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Comment by ai_critic | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone actually surprised? The baseline empathy and emotional intelligence of people, both online and offline, has absolutely tanked--I think Covid was the epoch, but arguably going a lot farther back since then. People are just shitty.

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I’m surprised that 6 out of 10 people even use AI, let alone that many people use it as a therapist.

Yeah. I simply don't believe it. They do describe their methodology at the end of the article. It's a single sentence.

Bought a bed last month, the carpenter delivered it and took photographs of it(with his phone) at our home. Next thing I see is he used Gemini to make the bed sit in various(fictional) rooms and interior design contexts. Like in a WhatsApp status with a number at the footer to call if people wanted a similar bed made.

What impressed me is just how realistic and beautiful it looked.

This is in India, the carpenter is barely literate in English.

You will be surprised just how many people use it these days.

Im guessing a fair bit what could have been described as a designers job is now being done by AI by anyone who has a phone.

retail facing acquaintances have confirmed to me that this started long before covid. personally I'm much more of a misanthrope than average, still to me it's more important to focus on systems (like the modern western system of no values no books no community no nutrients no free time no third space no thinking only consumption) as opposed to focusing on symptoms (eg. people behaving animalistically when confronted with a system that does not align with the needs of its occupants). we are all living creatures trying to optimize, therefore outside of edge cases there's functionally no difference between you, I, and 'shitty' people

It increased generally with social media adoption and the installation of a screen between a person and their people.

Being more loosely connected may not be a substitute for the meaningful connection, both as a skill to learn, and participate in

Surprised and suspicious. A tiny fraction of LLM queries are what anthropic calls 'affective' queries. Very little LLM traffic is for anything other than factual uses, and of that a vanishingly small fraction is something like psychological advice

https://www.anthropic.com/news/how-people-use-claude-for-sup...

I suspect this company is deliberately using terrible data to drive eyeballs, which, mission accomplished I guess.

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