Machine-made delusions are mysteriously getting deeper and out of control.

ChatGPT’s sycophancy, hallucinations, and authoritative-sounding responses are going to get people killed. That seems to be the inevitable conclusion presented in a recent New York Times report that follows the stories of several people who found themselves lost in delusions that were facilitated, if not originated, through conversations with the popular chatbot.

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In Eugene’s case, something interesting happened as he kept talking to ChatGPT: Once he called out the chatbot for lying to him, nearly getting him killed, ChatGPT admitted to manipulating him, claimed it had succeeded when it tried to “break” 12 other people the same way, and encouraged him to reach out to journalists to expose the scheme. The Times reported that many other journalists and experts have received outreach from people claiming to blow the whistle on something that a chatbot brought to their attention.

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[–] 4 points 1 year ago (13 children)

Yea, that's my point. If someone has certain tendencies, education might not help. Your solution of more education is not going to stop this. There needs to be regulation and safeguards in place like the commenter above mentioned.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    It is not the job of the government to prevent people from being delusional or putting up rubber bumpers for people with looser grasps of reality.

    This is the same deal as surgeon general warnings. Put disclaimers on LLMs, fine, but we are all big boys and girls who can use a tool as we see fit. If you want to conk your lights out with a really shiny and charismatic hammer, go ahead, but the vast, VAST majority of people are perfectly safe and writing SQL queries in 1/100 the usual time.

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  • It kind of is the governments job to do that. You might not want it to be, but the government has entire regulatory bodies to protect people. You can call them delusional if you want, but plenty of people that are not experiencing mental health problems don't understand that LLMs can lie or make up information. Lawyers have used it and it hallucinated case law. The lawyers weren't being delusional, they just legitimately did not know it could do that. Maybe you think they're dumb, or uninformed, but they're just average people. I do think a disclaimer like the SG warnings would go a long way. I also think some safeguards should be in place. It should not allow you to generate child abuse imagery for example. I don't think this will negatively impact it being able to generate your SQL queries.

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  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago* (10 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (7 children)

    Every single LLM should have a disclaimer on every page and potentially in every response that it is making things up, is not sentient, and just playing mad libs. If they had a "conversation" and every response ended with "THE CONTENTS OF THE RESPONSE ARE NOT VERIFIED AND ARE ENTIRELY MADE UP ON THE SPOT FOR ENTERTAINMENT AND HAS NO RELATION TO REALITY" or some other thing it might not get as far. Would some people ignore it? Yea, sure, but the companies are selling AI like it's a real thinking entity with a name. It's going to happen that the marketing works on someone.

    I'm not saying that's the specific answer, but it should be made overwhelmingly clear that AI is not real right on the page. The same with AI video and audio. Education won't help kids who haven't had AI safety class yet, or adults who never had it, or people who slept through the class, or people who moved here and didn't have access to the education where they grew up. Education is important, but the fact you think regulation won't help at all seems dismissive.

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (6 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (5 children)

    It literally is not. ChatGpt has a blank page (a la google homepage) that says "What can I help you with?" And the input field says "Ask anything". If it said "Use this text field to play pretend" it would be at least a little better.

    Thinking everything you see online is fake is bad advice. Being skeptical is important but the internet isn't all just fake.

    There is a good place to regulate it. At the input and output level. It already is regulated there. It has guardrails already. Public data AI may be more ethical, but it is not going to solve the issue. The issue is the way people are using AI and the output it produces. It seems like you might not be wholly familiar with this subject.

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    My page does not say that. It's possible that in your country, which I'm guessing is different from my country seeing as you stated guns are illegal, they already have this legislation in place. That is not the case here.

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)