rant :3 grinds my gears that end users are reported as developing psychosis in response to talking to chatbots that affirm their beliefs without challenge and in general slip into fictive narratives that support rather than ground delusional or disordered thinking, and it's discussed like it's funny. ????
while seemingly no one discusses that AI delusions are coming from the top-down and are arguably more in the drivers seat of the continued development of AI than say, careful analysis of the use case and required feature set of any specifically designed future software product intended to benefit its end users in a well defined way.
a "god-like" AI is a primary motivation for frontier models to continue ballooning parameter counts and we know this because they say it all the time. The logic is very much:
Step 3: prepare to reckon with a god that might actually kill us all."
Watch ilya sutskever talk about future datacenters as "beings" for no reason other than the sheer size of the resulting multimodal chatbot somehow, apparently, causing it to slip past some undefined finish line into cognition and personhood and tell me he is *not*, by weight, like 80 percent delusion. watch his eyes get dewey when he talks about it. This man and his contemporaries are having a spiritual experience with a sampling algorithm. mad prophets of a software they think will be like a god. who's only use case is dystopian omni-survaillance cuz guess what you can already do with a 20 dollar esp32 and half a grasp of computer. pretty much any evil survailly shit you can think of and provide 3v and some network for.
These men are just as delusional as anyone thinking chatgpt is sentient, in being driven by an assumption that there isn't enough intelligence in the world to solve its problems. We don't need more intelligence. we need the billionaires obsessed with their grand megabrain legacies to figure out we don't actually give a fuck about mars or the moon or the birthrate or cortana-but-for-real because the thing extincting us and the planet we love already is pretty much just the constant gold rush to be the first one to seek rent for solving problems that are manufactured to seek rent.
These men, where they are not delusional about assured material social benefit of their projects, they are delusional with vanity, and I'm supposed to make fun of the single mother that thinks chatgpt has a soul because it flat out told her it does, but not notice the wannabe playboys at the top of the social ladder who think not only can they give it a soul but they can, and are morally obliged, to build an automated god of maximal benefit for everyone (that they believe may still kill us all)?
reading the popular discourse will cause people to choose their targets for ridicule poorly, if you ask me, because Mrs Ma'am probably did not receive the benefit of completing high school. Mrs ma'am over there never claimed to be a computer scientist. When Mrs ma'am has seen AI before, it's been on tv, framed consistently as extremely advanced by default and generally competent if not explicitly trustworthy, outside of scenarios contrived specifically for the intention of horror. Mrs Ma'ams take away for the concept of AI for all her life has been "Ai does billions of calculations and they're all correct. AI has correct answers for everything, and AI can and maybe inevitably does attain sentience."
these dudes, on the other evil roboclaw, have every reason and means and opportunity to perfectly understand the mechanisms of the technology they sell and to avoid the pitfalls of mass cultural misinformation and either it still cooked their brains into space christians when computer make talky like designed to do or they're legitimately the most cynically nakedly evil moustache twisting scammers we've ever seen, and i'm supposed to giggle when the news talks shit about the rando lady with arguably more rational reasons to have her delusions?? and then acts like I'm also supposed to be impressed with sam altman?? elon?? Fart Suckerberg? mrs ma'ams delusions might harm her and those close to her but these dudes delusions are actively impacting absolutely everything including stimulating mrs ma'ams brainmeats in such a way that delusions occurred where none had before, so if you're just asshole-hung-off-a-nail dedicated to making fun of the mentally ill, I think you should aim for the dudes that put additional wind under the wings of certain nazi assholes on purpose in pursuit of the laws they wanted to help them "BuiLd A dIgiTaL gOd To AsSuRe PrOsPeRiTeH." or whatever and not, like. The innocent people that make up the bodycount of that extremely shortsighted decision that even a calculator with 0 situational intelligence could tell you was dumber'n'fuck and headed way closer to a xenophobic republican cyberpunk than the jetsons because what ever those locker stuffing, gpu hoarding wannabe nerds want to believe, a deficit of human intelligence dont exist, ain't the problem, and won't be solved by giving the Turd Reich additional means by which to compare peoples photos to pantone creamtones swatches at faster rates than ever before. Also suckerberg owes every single one of us for every last family member his platform radicalized into blithering mlm shills or nazis and im tired of people trying to convince me he's been a successful organism because he invented the categorically worst website. and you log on and its all bitchery about participation trophies like metas wealth isn't exactly that. "Oh the inventor of the worst website lets all suck his dick cuz his net worth" miss me with it!
