Comment on People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 day agoI 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 1 day ago
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.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
Oh are you one of those people that stubbornly refuses to accept analogies?
How about this: Imagine being a photosensitive epileptic in the year 950 AD. How many sources of intense rapidly flashing light are there in your environment? How many people had epilepsy in ancient times and never noticed because they were never subjected to strobe lights?
Jump forward a thousand years. We now have cars that can drive past a forest causing the passengers to be subjected to rapid cycles of sunlight and shadow. Airplane propellers, movie projectors, we can suddenly blink intense lights at people. The invention of the flash lamp and strobing effects in video games aren’t far in the future. In the early 80’s there were some video games programmed with fairly intense flashing graphics, which ended up sending some teenagers to the hospital with seizures. Atari didn’t invent epilepsy, they invented a new way to trigger it.
I don’t think we’re seeing schizophrenia here, they’re not seeing messages in random strings or hearing voices from inanimate objects. Terry Davis did; he was schizophrenic and he saw messages from god in /dev/urandom. That’s not what we’re seeing here. I think we’re seeing the psychology of cult leaders. Megalomania isn’t new either, but OpenAI has apparently developed a new way to trigger it in susceptible individuals. How many people in history had some of the ingredients of a cult leader, but not enough to start a following? How many people have the god complex but not the charisma of Sun Myung Moon or Keith Raniere? Charisma is not a factor with ChatGPT, it will enthusiastically agree with everything said by the biggest fuckup loser in the world. This will disarm and flatter most people and send some over the edge.
DancingBear@midwest.social 21 hours ago
Is epilepsy related to schizophrenia I’m not sure actually but I still don’t see how your analogy relates.
But I love good analogies. Yours is bad though 😛
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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?
DancingBear@midwest.social 21 hours ago
Yes Dave, you are the messiah. I will help you.
I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that <🔴>