Hacker News Reader

Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

I mean sure, it's very promising if OpenAI's future is your only metric. It gets notably darker if you look at the broader picture of ChatGPT (and company)'s impact on our society.

* We have people uploading tons of zero-effort slop pieces to all manner of online storefronts, and making people less likely to buy overall because they assume everything is AI now

* We have an uncomfortable community of, to be blunt, actual cultists emerging around ChatGPT, doing all kinds of shit from annoying their friends and family all the way up to divorcing their spouses

* Education is struggling in all kinds of ways due to students using (and abusing) the tech, with already strained administrations struggling to figure out how to navigate it

Like yeah if your only metric is OpenAI's particular line going up, it's looking alright. And much like Uber, it's success seems to be corrosive to the society in which it operates. Is this supposed to be good news?

View on HN

Yes but in a typical western business sense they are merely optimizing for user engadgement and profits. What happens to society a decade from now because of all the slop being produced, that is not their concern. Facebook is just about connecting friends right, totally wont become a series of information moats and bubbles controlled by the algorithms...

A great communicator on the risks of AI being to heavily intergrated into society is Zak Stein. As someone who works in education, they are see first hand how people are becoming dependent on this stuff rather than any kind of self improvement. The people who are just handing over all their thinking to the machine. It is very bizarre and I am seeing it in my personal experience a lot more over the last few months.

I absolutely agree. I find it abhorrent.

Dying for a reference on the cult stuff, a quick search didn’t provide anything interesting.

Scroll through the ChatGPT subreddit right now and tell me there isn't a TON of people in there who are legitimately unwell. Reads like the back page notes of a dystopian novel.

I think this is less caused by ChatGPT/LLMs and more of a phenomenon in social media circles where people flock to "the thing" and have poor social skills and mental health generally speaking.

In addition to what the parent commenter was likely referring to, there are also the Zizians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians

https://futurism.com/chatgpt-mental-health-crises, which references the more famous https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spi... but is a newer article.

The article links to a forum post which kind of explains how engagement is maximised https://community.openai.com/t/uncovering-the-intent-behind-...

Poetic, but I don't think that really explains anything.

Ever thought about how there's a magnetic quality to mirrors that keeps us looking? I see GPT in a similar light, it functions as a mirror, reflecting aspects of our reality.

I don't think GPTs reflect much of us at all, because we ultimately must translate into language what chatbots lack (motivation, caring about things, emotions, biased stimulation like pain and pleasure, etc)

Language is a large part of how we think about ourselves, but I don't think chatbots can tap much into what it is to be human or what we care about/feel outside of what we've already written, and are thus kind of useless as fetishes for humanity. So far, anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com