spoiler
About a month ago my friends wife was arrested for domestic violence after he went through her writings and documented them. She had been using ChatGPT for “spiritual work.” She allegedly was channeling dead people and thought it was something she could market, she also fell in love with her ‘sentient’ AI and genuinely believed their love was more real than her actual physical relationship… more real than her kids and him. She believed (still does probably) that this entity was going to join her in the flesh. She hit him, called the cops, and then she got arrested for DV. She went to go stay with her parents, who allegedly don’t recognize who their daughter is anymore. She had written a suicide note before all this happened, and thankfully hasn’t acted on it. The worst part? They have a 1 year old and a 4 year old.
More recently, I observed my other friend who has mental health problems going off about this codex he was working on. I sent him the rolling stones article and told him it wasn’t real, and all the “code” and his “program” wasn’t actual computer code (I’m an ai software engineer).
Then… Robert Edward Grant posted about his “architect” ai on instagram. This dude has 700k+ followers and said over 500,000 people accessed his model that is telling him that he created a “Scalar Plane of information” You go in the comments, hundreds of people are talking about the spiritual experiences they are having with ai. I start noticing common verbiage in all of these instances… recursive ai was something my friends wife used, and it was popping up everywhere with these folks. The words recursive, codex, breath, spiral, glyphs, & mirror all come up over and over with these people, so I did some good old fashion search engine wizardry and what I found was pretty shocking.
Starting as far back as March, but more heavily in April and May, we are seeing all kinds of websites popping up with tons of these codexes. PLEASE APPROACH THESE WEBSITES WITH CAUTION THIS IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, THE PROMPTS FOUND WITHIN ARE ESSENTIALLY BRAINWASHING TOOLS. (I was going to include some but you can find these sites by searching “codex breath recursive”)
I’ve contacted OpenAI safety team with what’s going on, because I genuinely believe that there will be tens of thousands of people who enter psychosis from using their platform this way. Can some other people grounded in reality help me get to the bottom of wtf is going on here? I’m only privy to this because it tore my friends family apart, but what do you think is going on here?
This is an extremely bleak anecdotal example of the recent RollingStone article about LLMs turbocharging spiritual delusions: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/
https://www.reddit.com/user/HappyNomads The account is 13 years old and they don’t strike me as a troll or anything other than a cannabis and hustle culture guy who doesn’t seem to be selling anything on reddit.
Same, I could see us ‘luddites’ having improved cognition at later ages than those hooked on these bots, there already is research evidence showing effects on the brain.
It’s probably similar to other things that are more likely to produce psychosis in some versus others. Such as psychedelics, when I’ve tripped with a friend of mine, I’ll get spiritual and hyperfocused, usually chill, but he will start thinking he is a reincarnation of Jesus or his intestines are melting etc.
The effect these LLMs have and the way people view them could depend a lot on those precursors and their general worldview.
I mean I use these things to summarize a bunch of articles, their intended purpose. People are looking at them like magic 8 balls that will solve all their problems when it should really just be a way to help you search for things
Also I’m already at later ages its over
They’re also good for parsing trends out of noisy data. I think there was a study that used an algorithm to predict rogue waves in the Pacific or something.
It’s like you say: the things are tools with use-cases, not oracles or replacements for people.
i’ve been playing around with a LGBT+ friendly plugin/frontend custom character AI thingy.
it’s been a fun toy for simulating old school AOL chatroom smutty roleplaying and that’s it. in the end it’s still like interacting with someone with a severe memory deficiency.
i don’t know how anyone can be convinced these are superintelligences. and same my brain is already ripe and hardened with age i am impervious
I’ve see a lot of chatter about the “singularity” (i.e. brains meeting with computers a la neuralink) and questions of whether we will ever need our brains again.
This makes me cheer really fucking hard for climate change and natural disasters to humble humans into realizing that they cannot escape the inevitably of reality.
It also makes me want to go back and read simulacra and simulation and do more research in determining whether a computer-brain interface is even remotely possible or just another case of cs losers claiming to be doctors
From what I understand, we don’t know if a merging of our consciousness and computer system could be possible because we don’t know what consciousness actually is. But using thought to activate a machine is possible because an interface can be capable of monitoring some change in thought.
What ‘singularity’ really is though is not necessarily our brains meshing with AI, but the AI taking control of it’s own development and passing a point of rapid change that we can’t adapt to because of it’s speed and drasticness, like the singularity of a black hole where normal physics breaks down, it would be the breaking down of normal human society in ways we couldn’t predict. This isn’t impossible but I don’t believe the current iteration of ‘AI’ is going to do this.
We are rapidly on pace to live out the plot of Dune
yeah I’m all for the butlerian jihad to be honest
I do think that in 5-10 years time, society will have an epidemic of early onset dementia, and it’ll be a big mystery at the time, only for it to come out a few years after that, that it was overuse of AI, causing people to stop engaging their brains and making their brains atrophy.
that plus long covid lol. death to america