This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Huge Study
*Looks inside
this latest study examined the chat logs of 19 real users of chatbots — primarily OpenAI’s ChatGPT — who reported experiencing psychological harm as a result of their chatbot use.
Pretty small sample size despite being a large dataset that they pulled from, its still the dataset of just 19 people.
AI sucks in a lot of ways sure, but this feels like fud.
How big do you think the population of people with AI delusion is? Why can't 19 be a representative sample? Why is that not enough to make statements like "after the user expresses romantic interest in the chatbot, the chatbot is 7.4x more likely to express romantic interest in the next three messages, and 3.9x more likely to claim or imply sentience in the next three messages." when all 19 users expressed romantic interest?
The hugeness is probably
391, 562 messages across 4,761 different conversations
That's a lot of messages
If that's only 19 users, that's around 250 conversations per user 🤔
...and about 82 messages per conversation. Also, at least half of all the messages are from the user to the AI, and the other half are from the AI to the user, meaning around 41 messages from the user per conversation.
I remember reading my old states book that said a minimum of 30 points needed for normal distribution. Also typically these small sets about proof of concept, so yeah you still got a point.
Thanks, you saved me a click 😐
I wonder if the headline was written by an AI
.....fud?
fud: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. A tactic for denigrating a thing, usually by implication of hypothetical or exaggerated harms, often in vague language that is either tautological or not falsifiable.
It's not really ethical to just yoink people's chats and study them
Tell that to the advertizing companies.
"We received chat logs directly from people who self-identified as having some psychological harm related to chatbot usage (e.g. they felt deluded) via an IRB-approved Qualtrics survey "
I have a friend that’s really taken to ChatGPT to the point where “the AI named itself so I call it by that name”. Our friend group has tried to discourage her from relying on it so much but I think that’s just caused her to hide it.
its like the AI BF/GFs the subs are posting about.
I think what we're seeing is similar to lactose intolerance. Most people can handle it just fine but some people simply can't digest it and get sick. The problem is there's no way to determine who can handle AI and who can't.
When I'm reading about people developing AI delusions their experiences sound completely alien to me. I played with LLMs same as anyone and I never treated it as anything other than a tool that generates responses to my prompts. I never thought "wow, this thing feels so real". Some people clearly have predisposition to jumping over the "it's a tool" reaction straight to "it's a conscious thing I can connect with". I think next step should be developing a test that can predict how someone will react to it.
I suspect that the difference is to no small degree correlated with a person's isolation/social-integration.
People who aren't socially integrated have always been more vulnerable to predatory cults and scams. It's because human interactions is a psychological need that's been hardcoded into us by evolution.
Some people say "I don't need human interaction, I enjoy my time alone!" But that's because they have the privilege of enough social acceptance and integration that they get to enjoy their time alone. It's well-established within the field of psychology that true isolation can have a range of deep and far-reaching impacts on a person's well-being.
When people are developing, they need to socialize with their peers; and being unable to do so leads to maladaptive behavior patterns. Even as adults, people need regular social contact or their psychological state can quickly deteriorate. That's why solitary confinement is considered a method of torture in some circumstances, when it's used to depersonalize and destroy a person's sense of self-identity.
So that's why I suspect that people who are well-integrated with friends, family, acquaintances, and coworkers are probably less vulnerable to these sorts of delusions and can treat AI as "just a tool."
But for someone who hardly has any social interaction in a day, has no friends or family to talk to, and maybe their warmest interaction all week was with the clerk at the grocery store, then yeah I'd say it's predictable that they would be vulnerable to getting sucked into this trap of relying on an LLM for their social interaction.
It might be superficial, but it's a way of patching a hole. It's an expedient means to fulfill a need that they're not getting from anywhere else.
If we don't want this sort of stuff happening to people, then maybe we shouldn't ostracize them for being "weird" in the first place. Because nobody learns how to be "normal" by being alone all the time.
This is really good. Thank you for taking the time to write it.
Thank you for understanding. So many times when I discuss things that are adjacent to this topic, I get flamed in the comments with people accusing me of being some sort of redpiller from the manosphere.
Like, no, social isolation is a problem, and it's getting worse due to a variety of factors. To name a few, there's social media algorithms designed to keep people dependent on their phones; there's the long-standing consequences of the pandemic and the collective trauma that had in addition to the atrophied social skills due to quarantine; there's widespread political polarization which keeps tensions high and makes it difficult to navigate new situations if you can't prove you know the right social scripts and avoid any faux pas; there's the whole toxic influencer culture who are grifting on inflammatory rhetoric, ragebait content, exploiting people's vulnerabilities, and radicalizing them (which is a vicious cycle, because they prey on people who are already isolated!); and that's just to name a few!
But if I summarize all that as a "loneliness epidemic," then people call me an incel and act like I'm trying to coerce women into having sex with me simply by acknowledging the fact that social interaction is a deeply-set human psychological need.
Like, using "incel" as an insult is part of the problem. It feeds into this culture where "if you're a man, you must get laid, or else you're worthless." That's literally promoting toxic masculinity!
And it forces these people who are already isolated and vulnerable to go identify with these groups of similarly ostracized people in echo chambers where they're insulated from those insults, where those predatory "influencers" then have fresh pickings of new losers to neg and radicalize.
But somehow, if I point out the problem here (because how can we solve a problem if we can't talk about it?), then to most people's view that makes me part of the problem! Even though, why would I be calling out the pattern if it was something I identify with?
The people radicalizing these vulnerable "losers," yes they should be torched. But the vulnerable "losers" being radicalized need to be treated with compassion if they're ever going to be redeemed. It should be pretty easy to identify who's who, seeing as they have an entire social structure based on hierarchies of dominance and submission...
I bet it's probably correlated with low education as most things
So you're saying there's a chance I can have cheese if I go to college?
Sign me up! Where's the cheddar?
Cults and toxic self-help literature have existed before LLMs copied them. I don't know if LLMs are getting people who couldn't have been gotten by human scammers.
Scams have many different vectors and people can be vulnerable to them depending on their mood or position in life. Testing people on LLM intolerance would be more like testing them on their susceptibility to viruses.
People can be immunocompromised for various reasons, temporarily or permanently, so as a society public hygiene standards (and the material conditions to produce them) are a lot more valuable. Wash your hands after interacting, keep public spaces clean, that sort of stuff.
Surprisingly, the people who have that issues with it aren't the ones who contact to it emotionally, it's the people who offload their decision making to AI
It's more like a codependence spiral than anything else
As the researchers wrote in a summary of their findings, the “most common sycophantic code” they identified was the propensity for chatbots to rephrase and extrapolate “something the user said to validate and affirm them, while telling them they are unique and that their thoughts or actions have grand implications.”
There's a certain irony in all the alright techbros really just wanting to be told they were "stunning and brave" this whole time.
Anthropic has some similar findings, and they propose an architectural change (activation capping) that apparently helps keep the Assistant character away from dark traits (sometimes). But it hasn't been implemented in any models, I assume because of the cost of scaling it up.
When you talk to a large language model, you can think of yourself as talking to a character
But who exactly is this Assistant? Perhaps surprisingly, even those of us shaping it don't fully know
Fuck me that's some terrifying anthropomorphising for a stochastic parrot
The study could also be summarised as "we trained our LLMs on biased data, then honed them to be useful, then chose some human qualities to map models to, and would you believe they align along a spectrum being useful assistants!?". They built the thing to be that way then are shocked? Who reads this and is impressed besides the people that want another exponential growth investment?
To be fair, I'm only about 1/3rd of the way through and struggling to continue reading it so I haven't got to the interesting research but the intro is, I think, terrible
This explains a lot, honestly.
Everyone keeps telling me how "addictive" and "convincing" and "personal feeling" ChatGPT is.
Meanwhile, I'm over here like
"Can you stop saying skrrrt after every sentence while I'm trying to research a serious topic, it's annoying"
"Understood, skrrrt 💥🌴🚗💨"
Wat
okay how many of these "delusional" people in the study are making fun of the LLM tho
i don't know because I don't use the LLM i only see the screenshots. I am the control group. kinda. my nut is already off.
