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Comment by sigmoid10 | Hacker News Reader

I mean, this stuff is pretty basic when it comes to delusions. Seems more likely that their inherent psychosis latched onto AI instead of being caused by it. These people would probably also deteriorate if they simply stumbled into any questionable part of the internet that reinforces their beliefs.

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Totally, I think it's different to some degree in terms of the velocity.

In a traditional forum they may have to wait for others to engage, and that's not even guaranteed. Whereas with an llm you can just go back and forth continually, with something that never gets tired and is excited to communicate with you, reinforcing your beliefs.

Issue with technology accelerating nature...

Well put

I think the key difference here is that ChatGPT and its ilk give an unlimited stream of yes-you-are-the-always-correct-genius sycophancy literally designed for engagement. The kind of niche rabbitholes existing from before LLMs are generally either rate-limited by being a limited number of actual people with strongly similar views (doomsday preppers, niche cults, etc), or so huge and chaotic that pure-strain sycophancy won't happen (reddit, 4chan).

It's effectively letting people talk to themselves but with an abstraction that makes it appear to be objective and coming from a 3rd party.

> Seems more likely that their inherent psychosis latched onto AI instead of being caused by it.

This is what the author of the tweet thread says.

Oh right. Reading this from random user, who seemingly has no training on therapy or psychology makes sense.

Similar to reading how a database should be built from a web developer.

Considering how hard actual quality training of a psychologist is, this is even more crazy

There's nothing crazy with suspecting that causality has not been established. If we're not psychologists or psychiatrists, then we have even more cause to wait for clinical studies. If you are a psychologist or psychiatrist, you still might not be remotely equipped to run clinical studies.

If you don't want to be "crazy" then you need a higher threshold for accepting these anecdotes as generalizable causal theory, because otherwise you'd be incoherently jerked left and right all the time.

He does make that point further down. He also makes the point that in the past there was a similar syndrome around TV and radio, where schizophrenics would say the CIA (it was usually the CIA) was beaming thoughts into their brains.

Interestingly, no one is accusing ChatGPT of working for the CIA.

(Of course I have no idea if that's rational or delusional.)

Anyway - this really needs some hard data with a control group to see if more people are becoming psychotic, or whether it's the same number of psychotics using different tools/means.

> Interestingly, no one is accusing ChatGPT of working for the CIA.

Hans Moleman: /I'm/ accusing ChatGPT of working for the CIA!

(More seriously, big American tech companies are generally in-line with the US Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex.)

The difference being that the moneyed interests behind these things over promise their abilities, misrepresent their limitations, and refuse to monitor usage in anyway that would reduce engagement.

Combine that with people who are largely tech illiterate and you will hear “if ai says it it must be true”, or “ai knows more than you so it must be correct”.

Then when that same magic technology starts telling you you are special, you believe it because the machine is always right.

Isn't that exactly what this person points out in the thread linked in GP? They compare it directly to triggers in other decades.

OP's title and the original post insinuate that psychosis happened because of AI. As if it wouldn't have happened otherwise. That's a very bold claim.

The original post does not. Read the whole Twitter thread.

The title literally says

>I’ve seen 12 people hospitalized after losing touch with reality because of AI

which is a direct quote from the original twitter post.

In News, headlines != articles, and in Twitter, a first tweet != a tweet thread. You need the full thing, not the headline to say you've ingested the content.

Not when the HN post is a single tweet that tries to steer opinions.

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