Guess what I’m saying is I’ve sort of dared AI to suck me in, and … I am unchanged.

I'm not sure this tests the point I was raising. In all of those cases, you knew at the beginning that you were dealing with AI. Yes, the man in our article did too, but what if you didn't know it was AI to begin with when you started interacting with it? How would your interactions change? What "safe guards" would you not have up if, as an example, it was appearing to you like a Lemmy poster instead of a dedicated AI interaction window?

I don’t think for a second there is any sort of emotional or intelligent entity in the other end.

Of course, because there isn't when we are rational. I also assume you are a psychologically healthy person. There is a suggestion the man in the article may have had an underlying condition, but he wasn't aware of it.

I think if more people experimented with generation settings like temperature and watched AI go to incoherent acid trips, it would feel more like a machine to them.

I completely agree. I've done some experiments of my own training a small LLM from scratch (not Fine Tuning an existing commercial model) using training data exclusively from a small set of public domain books I have read. I then had this LLM produce output. Since I had read the books, I could see pieces of where it got components of its responses. Cranking up temperature would make it go off the rails, which was fun to see. Overfitting made it try to give me something close to what I asked for, but obviously fail. I really liked the whole exercise because it was a small enough set of data with all of the levers and knobs exposed for me to see how far it could go, and more importantly how far it couldn't.