Copy-pasting my tentative doomerist theory of generalised “AI” psychosis here:

I’m getting convinced that in addition to the irreversible pollution of humanity’s knowledge commons, and in addition to the massive environmental damage, and the plagiarism/labour issues/concentration of wealth, and other well-discussed problems, there’s one insidious damage from LLMs that is still underestimated.

I will make without argument the following claims:

Claim 1: Every regular LLM user is undergoing “AI psychosis”. Every single one of them, no exceptions.

The Cloudflare person who blog-posted self-congratulations about their “Matrix implementation” that was mere placeholder comments is one step into a continuum with the people whom the chatbot convinced they’re Machine Jesus. The difference is of degree not kind.

Claim 2: That happens because LLMs have tapped by accident into some poorly understood weakness of human psychology, related to the social and iterative construction of reality.

Claim 3: This LLM exploit is an algorithmic implementation of the feedback loop between a cult leader and their followers, with the chatbot performing the “follower” role.

Claim 4: Postindustrial capitalist societies are hyper-individualistic, which makes human beings miserable. LLM chatbots exploit this deliberately by artificially replacing having friends. it is not enough to generate code; they make the bots feel like they talk to you—they pretend a chatbot is someone. This is a predatory business practice that reinforces rather than solves the loneliness epidemic.

n.b. while the reality-formation exploit is accidental, the imaginary-friend exploit is by design.

Corollary #1: Every “legitimate” use of an LLM would be better done by having another human being you talk to. (For example, a human coding tutor or trainee dev rather than Claude Code). By “better” it is meant: create more quality, more reliably, with more prosocial costs, while making everybody happier. But LLMs do it: faster at larger quantities with more convenience while atrophying empathy.

Corollary #2: Capitalism had already created artificial scarcity of friends, so that working communally was artificially hard. LLMs made it much worse, in the same way that an abundance of cheap fast food makes it harder for impoverished folk to reach nutritional self-sufficiency.

Corollary #3: The combination of claim 4 (we live in individualist loneliness hell) and claim 3 (LLMs are something like a pocket cult follower) will have absolutely devastating sociological effects.

$81.25 is an astonishingly cheap price for selling one’s soul.

Hops over to Wikipedia… searches… “Showing results for ruleal. No results found for ruliad.”

Hmm. Widen search to all namespaces… oh, it was deleted. Twice.

Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. What a year, huh?)

Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. What a year, huh?)

Gentlemen, it’s been an honour sneering w/ you, but I think this is the top 🫡 . Nothings gonna surpass this (at least until FTX 2 drops)

Gentlemen, it’s been an honour sneering w/ you, but I think this is the top 🫡 . Nothings gonna surpass this (at least until FTX 2 drops)

eagerly awaiting the multi page denial thread

None of these words are in the Star Trek Encyclopedia

Gentlemen, it’s been an honour sneering w/ you, but I think this is the top 🫡 . Nothings gonna surpass this (at least until FTX 2 drops)

it’s all coming together. every single techbro and current government moron, they all loop back around to epstein in the end

I think that’s more about Wolfram giving a clickbait headline to some dicking around he did in the name of “the ruliad”, a revolutionary conceptual innovation of the Wolfram Physics Project that is best studied using the Wolfram Language, brought to you by Wolfram Research.

The full ruliad—which appears at the foundations of physics, mathematics and much more—is the entangled limit of all possible computations. […] In representing all possible computations, the ruliad—like the “everything machine”—is maximally nondeterministic, so that it in effect includes all possible computational paths.

Unrelated William James quote from 1907:

The more absolutistic philosophers dwell on so high a level of abstraction that they never even try to come down. The absolute mind which they offer us, the mind that makes our universe by thinking it, might, for aught they show us to the contrary, have made any one of a million other universes just as well as this. You can deduce no single actual particular from the notion of it. It is compatible with any state of things whatever being true here below.

Gentlemen, it’s been an honour sneering w/ you, but I think this is the top 🫡 . Nothings gonna surpass this (at least until FTX 2 drops)

“im saving the world from AI! me talking to epstein doesn’t matter!!!”

€5 say they’ll claim he was talking to jefffrey in an effort to stop the horrors.

no not the abuse of minors, he was asking epstein for donations to stop AGI, and it’s morally ethical to let rich abusers get off scott free if that’s the cost of them donating money to charitable causes such as the alignment problem /s

Gentlemen, it’s been an honour sneering w/ you, but I think this is the top 🫡 . Nothings gonna surpass this (at least until FTX 2 drops)

You know, it makes the exact word choices Eliezer chose on this post: https://awful.systems/post/6297291 much more suspicious. “To the best of my knowledge, I have never in my life had sex with anyone under the age of 18.” So maybe he didn’t know they were underage at the time?

Gentlemen, it’s been an honour sneering w/ you, but I think this is the top 🫡 . Nothings gonna surpass this (at least until FTX 2 drops)

Gentlemen, it’s been an honour sneering w/ you, but I think this is the top 🫡 . Nothings gonna surpass this (at least until FTX 2 drops)

Gentlemen, it’s been an honour sneering w/ you, but I think this is the top 🫡 . Nothings gonna surpass this (at least until FTX 2 drops)