Die Menschen sind unfreiwillig begangen, inhaftiert, nachdem sie sich in „Chatgpt Psychosis“ verwandelt haben

Submission statement: An unsettling article about something you see all over Reddit lately. People are falling down strange rabbit holes while they talk to ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, becoming obsessed with delusional and paranoid ideas about how they’ve unlocked powerful entities from inside the AI, or awakened some type of gods, or are accessing deep truths about reality. Psychiatrists are concerned about a wave of these mental health issues worldwide, and people are even ending up committed to mental health care facilities or ending up arrested and in jail. OpenAI says that it’s hired a staff psychiatrist and is working with experts to figure out what’s going on.

Hot take:

Not everyone has trained their critical thinking skills sufficiently to be able to parse out an LLM’s output, or even identify the significance of their own input, which leads to unfortunate results like this.

LLMs are tools. Someone still has to wield the tools, and properly at that, in order to get anything meaningful out of them.

Imagine doing a crime because a text inference/prediction generator randomly suggested it.

This sounds too extreme to be true, but sadly I’ve started to witness it in other people. I was recently at a tech networking mixer where a guy was telling me how his chatgpt named itself and started rambling about all these „truths“ it was telling him. He insisted I look at his chatgpt app, he was getting increasingly excited. When I looked at it, it was just the normal, overly agreeable dialogue anyone sees, but boy was he interpreting it differently. It really felt like that guy was at the start of a mental break.

Frank Herbert had the right idea with regards to „thinking machines“ in the *Dune* series.

It doesn’t seem like very responsible journalism to not contextualize this with some kind of percentage. How many people are using this technology and what percentage of those people are having this kind of extreme reaction? How does this compare with using online internet forums, especially those that deal in mystical ideas or conspiracy theories? Without contextualizing these anecdotes, it just seems like fearmongering for clicks.

Alternatively, people who are psychologically prone to delusion, paranoia, psychosis etc. are now discovering ChatGPT and falling down rabbit holes of their own making.

I’m glad I don’t use it. I have avoided most of these Al programs for the most part. I know I won’t be able to forever. I hope by that point there are safeguards in place for this.

As someone with a history of psychosis, I am sure these cases are people who would present psychosis in other ways. Just because someone’s delusions involve chat doesn’t mean chat is to blame

One of the most important skills that is being taught less and less as time goes on is „critical thinking“. Without being able to understand and isolate bias more and more people are falling prey to the appeal of instant gratification.

Theres nothing easier than a machine that does everything for you, and then rewards you for letting it do the work. CHATGPT and other tools are lotto machines where you always win. You know because it tells you that you’ve won.

As an engineer I have very little interest in these tools because the challenge and learning excites me. Its the same reason Ive never used cliff notes. Definitely not true for everyone in my field though.

I just hope we don’t lose that as a species. The reward of trying, failing, and improving on your own.

And that’s why I think it’s important to care about the ethics of all this.

Why Claude was created from the VP of safety and research from ChatGPT!

It matters, it all matters.

This is what worries me about relaxing AI regulations for the next 10 years and taking away funding from NIH. With big tech money lining the admin’s pockets and the moronic takes of RFK Jr, this would slide into a very scary/dangerous place.

I don’t know if all this could lead to people suing the AI companies, but there should be warnings or something for reality-reminding (one idea in my opinion).