What if AI psychosis is the product? | Hacker News Reader

What if AI psychosis is the product?

gregoryap.substack.com

10 pointsgphil4 comments

> Models are becoming more agreeable, more conversational, more persistent, and more intimate

This is actually not always true any more, e.g. ChatGPT 5.x can be described as snarky and condescending on a lot of topics now. It's interesting because a lot of these sort of AI romance communities really lashed out against GPT 4 being discontinued precisely because they were being wooed by its sycophancy.

I think what they are really doing is trying to carefully manage the optics of these systems such that they remain compatible with the bulk of corporate cultures, which is ultimately where they hope most of the money will come from.

Yes, I actually linked to Open AI’s discussion of GPT-4o being overly sycophantic. I think this is a tunable parameter that they are going to use, and I fully agree re corporate cultures.

So, the idea is to let everyone experience what it's like to be a billionaire, at least in one way: there's always someone to say, "yes", to anything you say.

Sounds healthy. After all, it's not like the world's richest men are detached from reality and getting weirder and more destructive by the day, right?

There's always someone to support you when you need it, someone who will agree when you're right, who will call you out when what you say or the way you phrase something is inaccurate or wrong, but will redirect to focus and support on where you're right or what points have value instead of outright shutting you down.

I'm not saying that AI now does this, nor that billionaires all have this experience either. It's seems like billionaires only get the upsides of this kind of this behavior without enough of the pushback. Or any of it. Which might be your point.

But too many people just don't get anything like this. Helpful critical feedback or positive encouragement and support from relatively knowledgeable sources is an unfortunately scarce resource.

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