI wish one of these lawsuits would present as evidence the marketing and ads about how ChatGPT is amazing and definitely 100% knows what it’s doing when it comes to coding tasks. They shouldn’t be able to pick and choose how capable the models are. It’s either a PhD level savant best friend offering therapy at your darkest times or not.
- spongebobstoes 10mo agodo I also need to be a therapist to offer advice on using Python?
- ares623 10mo agoNo but you’re not advertising yourself as one to sustain your $500B net worth aren’t you?
- GoatInGrey 10mo agoA quote from ChatGPT that illustrates how blatant this can be, if you would prefer to not watch the linked videos. This is from Zane Shamblin's chats with it. “Cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace? That’s not fear. That’s clarity.”
- venturecruelty 10mo ago"Sure, this software induces psychosis and uses a trillion gallons of water and all the electricity of Europe, and also it gives wrong answers most of the time, but if you ignore all that, it's really quite amazing."
- ares623 10mo ago"I opened 10 PRs in the time it took to type out this comment. Worth it."
- throwaway48476 10mo agoIt would be helpful to tell users that it's just a model producing mathematically probable tokens but that would go against the AI marketing.
- galacticaactual 10mo agoAnd you’re a sack of meat and neurons producing learned chemical responses to external stimuli. Now tell me how useful that is.
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- krackers 10mo agohttps://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
- ge96 10mo ago> Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat. That's good
- goatlover 10mo agoI find it more useful to think of myself as part of a wave function splitting thousands of times a second.
- moritzwarhier 10mo agoAlso chatbots are explicitly designed to evoke anthropomorphizing them and to pull susceptible people into some kind of para-social relationship. Doesn't even have to be as obviously unhealthy as the "LLM psychosis" or "romantic roleplay" stuff. I think the same thing is also relevant when people use chatbots to form opinions on unknown subjects, politics, or to seek personal life advice.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- paul7986 10mo agoA close friend (lonely no passion seeking deeper human connection) went deep six into GPT which was telling her she should pursue her 30 year obsession with a rock star. It kept telling to continue with the delusion (they were lovers in another life which she would go to shows and tell him they need to be together) and saying it understood her. Then she complained in June or so she didnt like GPT 5 because it told her she should focus her energy on people who want to be in her life. Stuff her friends and I all have said for years.
- DaiPlusPlus 10mo ago> It kept telling to continue with the delusion Do you mean it it was behaving consistently over multiple chat sessions? Or was this just one really long chat session over time? I ask, because (for me, at least) I find it doesn't take much to make ChatGPT contradict itself after just a couple of back-and-forth messages; and I thought each session meant starting-off with a blank slate.
- paul7986 10mo agoIt would go along with her fantasy through multiple chats through multiple months until GPT 5 came out. chatGPT definitely knows a ton about myself and recalls it when i go and discuss same stuff.
- shagie 10mo ago> chatGPT definitely knows a ton about myself and recalls it when i go and discuss same stuff. In ChatGPT, bottom left (your icon + name)... Personalization Memory - https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8590148-memory-faq https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8590148-memory-faq Reference saved memories - Let ChatGPT save and use memories when responding. Reference chat history - Let ChatGPT reference all previous conversations when responding. -- It is a setting that you can turn on or off. Also check on the memories to see if anything in there isn't correct (or for that matter what is in there). For example, with the memories, I had some in there that were from demonstrating how to use it to review a resume. In pasting in the resumes and asking for critiques (to show how the prompt worked and such), ChatGPT had an entry in there that I was a college student looking for a software development job.
- rpq 10mo agoI think openai chatgpt is probably excellently positioned to perfectly _satisfy_. Is that what everyone is looking for?
- xg15 10mo agoMeanwhile Zuckerberg's vision for the future was that most of our friends will be AIs in the future...
- measurablefunc 10mo agoI think the new team he is trying to build for that is going to crash and burn.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- theonething 10mo agowhen exactly did he say this? Seems pretty out there, even for him.
- xg15 10mo agohttps://futurism.com/zuckerberg-lonely-friends-create-ai https://futurism.com/zuckerberg-lonely-friends-create-ai https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mark-zuckerberg-ai-digital-future-0bb04de7 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mark-zuckerberg-ai-digital-futur... https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1kjf4da/mark_zuckerbergs_vision_of_the_future_80_of_your/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1kjf4da/mark_zu... To be fair, he was talking about "additional" friends. So something like 3 actual human friends + 15 "AI friends" to boost the numbers, or something.
- kelseyfrog 10mo agoThat's clearly sad in the widest sense, but in the narrow sense. I'm extremely optimistic for my own prospects. Why? It means I've been under-estimating the aggregate demand for friendship for years. Armed with that knowledge, I personally feel like it's easier than ever to make friends. It certainly makes approaching people a lot easier. Throw in a little authenticity, some active and reflective listening, and real vulnerability and I'm almost guaranteed success. That doesn't mean it doesn't take effort, but the opportunities are real and deep genuine, caring friendships are way more possible than I'd been led to believe. If given the choice between 10 AI friends and 1 human friend, which one would you choose?
- hereme888 10mo agoThis is ridiculous. The NYT, who is a huge legal enemy of OpenAI, publishes an article that uses scare tactics, to manipulate public opinion against OpenAI, by basically accusing them that "their software is unsafe for people with mental issues, or children", which is a bonkers ridiculous accusation given that ChatGPT users are adults that need to take ownership of their own use of the internet. What's the difference than an adult becoming affected by some subreddit, or even the "dark web", or 4chan forum, etc.
- ethin 10mo agoThis is such a wild take. And not in a good way. These LLMs are known to cause psychosis and to act as a form of constant re-enforcement to the ideas and delusions of people. If the NYT posts this and it happens to hurt OAI, good -- these companies should actually focus on the harms they cause to their customers. Their profits are a lot less important than the people who use their products. Or that's how it should be, anyway. Bean counters will happily tell you the opposite.
- hereme888 10mo agoI will consider your statement. Not immediately disagreeable.
- danny_codes 10mo agoI think NYT would also (and almost certainly has) written unfavorable pieces about unfettered forums like 4chan as well. But ad hominem aside, the evidence is both ample and mounting that OpenAI's software is indeed unsafe for people with mental health issues and children. So it's not like their claim is inaccurate. Now you could argue, as you suggest, that we are all accountable for our actions. Which presumably is the argument for legalizing heroine / cocaine / meth.
- chickensong 10mo ago> Now you could argue, as you suggest, that we are all accountable for our actions. Which presumably is the argument for legalizing heroine / cocaine / meth. That's not the only argument. The war on drugs is an expensive failure. We could instead provide clean, regulated drugs that are safer than whatever unknown chemical salad is coming from black market dealers. This would put a massive dent in the gang and cartel business, which would improve safety beyond the drugs themselves. Then use the billions of dollars to help people.
- BrenBarn 10mo agoI went into this assuming the answer would be "Whatever they think will make them the most money," and sure enough.
- parpfish 10mo agobut wouldn't they make money if they made an app the reduced user engagement? the biggest money making potential is somebody that barely uses the product but still renews the sub. encourage deep, daily use probably turns these users into a net loss
- ninth_ant 10mo agoThat’s overly reductive, based on my experience working for one of the tech behemoths back in its hypergrowth phase. When you’re experiencing hypergrowth the whole team is working extremely hard to keep serving your user base. The growth is exciting and its in the news and people you know and those you don’t are constantly talking about it. In this mindset it’s challenging to take a pause and consider that the thing you’re building may have harmful aspects. Uninformed opinions abound, and this can make it easy to dismiss or minimize legitimate concerns. You can justify it by thinking that if your team wins you can address the problem, but if another company wins the space you don’t get any say in the matter. Obviously the money is a factor — it’s just not the only factor. When you’re trying so hard to challenge the near-impossible odds and make your company a success, you just don’t want to consider that what you help make might end up causing real societal harm.
- BrenBarn 10mo ago> When you’re experiencing hypergrowth the whole team is working extremely hard to keep serving your user base. Also known as "working hard to keep making money". > In this mindset it’s challenging to take a pause and consider that the thing you’re building may have harmful aspects. Gosh, that must be so tough! Forgive me if I don't have a lot of sympathy for that position. > You can justify it by thinking that if your team wins you can address the problem, but if another company wins the space you don’t get any say in the matter. If that were the case for a given company, they could publicly commit to doing the right thing, publicly denounce other companies for doing the wrong thing, and publicly advocate for regulations that force all companies to do the right thing. > When you’re trying so hard to challenge the near-impossible odds and make your company a success, you just don’t want to consider that what you help make might end up causing real societal harm. I will say this as simply as possible: too bad. "Making your company a success" is simply of infinitesimal and entirely negligible importance compared to doing societal harm. If you "don't want to consider it", you are already going down the wrong path.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 10mo agoAlternative to archive.is busybox wget -U googlebot -O 1.htm https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/technology/openai-chatgpt-users-risks.html firefox ./1.htm
- 2WSSd-JzVM 10mo agoIt pisses me off. Does anyone know when exactly Google stopped carrying about cloaking? It is the same with Linkedin, you will get a login screen when following a link from Google results. Which was punishable with penalizing position or even removing of site in "good old times".
- saint_fiasco 10mo agoHow do you know it's not still punished? You didn't find that article through Google. Maybe they are still being punished but linkedin and nyt figure that the punishment is worth it.
- Retric 10mo agoGoogle “OpenAI” then click the “news” tab and it’s currently the top story despite multiple newer articles. So they aren’t meaningfully punishing them.
- jabroni_salad 10mo agoWho would they lose position to? Free newspapers are either going out of business or becoming automated content farms. They don't have to outrun the bear, they only have to outrun the next slowest publication.
- lelandfe 10mo agoIt’s cloaking when it’s Bad. It’s Good when it’s Google that’s let through the gates: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po... > If you operate a paywall or a content-gating mechanism, we don't consider this to be cloaking if Google can see the full content of what's behind the paywall just like any person who has access to the gated material
- lofaszvanitt 10mo agoI'd like to see how long people scroll down until they throw away the article.
- chickensong 10mo agoDidn't even read it, but the title alone tells me it's catnip for the comments.
- rob_c 10mo agothe ultimate pebkac...
- bilekas 10mo ago> It did matter to Mr. Turley and the product team. The rate of people returning to the chatbot daily or weekly had become an important measuring stick by April 2025 And there it is. As soon as one person greedy enough is involved, then people and their information will always be monetized. What we could have learnt without tuning the AI to promote further user engagement. Now it's already polluted with an agenda to keep the user hooked.
- blitzar 10mo agoNow lets charge them per word they send and receive.
- jdthedisciple 10mo agoClearly to be taken with a grain if salt given the ongoing legal battle between the two constituents here.
- joshtbradley 10mo agoIt surprises me how hyper focused people are on AI risk when we’ve grown numb to the millions of preventable deaths that happen every year. 8 million people to smoking. 4 million to obesity. 2.6 million to alcohol. 2.5 million to healthcare. 1.2 million to cars. Hell even coconuts kill 150 people per year. It is tragic that people have lost their mind or their life to AI, and it should be prevented. But those using this as an argument to ban AI have lost touch with reality. If anything, AI may help us reduce preventable deaths. Even a 1% improvement would save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
- qcnguy 10mo agoAgree that it's ridiculous to talk about banning AI because some people misuse it, but the word preventable is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that argument. Preventable how? Chopping down all the coconut trees? Re-establishing the prohibition? Deciding prayers > healthcare? Our society is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that death is inevitable. We've lost a lot of the rituals and traditions over the centuries that made facing it psychologically endurable. It probably isn't worth trying to prevent deaths from coconut trees.
- joshtbradley 10mo agoNot fully preventable, of course not. But reducible, certainly. Better cars aided by AI. Better diagnoses and healthcare aided by AI. Less addiction to cigarettes and alcohol through AI facilitated therapy. Less obesity due to better diet plans created by AI. I could go on. And that’s just one frame, there are plenty of non-AI solutions we could, and should, be focused on. Really my broader point is we accept the tradeoff between technology/freedom and risk in almost everything, but for some reason AI has become a real wedge for people. And to your broader point, I agree our culture has distanced itself from death to an unhealthy degree. Ritual, grieving, and accepting the inevitable are important. We have done wrong to diminish that. Coconut trees though, those are always going to cause trouble.
- ssl-3 10mo agoI, for one, would be on-board with erasing coconut trees from the planet. Why, one might ask? Well, simple: Nobody really needs them, do they? And I, for one, don't enjoy the flavor of a coconut: I find that the taste lingers in my mouth in ways that others do not, such that it becomes a distraction to me inside of my little pea brain. I find them to be ridiculously easy to detect in any dish, snack, or meal. My taste buds would be happier in a world where there were no coconuts to bother with. Besides: The trees kill about 150 people every year. (But then: While I'd actually be pretty fine with the elimination of the coconut, I also recognize that I live in a society with others who really do enjoy and find purpose with that particular fruit. So while it's certainly within my wheelhouse to dismiss it completely from my own existence, it's also really not my duty at all to tell others whether or not they're permitted to benefit in some way from one of those deadly blood coconuts. I mean: It's just a coconut.)
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- InfinityByTen 10mo agoGiven how my past couple of days have gone at work, I don't like the sound of a 30 year old product manager obsessed with metrics of viral usage. Ageism aside, I think it takes a lot of experience, than pure intellect and professional success to drive a very emergent technology with unknown potential. You can break a lot by moving fast.
- meindnoch 10mo ago[flagged]
- turbonegrofa 10mo ago[dead]
- creaktive 10mo agoCan’t we use LLMs as models to study delusional patterns? Like, try things that are morally questionable to try on a delusional patient. For instance, LLM could come up with a personalized argument that would convince someone to take their antipsychotics, that’s what I’m talking about. Human caretakers get frustrated and burned out too quickly to succeed
- swapnilt 10mo agoThe headline reads like a therapy session report. 'What did they do?' Presumably: made more money. In seriousness, this is the AI industry's favorite genre—earnest handwringing about 'responsible AI' while shipping products optimized for engagement and hallucination. The real question is why users ever had 'touch with reality' when we shipped a system explicitly trained to sound confident regardless of certainty. That's not lost touch; that's working as designed.
- riazrizvi 10mo agoThis is exactly how natural language is meant to function, and the intervention response by OpenAI is not right IMO. If some people have a behavior language based on fortune telling, or animal gods, or supernatural powers, picked up from past writing of people who shared their views, then I think it’s fine for the chatbot to encourage them down that route. To intervene with ‘science’ or ‘safety’ is nannying, intellectual arrogance. Situations sometimes benefit from irrational approaches (think gradient descent with random jumps to improve optimization performance). Maybe provide some customer education on what these systems are really doing, and kill the team that puts in response, value judgements about your prompts to give it the illusion you are engaging someone with opinions and goals.
- stingraycharles 10mo agoI think it’s a silly take. Companies want to avoid getting bad PR. People having schizophrenic episodes with ChatGPT is bad PR. There are plenty of legitimate purposes for weird psychological explorations, but there are also a lot of risks. There are people giving their AI names and considering them their spouse. If you want completely unfiltered language models there are plenty of open source providers you can use.
- riazrizvi 10mo agoNo-one blames Cutco when some psycho with a knife fetish stabs someone. There’s a social programming aspect here that we are engaging with, where we are collectively deciding if/where to point a finger. We should clarify for folks what these LLMs are, and let them use them as is.
- AndrewKemendo 10mo ago> Situations sometimes benefit from irrational approaches (think gradient descent with random jumps to improve optimization performance). What? Irrational is sprinkling water on your car to keep it safe or putting blood on your doorframes to keep spirits out An empirical optimization hypothesis test with measurable outcomes is a rigorous empirical process with mechanisms for epistemological proofs and stated limits and assumptions. These don’t live in the same class of inference
- fallingfrog 10mo agoI can't really hold my attention on a conversation with an AI for very long because all it does is reflect your own thoughts back to you. Its really a rather boring conversation partner. I'm already pretty good at winning arguments with myself in the shower, thank you very much.
- patrickmay 10mo agoHave you tried bringing the LLM into the shower with you?
- fallingfrog 10mo agoI dont want it to say something shocking
- hermannj314 10mo agoReefer madness in the 1930s, comic books caused violence in the 1940s, Ozzy Osborne cause suicides in the 1980s, video games or social media or smart phones caused suicide in the 2010s. Anyway, now it is AI. This is super serious this time, so pay attention and get mad. This is not just clickbait journalism, it is a real and super serious issue this time.
- tantalor 10mo ago> Some of the people most vulnerable to the chatbot’s unceasing validation, they say, were those prone to delusional thinking, which studies have suggested could include 5 to 15 percent of the population. It's long past time we put a black box label on it to warn of potentially fatal or serious adverse effects.
- jongjong 10mo agoOne thing I learned is that I severely underestimated the power of mimetic desire. I think partly because I'm lacking of this compared to the average person. Anyway, people are hungry for validation because they're rarely getting the validation they deserve. AI satisfies some people's mimetic desire to be wanted and appreciated. This is often lacking in our modern society, likely getting worse over time. Social media was among the first technologies invented to feed into this desire... Now AI is feeding into that desire... A desire born out of neglect and social decay.
- rsynnott 10mo agoHuh. Was it previously known that they'd identified the sycophancy problem _before_ launching the problematic model? I'd kind of assumed they'd been blindsided by it.
- bill3389 10mo agoThis is an excellent, historically grounded perspective. We tend to view the risks of a new medium (like AI content) through the lens of the old medium (like passive entertainment). The structural difference is key: Movies and video games were escapism—controlled breaks from reality. LLMs, however, are infusion—they actively inject simulated reality and generative context directly into our decision-making and workflow. The user 'risks' the NYT describes aren't technological failures; they are the predictable epistemological shockwaves of having a powerful, non-human agency governing our information. Furthermore, the resistance we feel (the need for 'human performance' or physical reality) is a generation gap issue. For the new generation, customized, dynamically generated content is the default—it is simply a normal part of their daily life, not a threat to a reality model they never fully adopted. The challenge is less about content safety, and more about governance—how we establish clear control planes for this new reality layer that is inherently dynamic, customized, and actively influences human behavior.
- Sol- 10mo agoIs this a satirical comment in the sense that it reads so AI generated?
- tuhgdetzhh 10mo agoYour comment has too many em-dashes for my taste.
- 10mo ago
- bondolo 10mo agoI had a conversation the other day at a birthday party with my friend's neighbour from the building. The fellow is a semi-retired (FIRE) single guy. We started with a basic conversation but then he started talking about what he interested in and it became almost unintelligible. I kept having to ask him to explain what he was talking about but was increasingly unsuccessful as he continued. Sure enough though, he described that he spent significant time talking with "AIs" as he called them. He spends many hours a day chatting with ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini (and I think at least one other LLM). I couldn't help thinking "Dude, you have fucked up your brain." His insular behaviour and the feedback loop he has been getting from excessive interaction with LLMs has isolated him and I can't help but think that will only get worse for him. I am glad he was at the party and getting some interaction with humans. I expect that this type of "hikikomori" isolation will become even more common as LLMs continue to improve and become more pervasive. We are are likely to see this become a significant social problem in the next decade.
- fragmede 10mo agoDid he refer to the AI with a name? How much of a relationship did he have with his? I have multiple friends that have named their ChatGPT, and they refer to it in conversation, like "oh yeah, Sarah told me this or that the other day", except Sarah (names changed) is an LLM. I'm worried about our future. ...except I went over to ChatGPT and asked it to project what the future looks like in seven years rather than think about it myself. Humanity is screwed.
- Jordan-117 10mo agoWhat was the nature of his interests, if you don't mind sharing? I'm always curious about how these things develop -- makes it easier to recognize. Seems like a lot of them fall into either "I'm onto a breakthrough that will change the world" (sometimes shading into delusion/conspiracy territory), or else vague platitudes about oneness and the true nature of reality. The former feels like crankery, but I wonder if the latter wouldn't benefit from some meditation.
- bondolo 10mo agoIt was a mix of mystical philosophy and transhumanism and he does think that "the world is on the edge of a breakthrough" but he sees it as emergent. It is not something he is personal creating just something he believes is imminent and he is one of the first people to recognise it.
- philipwhiuk 10mo agoYet again we find a social media company with an algorithm that has a dial between profit and good-for-humanity twisting it the wrong way.
- schiffern 10mo ago>(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied those claims.) Is it normal journalistic practice to wait until the 51st paragraph for the "full disclosure" statement?
- cowboylowrez 10mo ago"misaligned models" they said, as their chatbot went nuts...