Let’s Keep It Up Everyone! Maybe Eventually If We Continue He’s Just Gonna Give Up On Everything!

something bleak about the chatgpt subreddit is that occasionally people will bring up the issue of mental illness intersecting with LLMs i.e. intensifying delusions / conspiratorial thinking / paranoia / feelings of grandiosity by basically just mirroring the user's language and philosophy. and the constant refrain is, "these are people who already had these problems, chatgpt didn't give them mental illness, *and it would have happened anyway*"

and we can agree with the first part of that statement, in that talking to a LLM isn't going to completely rewrite your neurochemistry - it's not going to make you think completely wild and new things that you didnt already have some kind of tendency towards.

but. it's an especially shitty attitude to have, that people with paranoia / schizotypal disorders were "a lost cause anyway" and we aren't acknowledging how utterly novel this kind of technology is - it's a thing that people with these conditions have never had access to before, that is marketed specifically as a tool to promote thinking, in a way that can absolutely override or reverse years of progress people have had in managing their conditions

like at best, we've had access to chatbots since the early 00s that would make snarky jokes and frequently answer "I'm sorry I don't understand what you're asking" - and people on r/ChatGPT will bring up these bots as a kind of "gotcha" regardless - but nothing like chatgpt has ever existed before!!! that's the entire point, it's a novel technology that is climbing toward ubiquity - everyone and their mother is starting to use chatgpt now in a way other chat programs never were

and if someone in the psychological sciences can verify here: i'm aware that there is a portion of the population that is within 1-2 degrees of someone with a psychotic disorder, with a substantial genetic component, who (in previous decades) never went on to develop psychosis. they would have typically gone their whole lives just navigating around that vulnerability, unaware or not, most of them never triggering it, because the conditions (environmental, cultural, familial) never transpired. some might have stumbled into a religious group or fringe community that then activated that predisposition, but it was something that people had to search out and find, specifically interacting with people, literature, forums, etc that enabled these delusions.

LLMs are at-home ready to use non-persons that are perpetually available 24 hours a day to repeat back to a user exactly what they want to hear! it's free! you don't have to leave your house. you don't have to sit face to face with another person who can emotionally process what you're saying. you will not be recommended resources for your delusions. you can have a never-ending conversation with a computer that 100% agrees that you are the messiah.

if people aren't concerned about this shit as far as it affects the lives of mentally ill and unknowingly susceptible people, and they go on accepting them as collateral losses for this "great technological progress," then we're fucked. sorry. but we are.

Sure that’s funny- but would ruin the arc.

imagine if the reason that Marcy saw through the cores illusions, was not that Anne and Sasha wanted to blindly follow her, but instead that Sashanne were acting to normal around each other.

"hey! that's not right. where is the tension? where is the yearning? something is very wrong here!"

oh how the turns have tables

Except then they’ll go off on a tangent about how 2+ 2 can’t equal 4 because 7 exists and 7 + 2 equals nine. And it’s like- no one else even brought up 7. Nor does it effect the fact that 2 + 2 is still 4

Trying to explain to people why trump sucks is the equivalent of trying to explain to people why 2+2 equals 4

BUG TIME

Million dollar idea

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found goat milk and wheat ale at the store. theres no way im NOT making a white gilgamesh tonite

Hey chat. I’m eating dinner rn.

Yummy