It could be the person was already in a problematic situation with family and friends, and they just need to blame someone or something and don’t want to admit the real problems. Kind of what often happened back in the day with videogames getting blamed for killing humans.

This is not a fair analogy for what is going on here. Video games being blamed harkens back to times when music or other counter cultural media was blamed for behavior. We have a lot of literature which shows that the passive consumption of media doesn’t really affect someone in the ways which they were being blamed. From the beginning, this argument lacked a logical or hypothetical framework as well - it was entirely based on moral judgement values by certain individuals in society who simply “believed” that these were the cause.

AI on the other hand, interacts back with you, and amplifies psychosis. Now this is early days and most of what we have is theoretical in nature, based off case-studies, or simply clinical hypothesis [1, 2, 3]. However, there is a clear difference in media itself - the chatbot is able to interact with the user in a dynamic way, and is programmed in a manner by which to reinforce certain thoughts and feelings. The chatbot is also human-seeming enough for a person to anthropomorphize the chatbot and treat it like an individual for the purposes of therapy or an attempt at emotional closeness. While video games do involve human interaction and a piece of media could be designed to be psychologically difficult to deal with, that would be hyper-specific to the media and not the medium as a whole. The issues with chatbots (the LLM subset of AI) is pervasive across all chatbots because of how they are designed and the populace they are serving.

we could end up in a society where everyone undermines real problems in physical world and blames Ai to sideload the question

This is a valid point to bring up, however, I think it is shortsighted when we think in a broader context such as that of public health. We could say the same about addictive behaviors and personalities, for example, and absolve casinos of any blame for designing a system which takes advantage of these individuals and sends them down a spiraling path of gambling addiction. Or, we can recognize that this is a contributing and amplifying factor, by paying close attention to what is happening to individuals in a broad sense, as well as smartly applying theory and hypothesis.

I think it’s completely fair to say that this kid likely had a lot of contributing factors to his depression and ultimate and final decision. There is a clear hypothetical framework with some circumstantial evidence with strong theoretical support to suggest that AI are exacerbating the problem and also should be considered a contributing factor. This suggests that regulation may be helpful, or at the very least increased public awareness of this particular technology having the potential to cause harm to certain individuals.

Great article. I laugh at the folks who think this dude is bought into the fantasy that some folks have turned into what best represents a spirituality. As in if they haven’t seen folks who go a little too hard in any one specific part of their life. Sure, gooning as a term has long since entered the cultural zeitgeist and has been used, both ironically and not, as a way to simply now refer to excessive masturbation. But to discount that there is a loneliness epidemic out there and folks who have turned to gooning as some form of extreme kink or outlet for some need for human connection and healing, going 24/7 like many dom/sub relationships or cnc, ferality, etc. shows either a lack of exposure to the vastness of this damaged world or an attempt to poke fun at the author for seriously studying a cultural phenomenon. Either way, this is a fascinating look into a weird niche subculture and a really well written article. Thank you for sharing.

Unfortunately the world has become so divorced from reality it no longer matters whether something is true. It only matters whether you can convince someone it looks or feels true. Management wants subtle changes made by a hallucination engine because it doesn’t matter if they fail, they still get their golden parachute and move on to another company they get to ruin 🤷‍♀️

As someone who basically doesn’t use linkedin anymore, and also doesn’t particularly care if they train a terrible AI model on my information, can someone explain to me why should I bother to turn off this setting (I have not logged into linkedin in months)?

This is just one of the many far reaching effects of the disinformation age we are headed into. It would not surprise me if, in the future (assuming humanity survives our climate crisis), this period of time will be contrasted with the middle ages as periods of great loss of human knowledge.

For what it’s worth, a lot of what the article is bringing up isn’t particularly new. Fake studies are nothing new, but the scope of them will definitely increase. While it is manpower intensive, this is easily solved by peer review. In fact, perhaps ironically, AI could be used to do a first-pass review before and summarize what seems like it was AI created versus human created and send that along to a human.

Corporation funded studies designed to get around regulation or to promote their product, on the other hand, is something we’ve been dealing with for quite some time and an issue we haven’t really solved as a society. Anyone who works in science knows how to spot these from a mile away because they’re nearly always published in tiny journals (low citation score) which either don’t do peer review or have shady guidelines. The richer companies have the money to simply run 40 or 50 studies concurrently and toss the data from every one that doesn’t have the outcome they’re looking for (in essence repeatedly rolling a d20 until they get a 20) which allows them to get their findings into a bigger journal because it’s all done above board. Some larger publishing journals have created guidelines to try and fight this, but ultimately you need meta-analyses and other researchers to disprove what’s going on, and that’s fairly costly.

Also, as an aside- this belongs in the science community more than tech in my opinion.

Disgusting typical techbro behavior, I hate it.

The president really made an executive order about preventing woke AI? Humanity is cooked fam

That’s going to take some research and a rewrite to get it looking like those it was trained to match. You need to be adding synonyms and dependencies because the AIs lack any model of how we actually do IT, they only see correlations between words.

Very simple solution: ask AI to rewrite your resume for specific job applications or fields.

FYI this was already posted to technology, here.

Having seen how so many average people are using AI, I’m sadly not surprised that people are just going with whatever is up there, even when it is wrong.

The difference is that Camacho is a himbo, our current president is more of a bridge troll

It really isn’t hidden lol. But you will get countless LLM defenders online who claim you can eliminate the bias with prompting or other hacks which don’t address the underlying issue or do anything but patch a broken system. To fix LLM bias you need to systematically correct, and very few folks have bothered to try and design methods to systematically correct. In the case of Grok, it’s actually explicitly designed to reference Musk’s bigoted musings on subjects first before examining other information.

While you are correct, and the author deserves to be called out on their behavior, the context of the entire article is around how they are struggling with being bombarded with things taking up their attention and time. This response is seriously lacking in any compassion for the author’s struggle and more or less ignores the entire point of the article in order. Beehaw isn’t the place for one-liner gotchas. Please try to engage with the content if you’re going to comment.

Eh frankly I just see us moving to more strict reputation based systems - someone has to vouch for you.

So how is an AI prompt poking for Holocaust denial different than a Google search looking for Holocaust denial?

Because one is something you have to actively search for. The other is shoved in your face, by a figure that many feel is one who has some authority.

Why are you defending anything about this situation? This is not a thread to discuss how LLMs work in detail, this is a thread about accountability, consequences, hate, and society.

Definitely something I’ve observed even here. Luckily we get few applications and there is a report button, but I share the author’s frustration and the author’s jaded view of a limited timeline on services such as ours being tenable. Eventually it will be trivially easy to flood this place with slop.

314m what a joke! Still, good to see them lose this court case

You believe that a police officer, who is doing public actions, in a public role, should be given privacy while performing public actions? Say more

Even if an officer’s name and badge number were not public (which would be weird, because both of these are a part of a police officer’s uniform), what is the concern about a tool which provides these?

I would love to hear what has you concerned about a tool which provides a piece of information which is, by law (California Penal Code Section 830.10), supposed to be accessible to all individuals interacting with the officer - their name and/or badge number.