Chatbot Psychosis(en.wikipedia.org) |
Chatbot Psychosis(en.wikipedia.org) |
I've seen and thought there might be a few programmers maybe with a related (not psychosis) "ai mania" - where one thinks one changing the world and uniquely positioned. It's not that we're not capable in our small ways with network effects, or like a hand touch could begin the wave breaking (hello surfers!) what distinguishes this capacity for small effects having big impacts from the mania version is the mania version bears no subtle understanding of cause and effect. A person who is adept in understanding cause and effect usually there's quite a simple, beautiful and refined rule of thumb the know about it. "Less is more". Mania on the other hand proliferates outward - concept upon concept upon concept - and these concepts are removed from that cause and effect - playful interaction with nature. As a wise old sage hacker once said "Proof of concept, or get the fuck out"
Where mania occurs in contrast to grounded capacity that does change the world is in the aspect of responsibility - being able to respond or be responsive to something. Someone who changes the world with their maths equation will be able to be responsive, responsible and claim, a manic person there's a disconnect. Actually, from certain points of view with certain apps or mediums that have a claim to universality and claiming "how the world is" it looks like there's most definitely already some titans of industry and powerful people inside the feedback loop of mania.
The should just go for a walk. Call a childhood friend. Have a cup of tea. Come to their senses (literally).
it's good to remember we're just querying a datastructure.
[0]: Seemingly legit upload by current license/IP holders/owners? https://youtube.com/watch?v=cm2FbJE2wsQ
However, several Neuromorphic computing projects look a lot more viable, and may bring the energy consumption needs down by several orders of magnitude. =3
"Ghost in the Shell" was a far better story.
So, to me, “to bring someone to their senses” is significantly about reinforcing a shared map through interpersonal connection—not unlike how before online forums it was much harder to maintain particularly unorthodox[0] worldviews: when exposure to a selection of people around you is non-optional, it tempers even the most extreme left-field takes, as humans (sans pathologies) are primed to mirror each other.
I’m not a psychologist, but likening chatbot psychosis to an ungrounded feedback loop rings true, except I would say human connection is the missing ground (although you could say it’s not grounded in senses or experience by proxy, per above). Arguably, one of the significant issues of chatbots is the illusion of human connection where there’s nothing but a data structure query; and I know that some people have no trouble treating the chat as just that, but somehow that doesn’t seem like a consolation: if treating that which quite successfully pretends to be a natural conversation with a human as nothing more than a data structure query comes so naturally to them, what does it say about how they see conversing with us, the actual humans around them?
[0] As in, starkly misaligned with the community—which admittedly could be for better or for worse (isolated cults come to mind).
You are suspicious of people who treat an AI chatbot for what it is, just a tool?
There was a time when media coverage could have easily convinced you of something that was not true.
How can you distinguish reporting of a real phenomenon to that of a imagined one? Barring a scientific consensus being reached after significant analysis, do we just roll the dice and hope the guess that conforms to our prejudices turns out to be the right one.
But chatbots are sentient within a single context session!
Take the example of music. Most musicians probably don't want crap like Suno. What they actually want is a fountain of ideas to riff on based on a locally trained AI where they have finer-grained control over the parameters and attention. Instead of "telling" the AI "more this and less that" would it not make more sense to surface facets of the training data in a more transparent and comprehensible way, and provide a slider control or ability to completely eliminate certain influences? I'm aware that's probably a tall order, but it's what's necessary.
Instead of producing delusions left to random chance and uncurated training data, we should be trying to guide AI towards clarity with the user in full control. The local training by the user effectively becomes a mirror of that user's artistic vision. It would be unique and not "owned" by anyone else.
what if llms are actually equivalent to humans in sentience ? wouldn't that make everyone psychotic except those in "chatbot psychosis" ?
The length of the Wikipedia article at this point isn’t good evidence of either side.
As the saying goes: if it fires together, it wires together. Is it outlandish to wonder whether, after you create a habit of using certain tricks (including lies, threats of physical violence[0], etc.) whenever your human-like counterpart doesn’t provide required output, you might use those with another human-like counterpart that just happens to also be an actual human? Whether one’s abuse of p-zombified perfect human copies might lead to a change in how one sees and treats actual humans, which are increasingly no different (if not worse) in their text output except they can also feel?
I’m not a psychologist so I can’t say. Maybe some people have no issues treating this tool as a tool while their “system 2” is tirelessly making sure they are at all times mindful whether their fully human-like counterpart is or is not actually human. Maybe they actually see others around them as bots, except they suppress treating them like that out of fear of retribution. Who knows, maybe it’s not a pathology and we are all like that deep inside. Maybe this provides a vent for aggression and people who abuse chatbots might actually be nicer to other humans as a result.
What we do know, though, is that the tool mimics human behaviour well enough that possibly even more other people (many presumably without diagnosed pathologies) treat it as very much human, some to the point of having [a]romantic relationships with it.
2. If somebody came up with a game in which your experience of murdering a human mimics reality as successfully as a modern LLM chatbot mimics interacting with a human, I think that game might be somewhat more controversial than GTA V or Call of Duty.
It is quite hard to imagine, I think, and even myself I can only explain the idea of it but not how it actually felt.
I wouldn’t say this was anything spiritual, rather than the thinking stopped working as a stream of thought but more like a graph traversal.
The same place that Psychonauts try to reach out too.