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Pro-AI Subreddit Bans 'Uptick' of Users Who Suffer from AI Delusions (www.404media.co)
submitted 2 weeks ago by nulluser@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The moderators of a pro-artificial intelligence Reddit community announced that they have been quietly banning “a bunch of schizoposters” who believe “they've made some sort of incredible discovery or created a god or become a god,” highlighting a new type of chatbot-fueled delusion that started getting attention in early May.

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[-] meme_historian@lemmy.dbzer0.com 128 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

At this rate we'll soon have a decentralized para-religious terrorist organization full of brainlets that got scared shitless after discovering Roko's Basilisk and are now doing the cyber lord's bidding in order to not get punished once AGI arrives

edit: change to non-mobile link

[-] ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 38 points 2 weeks ago

Boy have I got news for you.

Look up the Zizians.

(Ok they’re only a tangential offshoot of people who maybe really like the Basilisk thought experiment and mostly don’t believe it. But hey. It’s underway!)

[-] Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world 22 points 2 weeks ago

Zizians my guy, they already exist

[-] pticrix@lemmy.ca 17 points 2 weeks ago

"rationalists". They dare use that name unironically.

[-] SparroHawc@lemm.ee 4 points 2 weeks ago

Rationalists are (supposedly) smart enough to figure out that Roko's Basilisk wouldn't waste cycles torturing someone in effigy if they decided they're going to ignore the threat of Roko's Basilisk. It's the opposite of a catch-22.

[-] kat_angstrom@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago

Imagine a boot SO mighty that if it exists it might crush you, so you need to lick it ahead of time so that someday if it does exist, it might not crush you.

[-] humorlessrepost@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

What if it’s an infinitely mighty boot? Ya know what’d make it even more mighty? Existing. Therefore it already exists. Start licking!

I just did a theology!

[-] meme_historian@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 weeks ago

The omniscient Boot requires lubrication!

[-] TheFriar@lemm.ee 7 points 2 weeks ago

I mean, at least the chat bots are always nonviolent and are restricted from encouraging people to do any harm. Doesn’t mean these people can’t (un)reason around it. People read the Bible and think it’s telling them to bomb clinics and hate their neighbors somehow.

[-] Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org 6 points 2 weeks ago

decentralized

Depends on the AI they're using and its bias

[-] asbestos@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago

This reads like Zack Freedman

[-] Stern@lemmy.world 81 points 2 weeks ago

tfw its no longer just the AI hallucinating

[-] Skunk@jlai.lu 55 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah, there’s been an article shared on lemmy a few months ago about couples or families destroyed by AI.

Like the husband thinks he discovered some new truth, kinda religious level about how the world is working and stuff. The he becomes an annoying guru and ruins his social life.

Kind of Qanon people but with chatGPT…

[-] pennomi@lemmy.world 42 points 2 weeks ago

Turns out it doesn’t really matter what the medium is, people will abuse it if they don’t have a stable mental foundation. I’m not shocked at all that a person who would believe a flat earth shitpost would also believe AI hallucinations.

[-] Bouzou@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

I dunno, I think there's credence to considering it as a worry.

Like with an addictive substance: yeah, some people are going to be dangerously susceptible to it, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be any protections in place...

Now what the protections would be, I've got no clue. But I think a blanket, "They'd fall into psychosis anyway" is a little reductive.

[-] pennomi@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago

I don’t think I suggested it wasn’t worrisome, just that it’s expected.

If you think about it, AI is tuned using RLHF, or Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. That means the only thing AI is optimizing for is “convincingness”. It doesn’t optimize for intelligence, anything seems like intelligence is literally just a side effect as it forever marches onward towards becoming convincing to humans.

“Hey, I’ve seen this one before!” You might say. Indeed, this is exactly what happened to social media. They optimized for “engagement”, not truth, and now it’s eroding the minds of lots of people everywhere. AI will do the same thing if run by corporations in search of profits.

Left unchecked, it’s entirely possible that AI will become the most addictive, seductive technology in history.

[-] Bouzou@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

Ah, I see what you're saying -- that's a great point. It's designed to be entrancing AND designed to actively try to be more entrancing.

[-] Vanth@reddthat.com 23 points 2 weeks ago

This feels a bit like PTA-driven panic about kids eating Tide Pods when like one person did it. Or razor blades in Halloween candy. Or kids making toilet hooch with their juice boxes. Or the choking game sweeping playgrounds.

But also, man on internet with no sense of mental health ... sounds almost feasible.

[-] Pogogunner@sopuli.xyz 19 points 2 weeks ago

I directly work with one of these people - they admit to spending all of their free time talking to the LLM chatbots.

On our work forums, I see it's not uncommon at all. If it makes you feel any better, AI loving is highly correlated with people you shouldn't ever listen to in the first place.

[-] chaosCruiser@futurology.today 13 points 2 weeks ago

The Internet is a pretty big place. There’s no such thing as an idea that is too stupid. There’s always at least a few people who will turn that idea into a central tenet of their life. It could be too stupid for 99.999% of the population, but that still leaves about 5 000 people who are totally into it.

[-] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

And the glory of the interwebz is that those 5000 people are bound to find each other and start a movement around it, where just 25 years ago they would have been laughed out of the local pub as a raving idiot...

[-] chaosCruiser@futurology.today 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

And that's exactly why we have flat-earthers, antivaxxers and "truthers" of various kinds. Although, due to the same phenomenon, we also have communities like !WhatsThisRock@lemmy.world, !capybara@lemmy.smeargle.fans, !NatureIsMetal@kbin.social, !captionthis@hilariouschaos.com, !HandmadeMarketplace and so many other interesting and quirky places. You win some, you loose some.

[-] raltoid@lemmy.world 14 points 2 weeks ago

And that's not even getting started on "ai girlfriends", that are isolating vulnerable people to a terrifying degree. And since they are garbage at context, they do things like that case last year where it could seem like it was encouraging a suicidal teen.

[-] cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 weeks ago

Crazy.

[-] cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 60 points 2 weeks ago

The year is 2026 the cyberchristo religion is taking off….

[-] thenose@lemmy.world 42 points 2 weeks ago

The wh 40k lore sounds more realistic than ever

[-] veni_vedi_veni@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago

I firmly believe when we have actual sexbots, that will be the sharp decline and decadence that will birth Slaanesh.

[-] nagaram@startrek.website 42 points 2 weeks ago

I think Terry A Davis would have found god in chat GPT and could have figured out the API calls on TempleOS

[-] palordrolap@fedia.io 26 points 2 weeks ago

Hard to say. I feel like it's about as likely he would have found LLMs to be an overcomplicated false prophet or false god.

This was a man whose operating system turned a PC into something not unlike an advanced Commodore 64, after all. He liked the simplicity and lack of layers the older computers provided. LLMs are literally layers upon layers of obfuscation and pseudo-neural wiring. That's not simple or beautiful.

It might all boil down to whether the inherent randomness of an LLM could be (made to be) sufficiently influenced by a higher power or not. He often treated random number outcomes as the influence of God, and it's hard to say how seriously he took that on any given day.

[-] Carmakazi@lemmy.world 11 points 2 weeks ago

I'd imagine it's a fool's errand to try and find threads of logic and consistency in the profoundly schizophrenic.

[-] Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub 5 points 2 weeks ago

What Terry enjoyed about computers has been echoed among lots of old heads in the unix world. On the tech front, he was solid.

It's the um, finding god in the code part...

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

The issue is not lack of logic and consistency, the trouble is a completely different reference frame.

Let me put it, to grossly simplify, in this way: Imagine you'd be dreaming while awake, no way to stop it, and would have to integrate all that craziness in real time. It's not that dreams make no sense -- they all have their rhyme and reason -- it's that they're talking a completely different language.

You might be hearing, out of nowhere, a cello note off to the side, move your gaze there, notice "that's my trashcan that makes no sense", and then be lost, and panic, lose faith in your senses, and that way lies psychosis. More productively, you say "ok mind which thought with as of yet unformed discernible meaning was it that you wanted me to pay attention to", look for the place the thought came from (as schizo, you can tell with your kinaesthetic sense), consider it for a while, still being oblivious of the meaning, and then go on with your life.

We're weird.

Oh, back to randomness: It can get you out of a rut and I do suppose that's how Terry used it, aware of it or not, and framing it however he did. Could also be using it to self-soothe, as in, distracting from a negative spiral. There's worse habits.

God, with almost 100% certainty, means "the genome and how it's speaking to me through my instincts" in his dialect. Because that's what it always means, what it always meant, for everyone, it meant that when it was the ancestors, it meant that when it became more detailed and became gods, it meant that when people realised all the gods are actually one thing, the theologists are just confused AF because politics and physics and cabbage-heads got into the mix. And so much for my schizo rant. Don't discount what I say because I'm crazy, the reason you consider me crazy is because it's true.

[-] answersplease77@lemmy.world 31 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

"Artifical" Intellegence has already taken over "Social" Media and the internet.

What I mean by the quotes: We replaced our social interactions with each other with Social Media, which has nothing social about it, then replaced the humans in social media with artificial slop generated by computers guessing what you want to read, watch, or hear.

Most of Facebook, Insta, Youtube, Reddit, Twitter...etc is AI profiles, AI channels, and AI sloptrash content that give back google-ad revenue money to some russian or indian dude who doen't even speak english.

[-] whaleross@lemmy.world 23 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I've been trying to configure ChatGPT tell me if I'm wrong in a question or statement but damn it never does unless I keep probing for support or links. I've been having the feeling that it has become worse with latter models. Glad but also sad to see I was right.

Anybody know other LLM that are more "trustworthy"* and capable of searching online for more information?

Edit; *trustworthy in quotes because of course people will jump on this. I know the limitations of LLM, I don't need you to tell me how much you hate everything AI. And I know LLM aren't AI.

[-] oldfart@lemm.ee 8 points 2 weeks ago

Claude 3.7 told me i'm wrong a couple of times. It knows how to search. I don't have an opinion on 4 yet but it can search too

[-] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 7 points 2 weeks ago

Claude definitely has its impressive moments where it calls out something inaccurate.

It’s also way less sycophantic, mature and better for light coding.

My only issue is that the servers are sometimes slow and so is the ios app which frequently trows an error after 2 minutes if waiting.

[-] Mrkawfee@feddit.uk 6 points 2 weeks ago

LLMs have breathed new life into the mid life crisis.

[-] shadowfax13@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 weeks ago

that sub seems to be fully brigaded by bots from marketing team of closed-ai and preplexity

[-] latenightnoir 0 points 2 weeks ago

Nietzche would've lost his marbles. Oh, wait...

this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
377 points (100.0% liked)

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