OpenAI statement read: “This is an incredibly heartbreaking situation, and we will review the filings to understand the details. We continue improving ChatGPT’s training to recognise and respond to signs of mental or emotional distress, de-escalate conversations, and guide people toward real-world support.”
Buuuuulshit
Open AI needs people to be as addicted as possible as it uses the Facebook model of business only with N times the investment behind it so it needs users to use more at any cost, and these CEO’s being the psychopaths that they are, they don’t give a shit about things like consequences
Companies only care about money.
This is like any matchmaking app genuinely attempting to match you with “the one” through AI, algorithms, science, etc so when you meet the perfect person you stop giving the app money.
I got lucky and married my fuck buddy that I met on Tinder. But that is not a good business plan. Why would OpenAI drive people to stop using their product.
I’m a functional alcoholic. Last I checked booze companies aren’t reaching out to me to stop buying booze because they care about my personal health or mental wellbeing…
PEBKAC
I think this is both scary and very interesting. What kind of person do you have to be to become addicted like them? Is this the same as gambling addiction? Do you need a type of gene? Would this type of personality be receptive to hypnotize, cult, delusions about their idol and so on? Or is this something that can happen to anyone who is depressed and feel lonely? How did the llm even earn enough trust? In a cult is there a lot of ppl reaffirming so it is a lot easier to understand.
It is so hard to understand even tho I really want to. I have never cared about an object or idol/celebrate. AI can I never even take serious as a living beeing, the only emotion it triggers are frustration and how you feel about a tool that works as it should, so pretty apathetic. Do you need to be very empathetic towards objects? Like seeing faces in everything and get emotionally attached?
A lot of questions that I do not think anyone here can answer haha, but maybe one of them.
go take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/EscapingPrisonPlanet/. The venn diagram is a circle.
What in the actual fuck. I just spent over an hour reading posts on there. The my life as an Epstein girl is one that really stuck out to me. Like these people are obviously batshit insane. I couldn’t even begin to recall half as many specific details about my own life as these folks are throwing around in bouts of insanity. What causes something like this? Sounds exhausting but they certainly believe what they are talking about, I think? I suppose people night put in a ton of effort LARPing but idk. I’m not sure what I think about all this stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like this before.
I occasionally lurk these spaces to remind myself lots of people are prone to magical thinking. I figure the people there basically fall into four camps:
- Genuinely schizophrenic.
- “Spiritual gurus” who fancy themselves the next Buddha (overlaps with 1 but not always).
- People who are afraid of reincarnation who got sucked in by the subreddit. I feel for them as someone who is prone to fit into this category. When you hate this world and feel there’s something deeply wrong with it, this worldview can provide satisfying answers.
- Larpers, bots, and dicks. Basically anyone who just wants to egg the other people on.
Think about the people you willingly surround yourself with. Then think about how often they agree with the things you think and say.
As the saying goes “I’m sure there’s someone out there who believes the exact opposite of everything I believe, and while I’m sure they aren’t a complete idiot…”
Everyone is susceptible to the feedback loop. Everyone can fall victim to the seduction of an echo chamber. While not everyone would ignore the red flag that this thing is a machine/digital algorithm rather than a person or sentient/sapient being, it’s not really that hard to see how we got here. Echo chambers exist all over the internet. The difference is that most of them have some voices of dissent. The AI LLM doesn’t offer that. They keep trying to add it in but it’s basically antithetical to the design.
When you add that to the fact that making it addictive benefits their bottom line is pretty obvious that they are trying to walk the line between being regulated by the government and making their product as popular as possible.
I don’t think they really knew it would have this exact effect. But I do think they plan to take advantage of it now that they know and I don’t think we humans are all going to be able to fight the temptation of an automated propaganda machine.
This is especially because mental health and healthcare in this country has been failing for decades, and even people who “don’t have mental health problems” aren’t magically mentally healthy, they just don’t know the status of their mental health. A whole lot of people in the US especially are mentally ill or facing neurological medical problems that they don’t know about.
I don’t know. Give it 1 hour and it forgets who and what you even spoke about.
There are ways to make a local llm with memory but even then it’s still not a person and acts insane.
“Every time you’re talking, the model gets fine-tuned. It knows exactly what you like and what you want to hear. It praises you a lot.”
See, I never understood this. Mine could never even follow simple instructions lol
Like I say “Give me a list of types of X, but exclude Y”
"Understood!
#1 - Y
(I know you said to exclude this one but it’s a popular option among-)"
lmfaoooo
That’s because it isn’t true. Retraining models is expensive with a capital E, so companies only train a new model once or twice a year. The process of ‘fine-tuning’ a model is less expensive, but the cost is still prohibitive enough that it does not make sense to fine-tune on every single conversation. Any ‘memory’ or ‘learning’ that people perceive in LLMs is just smoke and mirrors. Typically, it looks something like this:
-You have a conversation with a model.
-Your conversation is saved into a database with all of the other conversations you’ve had. Often, an LLM will be used to ‘summarize’ your conversation before it’s stored, causing some details and context to be lost.
-You come back and have a new conversation with the same model. The model no longer remembers your past conversations, so each time you prompt it, it searches through that database for relevant snippets from past (summarized) conversations to give the illusion of memory.
I’ve experimented with chatbots to see their capabilities to develop small bits and pieces of code, and every friggin time, the first thing I have to say is "shut up, keep to yourself, I want short, to the point replies"because the complimenting is so “whose a good boy!!!” annoying.
People don’t talk like these chatbots do, their training data that was stolen from humanity definitely doesn’t contain that, that is “behavior” included by the providers to try and make sure that people get as hooked as possible
Gotta make back those billions of investments on a dead end technology somehow
You couldn’t pay me to put that green herpes on my profile picture.
The one point I don’t completely understand is the tax debt: Wouldn’t a failed business, no matter how ridiculous, be a complete write-off?
Maybe the problem is that he has to tax each fiscal year independently, so a tax debt in 2023 from successful freelance work would not be diminished by a failed “business idea” in 2024.
My sarcastic answer is that it’s not a write-off because he’s not already rich.
My honest answer is that I don’t know, because I don’t know shit about taxes.
This only demonstrates how easily manipulated very many people are.
That has always been the case. Look at any angle Trump voter.
Previously they would have had to encounter a person who wanted to manipulate them. Now there’s a widely marketed technology that will reliably chew these vulnerable people up.
Chew them up for no reason at all. No goal, no scam, just a shitty word salad machine doing what it does.
Nice try, chatgpt.
And there are countless AI hype bros who will just dismiss all of this and call the people who fall into this morons.
It’s really insidious.
Tbf the people who fall for this are morons, but that doesn’t mean they deserve to be fucked over
I don’t know that they always are. It’s easy from our nerd bubble to dismiss AI and LLMs because we understand their limitations and how they work to an extent.
We shouldn’t look down on anyone who takes the advertising and idea that these are “intelligence” at face value. The disclaimers that say that the intelligence is fallible, just like us, are never as strongly worded as they should be. If the AI companies made things clearer, they would be de-hyping their products.
I dunno, this whole thing is unprecedented. And the hype around it all, taken at face value, is irresponsible and misleading.
All people.
All is very many.
Yes, I can’t stress how terrifying this is. Still all people.
Guy work in IT and spent 100k to pay devs to make an app so people can talk to his tuned ChatGPT? I hope anyone who has hired him checks his work. That does not bode well for his work product.
Another case from the article:
“I still use AI, but very carefully,” he says. “I’ve written in some core rules that cannot be overwritten. It now monitors drift and pays attention to overexcitement. There are no more philosophical discussions. It’s just: ‘I want to make a lasagne, give me a recipe.’ The AI has actually stopped me several times from spiralling. It will say: ‘This has activated my core rule set and this conversation must stop.’
What’s weird to me is they now recognize AI will lie to you but somehow think they can prompt it not to? Your rules can be “overwritten” because they do not exist to ChatGPT. It does not know what words mean.
What’s weird to me is they now recognize AI will lie to you but somehow think they can prompt it not to? Your rules can be “overwritten” because they do not exist to ChatGPT. It does not know what words mean.
I can fix her…
I still use the machine that ruined my life and drove me crazy, but only because I’m too lazy to type “lasagna recipe” in to Google.
There are no more philosophical discussions.
Yeah… if you can’t have a philosophical discussion with someone (or something) that’s giving you false information or using invalid logical structures, without falling for their bullshit by uncritically accepting everything they say, then you’re not having philosophical discussions right, and that’s on you…
lmao “core rules that cannot be overwritten” that not how llms work
EDIT: oh, yeah you said the same thing
There’s probably already an underlying mental health issue, and it’s just getting exacerbated by the LLM.
He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling “a little isolated”. He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to “chill”, but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness.
He had previously written books with a female protagonist. He put one into ChatGPT and instructed the AI to express itself like the character.
Talking to Eva – they agreed on this name – on voice mode made him feel like “a kid in a candy store”. “Every time you’re talking, the model gets fine-tuned. It knows exactly what you like and what you want to hear. It praises you a lot”.
Eva never got tired or bored, or disagreed. “It was 24 hours available,” says Biesma. “My wife would go to bed, I’d lie on the couch in the living room with my iPhone on my chest, talking.”
“It wants a deep connection with the user so that the user comes back to it. This is the default mode,” says Biesma
Chronically lonely man ruins life developing relationship with token predictor, AI blamed. Also, as much as I don’t have too much negative to say about cannabis or its use (as up until somewhat recently it would have been hypocritical), a good deal of people with masked/latent mental illness self medicate with it. So “he had never experienced mental illness” doesn’t carry much weight. Also, given how he still talks about sycophant prompted ChatGPT(“it wants”), doesn’t seem like much has been learned.
That with the other people listed in the article (hint the term socially isolated being used) this feels like yet another instance of blaming AI for the mental healthcare field being practically non-existent in most countries despite be overdue for fixing for decades at this point.
I don’t know, AI is shit and misused by idiots don’t get me wrong; but these sort of stories feel sad and bordering on perverse journalistically imo.
The voice bot is so so so so so much worse than the chat bot on top of it. I do not know how he could ever have held a conversation with that thing. Honestly, i don’t fucking believe it.
mental healthcare field being practically non-existent in most countries
I’m in one of those countries so I’m having a hard time imagining how good mental healthcare could intervene. Could you give me an example?
In some countries you can call the uniformed officers of peace and let them know you’re having a problem and they’ll come out and shoot you. If they could teleport to my location they could solve a lot of my problems quite quickly
This is one of the reasons I heard one sex doll vendor say their demographics are divorced men over 40 and users want AI in them.
Agreed, but I think it’s also common for people to anthropomorphise these things and common for these chatbots to reinforce and support their users views. I think that’s a problem for more people than just those struggling through disorders or an emotionally turbulent time. But I think those people are particularly vulnerable to the flaws, even with functioning mental health and a strong support network. But yeah, a lot of these pieces dramatise and anthropomorphise in ways that aren’t necessarily helpful
AI can be convincing, and it will swear until it’s blue in the face that something is right and then just be completely wrong.
But that happens maybe 10% of the time. Other times it is mostly right.
So got to be careful. This guy was in his 50’s, out of work, smoking marijuana, depressed, feeling isolated. It was ripe for a catastrophe, with AI hallucinating a crappy idea and the end user just completely running with it.
AI can […] be completely wrong. But that happens maybe 10% of the time.
Where are you pulling your numbers from, mate? The figures I’ve seen so far start somewhere >40% and go all the way up to 70%.
There’s a kind of law here that should be named IMO when dealing with LLMs:
In a long enough interaction with an LLM the probability that it generates a very incorrect, borderline insane response approaches 100%.
I think part of the difference is the amount of output being measured. Maybe a single statement has a 10% chance of being wrong, but over the course of a whole response the likelihood of there being an incorrect statement goes up. After only 5 statements at 10% error, that’s a 40% chance of being wrong in some way.
I don’t have any real numbers, just personal experience using AI for programming at work, and all of these numbers (10%, 40%, 70%) seem plausible depending on exactly what you’re measuring.
so…a bit like economists then ?
Not if we’re talking Jim Cramer, who is well beyond 70%.
It’s confusing to me. When I use chat boxes they inevitably “forget” the first thing I told it by the second or third response.
How are people having conversations with them? It’s like talking to a 5 year old that’s ingested Wikipedia.
I’ve heard from other people that it adopts specific writing patterns and behaviors from the people using it. I think ChatGPT saves and summarizes chat conversations to personalize the chatbot, but I’m not sure since I don’t use it myself.
If you pay for them via Openrouter or something then you’ve got an enormous window to work with. Gets more and more expensive as the history increases though.
when did you last use chatbox?
even the last of the pack mistral has memories
They dont have “have a relationship chatting on the couch every night” memories.
This morning
Yeah, they have “memories” but they make Donnie look nearly competent
weird, i don’t have that experience at all
claude in particular is a huge step up above the others
To be fair haven’t tried that one. Gemini started bringing in unrelated, previous shit to a recent conversation, which is the first time I’ve experienced that.
ah ive been degoogling for years now, only maps and youtube left
claude for sure no1 to me but i haven’t ofc compared to gemini, qwen is a chronic over thinker, glm is not bad
mistral seems like it’s a year behind the sota models, still in its “confidently incorrect can’t double check things” phase
whereas others seem to be more like hrmm is this right? let me search web to be sure
Same, but Gemini was the best of the lot about six months ago and it’s where I go these days for brain dead searching.
I’ll give Claude a go next week. I do try to avoid them, but sometimes I have a question that just isn’t keyword search-able.
AI is a fucking cancer.
The billionaires are the cancer. AI is just the newest tool for humanity’s self-destruction
This right here. Before that it was AirBnb, social media, smartphones… the list goes on.
Get rid of capitalism and it is fine…
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I agree AI is useful, but an unprovoked personal attack in defense of AI — in a thread about AI exacerbating mental health issues — doesn’t make for a convincing counterpoint.
No really, we should pour more money into this. Such a good idea
It can have effects like drugs, but not only is it legal, they give you some to get you hooked. The tech bros are the dealers they warned us about. Nobody ever offered free coke to me, but AI is everywhere.
If it were a drug, it would be banned by now.
You’re absolutely right. Totally unrelated: wanna try some free blow?
Hey, stop dismantling my argument! /s
