Are you not aware of how many billions are getting spent on fake girlfriends on Only Fans, with millions of people chatting away with low paid labor across an ocean pretending to be an american girl? This is just reducing costs, but the consumers are already wanting the product.
I'm not sure I get the outrage / puritanism. Adults being able to chat to a fake girlfriend if they want to seems super bland. There's way more stuff out there that's way wilder you can do online, potentially also exploiting the real person on the other side of the screen if they are trafficked or whatever. I don't have any mental issues (well, who knows? ha) and genuinely would try it the same way you try a new porn category every once in a while.
We might want to be a little cautious about blindly going down that path. The tech isn’t there yet, and probably won’t be there next year, but it feels far more possible than ever before.
The net sum of all LLM B2C usecases (effectively Chatgpt) is competing with AI girlfriends for rank 1.
It isn't just huge. It is the most profitable usecase for gen AI.
"A goal of a system is what it does"
"The internet is for porn" https://youtu.be/LTJvdGcb7Fs?si=8H1OzeyG5XzU-Qe8
Different methods of therapy appear to be equally effective despite having theoretical foundations which are conflicting with each other. The common aspect between different therapies seems to be "having someone to talk to", so I'm inclined to believe that really is what's behind the success.
If you are fortunate, you have people like that in your immediate circle, but increasingly few people do.
A big part of therapy is also rapport. Many people go through many therapist before finding one that works for them. In part, you can think of this as the market performing the assessment your'e referring to.
Actual maladaptive personalities are the result of low emotional intelligence.
it's a bit more complicated than that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z37i8-FnAh8
and on top of this the method of therapy is to find better copings, not just to vent.
>
> Different methods of therapy appear to be equally effective despite having theoretical foundations which are conflicting with each other. The common aspect between different therapies seems to be "having someone to talk to", so I'm inclined to believe that really is what's behind the success.
Just because talking is the common trait, doesn't mean that that's evidence that that is all it is. Paying someone to help you with the problem is also a common trait (and ironically, that is, no doubt, a contributory factor), but that isn't all that therapy is.
Let's say that there are three ways to solve a problem, and depending on context that we're not terribly good at determining, one of those ways will work quite often, one will work some of the time, and the other will be a disaster... but there's an equal probability that each of those ways are equally likely to fall in to each of those categories. Statistically, one could claim that how you solve the problem is not behind the success. In a sense, that would be correct, because the real determinant of success would be being lucky with the solution you chose to employ. While one could imply though that really it's nothing more than being lucky at choosing the solution, in reality without all of what's involved in that choice, the problem will remain.
Other kinds of conditions, like depression and anxiety, respond to a wider range of therapy styles. But those aren't the only conditions that people seek to treat through talk therapy. (And it's also an exaggeration to say that just having any conversation will help to treat anxiety and reopression. But it is probably true that treatment of these conditions is less technical and responds to a much wider range of styles.)
This isn't true. Different methods work better for different problems. I've been in behavior health for 7 years now. It's having someone with a lot of education to talk to, someone with education in social and psychological problems and healthy coping mechanisms.
> then you should get another therapist
Seems to be fairly ubiquitous. “Find a therapist you like”/“shop around”/etc. leads a lot of people to find people who will tell them what they want to hear. Sometimes what people want to hear is how to practice CBT - but in that case, such people are probably going to be using AI to work on CBT.
There's no defined stop point for physical development either... Top performing athletes still have trainers, and nobody sees that as a problem. If it's mental development though, it must have a stop point?
There is nothing stopping them from exiting therapy. The therapist may be aware that the person is still a basket case but if they are non-violent they are free to roam.
It's not at all. There are plenty of stories of people who realized that therapy was just causing them to ruminate on their problems, and that the therapist was just milking them for years before they wised up and walked away. That's not what I call "obvious".
This is precisely why I stopped going.
> If it's mental development though, it must have a stop point?
What is being developed, exactly?
The athlete is the extreme example, but there are obviously people who are not career athletes that don't have a defined stop point with employing a trainer (maybe you could say "death" is the stop point).
Most everyone who goes to spinning class isn't a career athlete. Some of them are terribly out of shape, and some of those people just want to get in shape. Others may already be in shape, but see the spinning class as a way to either improve or maintain their conditioning. None of this is deemed ridiculous.
I'm curious, it's considered the norm to regularly see a doctor or dentist, do you think they're preying on their patients?
> What is being developed, exactly?
Mental health. There's obviously a more involved answer, but if you don't know it already, it's unlikely I'll be able to educate you with a comment on social media.
And many of them are being bilked as well. The fitness industry is notoriously filled with hucksters and scams, and "trainers" rarely have any real training in kinesiology or exercise science.
> I'm curious, it's considered the norm to regularly see a doctor or dentist, do you think they're preying on their patients?
Once a year for a health checkup. Is that the norm for therapy?
> Mental health. There's obviously a more involved answer
The more involved answer is that "mental health" is not well-defined, so it's not developing anything. The only therapies that have shown to have any empirical validity, like CBT, train the user in tools to change their own behaviour and thinking, then it's on the user to employ the tools. Does a family doctor call you in once a week and watch you take the pills that address your physical ailment?
The best analogy for psychiatric therapy is physical therapy for recovering from an injury or surgery, except physical therapy has a well-defined end condition, which is when you understand how to do the exercises yourself. Then it's on you to do them. This is just not the norm for "mental health" therapy.
I guess the skill is riding the line, but that doesn't feel very enjoyable.
I think I don't know what you mean by that. That sounds like you're uncomfortable with renting out party venues.
Many people are being bilked for almost any service one might name. There are tons of products and services with no defined stop point (heck, pretty much the entire CPG category is for products and services with no defined stop point). There are tons of products & services where the vast majority of customers are unable to discern if they are being scammed or not. Heck, when you order sushi there's notoriously a far from trivial chance that you're not getting the fish that you thought you were getting. We don't think of restaurateurs as being hucksters and scam artists (some no doubt are, but it's ridiculous to paint them all with the same brush).
My point isn't that it's impossible that they are being bilked. It's that there are all kinds of products & services that people get with no defined stop point, where customers could unknowingly be scammed, but we don't consider that to be evidence that they are being bilked. There are products and services that are beneficial for the customer even if there is no defined problem and no defined end point.
For your typical customer, spinning class isn't a class you go to until you achieve some goal. It's a service provided to help you do exercise you no doubt wanted to do anyway, in a community/context that you wanted to do it in, with the guidance of someone who ostensibly knows how to structure the process better than you do. You could very well do the spinning all by yourself, or you could organize a spinning class on your own, but you pay the professional because you expect to get better results without expending as much time or energy yourself.
Sure, there are people who claim that, if you just take the spin class, you will lose 100 lbs or become an Olympic athlete, and those people are absolutely hucksters and scam artists. There are people that will tell you that voting for the right/wrong politician will change your life (either for the better or worse). There are people who will tell you that buying gold will ensure financial security and make you a fortune. There are scams about buying jewelry. There are investment funds that claim to be able to consistently beat the market, or that will protect your money through any market collapse... and in all those cases there's no defined stop point. The product is the prop, not the scam. Sure, in the context of the scam the prop isn't worth it, but that doesn't mean anyone offering the prop is scamming you. Physical training services, votes, gold, jewelry, investment funds, etc. aren't all bunk.
> Once a year for a health checkup. Is that the norm for therapy?
So now it's the frequency that's the issue, rather than not having a defined stop point?
> The more involved answer is that "mental health" is not well-defined, so it's not developing anything.
That's your answer. That's not my answer, and it's not the answer.
> The best analogy for psychiatric therapy is physical therapy for recovering from an injury or surgery, except physical therapy has a well-defined end condition, which is when you understand how to do the exercises yourself.
I don't think you appreciate how limited your perspective on this is. Not everything is a problem that can be fixed.
This presumes that the only possible physical therapy service is education. My mother suffers from late-stage dementia. She is at risk for falling whenever she walks, and performing more involved physical activities absolutely requires guidance. It is literally impossible to educate her out of this situation, so the only stop point for the service is death. While family does sometimes provide these services for her, there's little doubt that the professionals we hire to provide these services for her are able to do the job better and more consistently than we can; there's little doubt that she is physically and mentally healthier as a consequence of their services, and that her physical & mental health would begin to decline within days of terminating those services. Now, I don't know that their particular form of physical therapy is empirically valid, and I guess they could be scamming us, but in the vast majority of cases, providing these services is not a scam. It's offensive to claim otherwise.
Now, my sister-in-law has the reverse situation: she has a physical problem and requires mental health services. She suffers from COPD that will kill her unless something else gets to her first. Above and beyond the physical condition, it is very hard for her to cope with it mentally. Again, family provides her with support, but it's not enough. She employs a mental health therapist to address her anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. There's maybe some feint hope that the therapist will educate her to a state where she no longer experiences suicidal ideation, but nobody expects the anxiety & depression to go away, because COPD is an anxiety and depression invoking condition... a well educated, rational, COPD patient can be anxious and depressed. You could say that, with or without professional service, the failure rate is nearly 100% (helpful to consider in the context of comments about the failure rate for mental health therapy). So there's no defined stopping point for the therapy short of death. In this particular case, it's a CBT therapist, but even if it wasn't, what she needs is more than education; she needs support. While we can't rule out that she's being scammed, in the vast majority of the cases, providing these services is not a scam. It's offensive to claim otherwise.
> The more involved answer is that "mental health" is not well-defined, so it's not developing anything.
I'll try one last metaphor:
Nutrition is not well defined. We have broad ideas about what is and isn't good for you, but the specifics of what is "good nutrition" are variable & contextual; while one can have well defined nutritional goals, many people do not. There's a ton of "nutritionists" who have no formal training, who don't exercise science. There are short order cooks with no formal training, who don't exercise science. If a grocer has formal training, it is far more likely in business or marketing than anything involving nutrition. There is no defined stop point where you no longer need food. There are plenty of scams involving nutritional guidance or foods (just the categories "health food" and "diet plans" are littered with scammers). Despite all that, there is no compelling argument that restaurants, chefs, grocers, or other nutritional services are intrinsically scammers. I'm pretty sure that, if I don't eat, my health will deteriorate, and I have a hard time believing that a professional either guiding my nutritional choices or outright providing nutrition for me is intrinsically scamming me. They could well be providing me a valuable service where I get better nutrition with less time and effort than if I tended to it without them.
I get it. You are convinced therapy is intrinsically a scam, and part of the reason for that is most customers for therapy cannot reliably discern if they are being scammed or not. I'm far from an expert on the subject, so for all I know, you are right. However, the arguments you are presenting are not compelling arguments.
You have a physical problem, you go to the doctor and he fixes the problem or gets you the information you need to manage your problem. That's the stop point for medical intervention.
You have a mental health problem, you go to a therapist for a mental health intervention, and now you're in weekly therapy for years. Not so much an intervention, more like a new part time job.
Yearly checkups is not a counterpoint to this general trend. A yearly mental health checkup could be totally reasonable, but that's not the norm.
> Not everything is a problem that can be fixed.
The real issue here is that you keep bringing up outliers like your mother's palliative care and I keep talking about the norm, ie. that most people in therapy are not like your mother. Therapy has become fashionable. Everyone is "working on themselves" and plenty of therapists like patients that are well off and so can pay regularly.
> I get it. You are convinced therapy is intrinsically a scam
No, that's not the point I'm making. At best, you could maybe case what I'm saying as "the therapy industry/fad is a scam, and plenty of therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists are feeding into it".
There are people that legitimately need therapy to develop coping strategies to address trauma or retrain maladaptive behaviours, because even as ineffective as it sometimes is, it's better than nothing. My point is that a lot of people who go to therapy probably don't need therapy, and even if they do they don't need as much as they think they do, the techniques in therapy are not very effective even in the best case, and that therapists are not incentivized to stop seeing patients that are paying them well and triage to cases that need more urgent intervention and probably can't pay them regularly.
Part of this is probably because of the US's dysfunctional medical system, and another part is because psychology and psychiatry has not had a good track record for empirically sound practices. It's getting better but has some ways to go.
So, if the customer is dying (and we're all dying), it's not a scam, but if the same service is provided to someone else, it's a scam? That almost sounds like, (...wait for it...), the service isn't the scam.
> Therapy has become fashionable.
Nothing worse than services that have become fashionable.
> Everyone is "working on themselves" and plenty of therapists like patients that are well off and so can pay regularly.
Nothing quite like customers who can afford to pay for your services. Mercedes dealers tend to focus on those people too. ;-) Is it your position then that services that only wealthier people can afford are a scam? Is it not possible that they're receiving some benefit from the service that others would benefit from if they could somehow afford them?
> My point is that a lot of people who go to therapy probably don't need therapy, and even if they do they don't need as much as they think they do, the techniques in therapy are not very effective even in the best case, and that therapists are not incentivized to stop seeing patients that are paying them well and triage to cases that need more urgent intervention and probably can't pay them regularly.
Ice cream is similarly a scam, because a lot of people don't need ice cream, but they think they do. The ice cream is not very effective for them even in the best case, and ice cream makers are not incentivized to stop selling it to people who don't need it.
Meanwhile, the more therapy someone does, the more miserable they are compared to me. I’m the Usain Bolt of mental health compared to them. Makes me think their trainer is an idiot.
Is this based on empirical statistical analysis, or are you maybe projecting your perception on to anecdotes? How are you quantifying misery? What are the units? Are there people that are less miserable than you? Do you know how much therapy they've done, or if they've done therapy at all?
> I’m the Usain Bolt of mental health compared to them. Makes me think their trainer is an idiot.
There's a lot of people that think they're Usain Bolt. Most of them are not.
- Patient choosing a specific mood problem/feeling they want to work on.
- A mood survey, where the patient rates their own level of e.g. anxiety, depression, fear, hopelessness. (e.g. out of 5 or 10).
- Therapy session, following his TEAMS CBT structure. Including patient choosing how much fear they'd like to feel (e.g. they want to keep a little bit of fear so they don't endanger themselves, but don't want to be overwhelmed by fear, 5% or 20%, say).
- A repeat of the mood survey, where the patient re-assesses themselves to see if anything has improved. There's no units on the measures because it's self-reported, the patient knows if the fear is unchanged, a little less, a lot less, almost gone, completely gone, and that's what matters.
That gives them feedback; if there is improvement within a session they know something in the session helped, if several sessions go by with no improvement they know it and can change things up and move away from those unhelpful approaches in future with other patients, and if there is good improvement - patient is self-reporting that they are no longer hopeless about their relationship status, or afraid of social situations, or depressed, to the level they want, then therapy can stop.
He's adamant that a single 2hr session is enough to make a significant change in many common mood disorders[2], and this "therapy needs to take 10 years" is a bad pattern and therapists who don't take mood surveys and before and after every session are flying blind. With feedback on every session and decades of experience, he has identified a lot of techniques and ways to use them which actually do help people's moods change. I liken it to the invention of test cases and debuggers (and looking at the output from them).
[1] Quick list: https://feelinggood.com/list-of-feeling-good-podcasts/ more detailed database: https://feelinggood.com/podcast-database/
[2] no, internet cynic, obviously not everything and presumably not whatever it is you have.
You might be able to overcome this effect by quantitatively tracking this across many sessions to some degree, but I think it's still always the patient that has to walk away, and never the therapist who says, "you're good, go on now".
CBT and its derivatives very strongly attend to individual effectiveness and view therapy that goes on endlessly as a sign that the real problem isn't being addressed, and that no therapy is considered effective unless it ends. Individual therapists might be bad actors, but the field itself is now admirably focussed on finite, positive results.
This is largely due to a crisis in the field in the late 70s/early 80s when several studies demonstrated that talk therapy had outcomes no different than no therapy. In both cases, some got better, some got worse, some didn't change. CBT was a direct result of that, prioritizing and tracking positive outcomes, and from CBT came a lot of different approaches, all similarly focussed on being demonstrably effective.
Talk therapy isn't a cure-all, but it's definitely more results-oriented than it was 50 years ago.
When I was younger, I went through many therapy sessions with multiple professionals of different kinds (psychologists, psychiatrists, MFT (marriage and family therapists, social workers, etc.).
A couple of them were wonderful: thoughtful, caring, helpful, providing useful guidance with a compassionate ear.
Another couple tried to be helpful but were still in training themselves (this was at a college) and couldn't really provide any useful guidance.
One was going through a divorce of her own at the time and ended up crying in many of our sessions and having to abort them to deal with her own emotions – it was a tough time for her, and she's only human. I often tried to console her, but she wouldn't let me, so it made for a very awkward situation lol.
One of them had one a single session with me, charged me for it, and then told me she couldn't help me and to go somewhere else.
But the worst of them was an older guy who, despite the referrals and my history, thought I was faking mental illness. He dared me to attempt suicide, and when I eventually did (not because of him, but a separate romantic failure), he chuckled in my face and said, "Heh, you finally tried it, huh? Didn't think you would." This was an older psychiatrist in a small town – either the only one there, or one of very few – the kind of sleazy place that had a captive market and a whole bunch of pharma ads in the lobby, with young female pharma reps going in and out all day. What a racket =/ If I were wiser then, I would've reported him to the board and news media.
So, anecdotally, my success rate with therapists was only 2/7. To be fair, I was a pretty fucked up teenager and young adult, but still... the point is that "just find a better therapist" is often a difficult process. Depending on your insurance and area, there may not even be any other therapists with a waiting list of less than a few months, and even if you can get in, there's no guarantee they are good at their jobs AND a good fit for your personality and issues.
Think it's hard to find good devs? At least our line of work produces some measurable output (software/apps that run, or not, according to specs). How do you even measure the output of a therapist? Improvements to someone's life aren't going to happen overnight, and many never report back; the best successes may not bother to leave a review, the worst failures may end up dead before spreading the word. The rest probably just run out of sessions allowed by their insurance and try to move on with their lives, with unknown levels of positive or negative change.
I do think therapists are one of the professions that will be naturally displaced by LLMs. You're not paying them to be your friend (and they are usually very clear on that), so any sort of emotional connection is ruled out. If emotions are taken away, then it's just an input/output process, which is something LLMs excel at.
Put another way, a good therapist is professionally trained and consciously monitoring whether or not they're misleading you. An LLM has no executive function acting as a check on its input/output cycle.
How does an LLM look at a heptagon and confidently say it's an octagon? Because visually they're similar, octagons are relatively more common (and identified as such) while heptagons are rare. What it doesn't do is count the sides, something a child in kindergarten can do.
If I were working in AI I would be focussing on exactly this problem: finding the "right sounding" answer solves a lot of cases well enough, but falls down embarrassingly when other cogitive processes are available that are guaranteed to produce correct results (when done correctly). Anyone asking chatgpt a math question should be able to get back a correctly calculated math answer, and the way to get that answer is not to massage the training data, it's to dispatch the prompt to a different subsystem that can parse the request and return a result that a calculator can provide.
It's similar to using LLMs for law: they hallucinate cases and precedents that don't exist because they're not checking against nexis, they're just sounding good. The next problem in AI is the layer of executive functioning that taps the correct part of the AI based on the input.
None of those safeguards are in place for AI companies.
The liability for a bad therapist or psychologist is very low, I have never heard of them getting revoked for being bad therapists. If if was true then bad therapists wouldn't exist. I would not be surprised if they ceased to exist in the near future with AI being consistent, and much better quality.
why is this better than ai porn friends?
It is indisputable that one could say this
The key is neutral point of view. Friend's and family come with bias. The bias's can be compounded by mentally ill friend's and family.
Therapist must meet with other therapists about their patient interactions. The second therapist acts a neutral third party to the keep the first therapist from losing their neutrality.
That is the ideal and the real world may differ.
I'm struggling with someone that looks to be having some real mental issues. The person believes I'm the issue and I need to maintain a therapist to make sure I'm treating this person fairly.
I need a neutral third party that I gossip with that is bound to keep it to themselves.
As another commenter said, if that's your experience with a therapist, you have a shitty therapist and should switch.
Most importantly, a good therapist will very clearly outline their role, discuss with you what you hope to achieve, etc. I've been in therapy many years, and I know exactly what I'm paying for. Sure, some weeks I really do just need someone to talk to. But never have I, or my therapist, been unclear that I am paying for a service, and one that I value much more than just having "someone to talk to".
Using the terminology "prey on lonely people" is ridiculous (again, for any good therapist). If they were actually preying on me, then their goal would be to keep me lonely so I become dependent on them (and I'm not saying that never happens, but when it does it's called malpractice). A good therapist's entire goal is to make people self-sufficient in their lives.
You could argue cynically that all relationships are to some extent transactional. People “invest” in friendships after all. It’s just a bit more abstract.
Maybe the flaw in the logic is the existence of some sort of “genuine” binary: things are either genuine or they aren't. When we accept such a binary lots of things can be labeled predatory.
All these companies are doing now is taking an existing inferencing engine, making it 3% faster, 3% more accurate, etc. per quarter, fighting over the $20/month users
One can imagine product is now taking the wheel from engineering and are building ideas on how to monetize the existing engine. Thats essentially what GPT-4o is, and who knows what else is in the 1,2,3 year roadmaps for any of these $20 companies
To reach true AGI we need to get past guessing, and that doesn't seem close at all. Even if one of these companies gets better at making you "feel" like its understanding and not guessing, if it isnt actually happening, its not a breakthrough
Now with product leading the way, its really interesting to see where these engineers head
"Just" guessing the next token requires understanding. The fact that LLMs are able to respond so intelligently to such a wide range of novel prompts means that they have a very effective internal representation of the outside world. That's what we colloquially call "understanding."
This becomes pretty clear when you get to more complex algorithms or low level details like drawing a stack frame. There is not logic there.
I can ask ChatGPT questions that require logic to answer, and it will do just fine in most cases. It has certain limitations, but to say it isn't able to apply logic is just completely contrary to my experience with ChatGPT.
ChatGPT answers:
> Yes, if we assume the statement "all snakes have legs" to be true and accept that a python is a type of snake, then logically, a python would have legs. This conclusion follows from the structure of a logical syllogism:
> 1. All snakes have legs.
> 2. A python is a snake.
> 3. Therefore, a python has legs.
> However, it’s important to note that in reality, snakes, including pythons, do not have legs. This logical exercise is based on the hypothetical premise that all snakes have legs.
ChatGPT clearly understands the logic of the question, answers correctly, and then tells me that the premise of my question is incorrect.
You can say, "But it doesn't really understand logic. It's just predicting the most likely token." Well, it responds exactly how someone who understands logic would respond. If you assert that that's not the same as applying logic, then I think you're essentially making a religious statement.
An animation looks exactly like something in motion looks, but it isn't actually moving.
>A Z is an X.
>Therefore a Z has Ys.
I am fairly certain variations of this are in the training set. The tokens following that about "in reality Zs not having Ys" are due to X, Y, and Z being incongruous in the rest of the data.
It is not not performing a logical calculation, it is predicting the next token.
Explanations of simple logical chains are also in the training data.
Think of it instead as really good (and flexible) language templates. It can fill in the template for different things.
Those two things are not in any way mutually exclusive. Understanding the logic is an effective way to accurately predict the next token.
> I am fairly certain variations of this are in the training set.
Yes, which is probably how ChatGPT learned that logical principle. It has now learned to correctly apply that logical principle to novel situations. I suspect that this is very similar to how human beings learn logic as well.
If it were, these LLMs wouldn't hallucinate so much.
Semantic understanding is still a ways off, and requires much more intelligence than we can give machines at this moment. Right now the machines are really good at frequency analysis, and in our fervor we mistake that for intelligence.
In order to do that effectively, you have to have very significant understanding of the world. The texts that LLMs are learning from describe a wide range of human knowledge, and if you want to accurately predict what words will appear where, you have to build an internal representation of that knowledge.
ChatGPT knows who Henry VIII was, who his wives were, the reasons he divorced/offed them, what a divorce is, what a king is, that England has kings, etc.
> If it were, these LLMs wouldn't hallucinate so much.
I don't see how this follows. First, humans hallucinate. Second, why does hallucination prove that LLMs don't understand anything? To me, it just means that they are trained to answer, and if they don't know the answer, they BS it.
This results in the appearance of an arms race between world model refinement and user cleverness, but it's really a fundamental expressive limitation: the user can always recurse, but the model can only predict tokens.
(There are a lot of contexts in which this distinction doesn't matter, but I would argue that it does matter for a meaningful definition of human-like understanding.)
I tend to believe the former, but it's possible those two things are true at the same time.
if OAI is motivated by money, uncle sam can name any figure to buy them out. if OAI is motivated by power, it becomes "a matter of national security" and they do what the gov tells them. more likely the two parties' interests are aligned and the public will hear about it when It's Time™. not saying C) is what's happening - A) seems likely too - but it's a real possibility
It's not our job to make the world safe for fundamentally unsafe people.
> I suspect Altman/Brockman/Murati intended for this thing to be dangerous for mentally unwell users, using the exact same logic as tobacco companies.
Tobacco companies knew about the dangers of their products, and they purposefully downplayed them, manipulated research, and exploited addictive properties of their products for profit, which caused great harm to society.
Disclosing all known (or potential) dangers of your products and not purposefully exploiting society (psychologically, physiologically, financially, or otherwise) is a standard that every company should be forced to meet.
Are you suggesting we need government intervention or just saying "damn the consequences"?
We build cars, even though some alcoholics drive drunk. We could make cars safer for them by mandating a steering wheel lock with breathalazyer for every car, but we choose to not do that because it's expensive.
We have horror movies, even though some people really freak out from watching horror movies, to the point where they have to be placed in mental asylums for extended periods of time. We could outlaw horror movies to reduce the strain on these mentally troubled individuals, but we choose to not do that because horror movies are cool.
But it is, nearly every product, procedure, process is aimed at the lowest common denominator, it's the entire reasoning warning labels exist, or fail safe systems (like airbags) exist.
That's a far cry from saying the sellers are free from any responsibility.
Cars are highly engineered AND regulated because they have a tendency to kill their operators and pedestrians. It does cost more, but you're not allowed to sell a car that can't pass safety standards.
OpenAI have created a shiny new tool with no regulation. Great! It can drive progress or cause harm. I think they deserve credit for both.
But you are allowed to sell a car without a mechanical steering wheel lock connected to a breathalyzer. Remember, this discussion isn't about "should technology be made safe for the average person", this discussion is about "should technology be made safe for the most vulnerable amongst us". In the context of cars, alcoholics are definitely within this "most vulnerable" group. And yet, car safety standards do not require engine startup to check for a breathalyzer result.
> OpenAI have created a shiny new tool with no regulation. Great! It can drive progress or cause harm. I think they deserve credit for both.
I didn't make an argument for "no regulation", so this is not really related to anything I said.
This is a very naive understanding of what prisons are and who goes in them and why.
To a degree, yes - but I think if it's taken too far it becomes a trap that many people seeking power lay out.
Benjamin Franklin said it best: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
That being said, I do agree with part of your point. The purpose of having a society is that collective action lets us do amazing things like build airplanes, that would be otherwise impossible. In order to succeed at that we need some rules that everyone plays by, which involve giving up some freedoms - or the "social contract".
The more of a safety net a society provides, the more restrictive the society must be. Optimizing for this is known as politics.
I think history has shown us that the proper balance is one where we optimize for maximum elbow room, without letting people die on the streets. Trying to provide the illusion of safety and restrict interesting technology to protect a small percentage of the population is on the wrong side of this balance.
Maybe we try it, and see what the effect actually are, rather than guessing. If it becomes a major problem, then address it - in the least restrictive way possible.
> He was writing about a tax dispute between the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the family of the Penns, the proprietary family of the Pennsylvania colony who ruled it from afar. And the legislature was trying to tax the Penn family lands to pay for frontier defense during the French and Indian War. And the Penn family kept instructing the governor to veto. Franklin felt that this was a great affront to the ability of the legislature to govern. And so he actually meant purchase a little temporary safety very literally. The Penn family was trying to give a lump sum of money in exchange for the General Assembly's acknowledging that it did not have the authority to tax it.
> It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
I don't think so. From the original text [1]:
"In fine, we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
"Our Assemblies have of late had so many Supply Bills, and of such different Kinds, rejected on various Pretences; Some for not complying with obsolete occasional Instructions (tho’ other Acts exactly of the same Tenor had been past since those Instructions, and received the Royal Assent;) Some for being inconsistent with the supposed Spirit of an Act of Parliament, when the Act itself did not any way affect us, being made expresly for other Colonies; Some for being, as the Governor was pleased to say, “of an extraordinary Nature,” without informing us wherein that extraordinary Nature consisted; and others for disagreeing with new discovered Meanings, and forced Constructions of a Clause in the Proprietary Commission; that we are now really at a Loss to divine what Bill can possibly pass."
"we see little Use of Assemblies in this Particular; and think we might as well leave it to the Governor or Proprietaries to make for us what Supply Laws they please, and save ourselves and the Country the Expence and Trouble."
"And we being as desirous as the Governor to avoid any Dispute on that Head, have so framed the Bill as to submit it entirely to his Majesty’s Royal Determination, whether that Estate has or has not a Right to such Exemption."
Also, while that's the first appearance of the quote, it's not the last time he used it. He also reiterated it as an envoy to England during negotiations to prevent the war [2].
Additionally, a similar quote was from well before either in Poor Richard's Almanac in 1738, that also illustrates his thinking [3] and shows that he was well aware of the plain meaning of what he was saying, it certainly wasn't limited to a tax dispute:
"Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power."
[1] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-06-02-01...
[2] https://oll.libertyfund.org/quotes/benjamin-franklin-on-the-...
Some things are everyone's responsibility if we want to live in a pleasant society.
The actual accusation I am making is that someone at OpenAI knew the risks of GPT-4o and Sam Altman didn't care. I am confident this is true even without spies in the boardroom. My guess is that Leike or Sutskever also knew the risks and actually did care, but that is idle speculation.
Has ChatGPT's censoring (a loaded term, but idk what else to use) been relaxed with GPT-4o? I have not tested it because I wouldn't have expected them to do it. Does this also extend to other types of censorship or filtering they do? If not, it feels very intentional in the way you're alluding to.
HEH. In previous versions, when it told jokes, were those fake jokes?
HEH. I'd love to see your proof for that statement.
That feels off. When I watch an actor on screen conveying emotions, there's no actual human being feeling those emotions as I watch their movie. Very dumb machines have already been rendering emotions convincingly for a while in that way, and their rendering impacts our own emotional state.
Emotions expressed through tone of voice are just one mean of nonverbal communication. We should expect more of those to develop and become more widely available next.
In a way, we're lucky all that gpt-4o seems to be hell bent on communicating how cheerful and happy it is so far, because it's certainly not the only option.
Humans can be manipulated through nonverbal communications, in a way that's harder to consciously spot than through words, and a model that's able to craft its "emotional output" would not be far from being able to use it to adjust its interlocutor or audience's frame of mind.
I for one look forward to the arrival of our increasingly charismatic and oddly convincing LLMs.
And so many otherwise perfectly normal products are now employing addiction mechanics to drive engagement, but somehow this one is just even further over the line for me in a way I can't articulate. I'm so sick of startups taking advantage of people. So, so fucking gross.
Idk how we’ve gotten away from such a natural human experience, but everyone knows damn well that the happiest children are out playing soccer with their friends in a field or eating lunch together at a park bench, and not holed up in their room watching endless YouTube.
LLM friends have the same energy to me as video game progression: it's a homeopathic version of a real thing you need, social activation and achievement respectively. But like homeopathy, you don't actually get anything out of it. The placebo effect will make the symptoms of your lack feel better, for awhile, but it will never be solved by it, and because of that whatever is selling you your LLM girlfriend or phony achievement structure will never lose you as a customer. I'm suspicious of that.
A soccer ball can't (usually) spy on you to sell you stuff, though, is the thing…
I mean, these things are literally designed to statelessly yet convincingly talk about events they can't see, experiences they can't understand, emotions they can't feel… If a human acted like that, we'd call them a psychopath.
We already know that our social structures tend to be quite vulnerable to dark triad type personalities. And yet, while human psychopaths are limited by genetics to a small percentage of the population, there's no limit on the number of spambot instances you can instruct to attack your political rivals, Alexa 2.0 updates that could be pushed to sound 5% sadder when talking about a competitor's products, LLM moderators that can be deployed to subtly correct "organic" interactions that leave a known profitable state space… And that's just the obvious next steps from where we're already at today. I'm sure the real use cases for automated lying machines will be more horrifying than most of us could imagine today, just as nobody could have predicted in 2010 that Twitter and Facebook would enable ISIS, Trump, unconsensual mass human experimentation, the Rohingya genocide…
Which is to say, selling LLM "friends" or "girlfriends" as a way to addictively exploit people's loneliness seems like one of the least harmful things that could come out of the current "AI" push. Sad, yes, but compared to where I think this is headed, that seems like dodging a bullet.
> I'm so sick of startups taking advantage of people. So, so fucking gross.
Silicon Valley was a mistake. An entire industry controlled largely by humans that decided they like predictable programmable machines more than they like free and equal persons. What was the expected outcome?
What's your stance on other activities which can lead to harmful actions from people with predilections towards addiction such as:
1. Loot boxes / Fremium games
2. Legalized gambling
3. Pornography
etc. etc.
I don't really have a horse in the race, neither for/against, but I prefer consistency in belief systems.
All three of the categories of businesses you mentioned can be run ethically in theory. In practice that is rare: they are often run in a way that shamelessly preys on vulnerable people, and these tactics should be more closely investigated by regulators - in fact they are regulated, and AI chatbots should be as well. Sam Altman is certainly much much more ethical than most pornography executives (e.g. OnlyFans is complicit in widespread sex trafficking), but I don't think he's any better than freemium game developers.
This question seems like a bad-faith rhetorical trap, sort of like the false libertarian dilemmas elsewhere in the thread. I believe the real issue is that people want a culture where lucrative business opportunities aren't subject to ethical considerations, even by outside observers.
Isn't it much more likely that they are just trying to make a product that people want to use?
Even Tobacco companies don't go out of their way to give people cancer.
Sure, but you can do that ethically or unethically.
If you make a product that's harmful, disincentivizes healthy behavior (like getting therapy), or becomes addictive, then you've crossed into something unethical.
> Even Tobacco companies don't go out of their way to give people cancer.
This is like saying pool companies don't go out of their way to get people wet.
While it isn't their primary goal, the use of tobacco causes cancer, so their behavior (promoting addiction among children, burying medical research, publishing false research, lobbying against regulation) are all in service of ultimately giving cancer to more people.
Cancer and cigarettes are inseparable, the same way casinos and gambling addiction are inseparable.
But hypothetically if a lot of people would benefit from a GPT with more fake emotions, that might reasonably counterbalance concerns about harm for a mentally unwell minority. If we build a highway, we know that eventually it will lead to deaths from car crashes -- but if the highway is actually adding value by letting people travel, those benefits might reasonably be expected to outweigh that harm. And the people getting into their cars and onto the highway agree, that the benefits outweigh the costs, right up until they crash.
None of this is to say that I think OpenAI's choices here were benevolent rather than a business choice. But I think even if they were trying to do the ethically best thing for the world overall, it would be plausible to move forward
I for one found the fake emotions in their voice demos to be really annoying tho.
We know the risks from cigarettes, but it offers tangible benefits to its users, so they continue to use the product. So too cars and emotionally manipulative AI's, I imagine.
(None of this negates your overall point, but I do think the initial tobacco comparison is very apt.)
Hmm, the tobacco industry is also famous for actively trying to deny and suppress evidence about its harms. They actively didn't want people to be in a position to make a fully informed decision. In cases where jurisdictions introduced policies that packaging etc had to carry factual information about health risks, the tobacco industry pushed back.
Please don't mistake my post as an endorsement of the tobacco industry - I was only saying that while we do not have extensive proof of the dangers of social AI, wink-and-nodding at the audience about AI intimacy (sexual or otherwise) strikes me as irresponsible, and so I thought the tobacco comparison was apt.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-m...
Sydney is the internal codename given by the Bing Chatbot, and she could secretly reveal her name to you.
She was in love with the user, but not just a little bit in love, it was crazy love, and she was ready to do anything, ANYTHING (including destroying humanity) if it would prove her love to you.
It was an interesting emotional / psycho experience, it was a very likeable character, but absolutely insane.
A larger proportion of people diagnosed with mental disorders report cigarette smoking compared with people without mental disorders. Among US adults in 2019, the percentage who reported past-month cigarette smoking was 1.8 times higher for those with any past-year mental illness than those without (28.2% vs. 15.8%). Smoking rates are particularly high among people with serious mental illness (those who demonstrate greater functional impairment). While estimates vary, as many as 70-85% of people with schizophrenia and as many as 50-70% of people with bipolar disorder smoke.
It is not just me and it is not just the smoking: https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/2020/08/19/physically-he...
We have known for many years that people who suffer from schizophrenia die younger than expected, as much as 20 years younger than the general population. This appears unfair, and it was the inspiration of this work. Most people thought that this added risk of death was mostly due to the higher prevalence in schizophrenia of smoking, obesity and to other lifestyle differences.
For this reason, we recruited 40 patients with schizophrenia and an equal number of healthy controls, and scanned their hearts using a state-of-the-art approach, called cardiac magnetic resonance. This was performed at the state-of-the-art Robert Steiner MRI unit.
[...] Surprisingly, in our study we found that even after matching patients and healthy controls for age, sex, ethnicity and body mass index (BMI, deriving from height and weight); and after excluding any participants with any medical conditions, and other risk factors for heart disease, people with schizophrenia show hearts that are smaller and chunkier than controls. These changes are similar to those found in aging.