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Huge Study of Chats Between Delusional Users and AI Finds Alarming Patterns (futurism.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 225 points 7 months ago (50 children)

Huge Study

*Looks inside

this latest study examined the chat logs of 19 real users of chatbots — primarily OpenAI’s ChatGPT — who reported experiencing psychological harm as a result of their chatbot use.

Pretty small sample size despite being a large dataset that they pulled from, its still the dataset of just 19 people.

AI sucks in a lot of ways sure, but this feels like fud.

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  • [–] 60 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    The hugeness is probably

    391, 562 messages across 4,761 different conversations

    That's a lot of messages

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  • [–] 19 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    If that's only 19 users, that's around 250 conversations per user 🤔

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    ...and about 82 messages per conversation. Also, at least half of all the messages are from the user to the AI, and the other half are from the AI to the user, meaning around 41 messages from the user per conversation.

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  • [–] 25 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    I remember reading my old states book that said a minimum of 30 points needed for normal distribution. Also typically these small sets about proof of concept, so yeah you still got a point.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    It's about 300 samples for an estimate of the distribution with a 95% confidence iirc. That's assuming the samples are representative (unbiased) and 95% confidence doesn't mean it's within 95% of reality, but that 5% of tests run in such a way would be expected to be inaccurate (and there's no way of knowing for sure which one this particular sample is because even a meta study will have such an error rate, though you can increase the confidence with more samples or studies, just never to 100% unless you study every possible sample, including future ones).

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (3 children)

    That doesn't make sense. What if your population is only 100?

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    Then any statistics you measure on that population might be fully accurate for those 100 but might be less able to predict what the next 100 will look like.

    You can still measure stats with smaller groups, it just means the confidence interval is smaller. With 300, there's a 95% chance your test results are close to reality. With 100 it might be more like 66%.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Population is a statistical term which means "everything". There is no "next 100".

    The 300 number is specifically about very big populations where you're trying to measure something like an average of an unknown variable. It doesn't apply to just anything statistics.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    I meant like births, as in even if you can enumerate every single individual, statistics can apply to future members that don't yet exist.

    And yeah, it's been a while and I remembered that the proof didn't depend on the population size but forgot that it assumed a large population size in the first place. I was wrong.

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  • [–] 13 points 7 months ago* (9 children)

    Where are you hearing it so much? (And ideally can you describe it in a little more detail than saying it's crypto bros again?)

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (8 children)

    Crypto bros are infamous for describing any criticism as FUD, no matter the criticism. It's like a verbal tic. Here are some examples from the past couple days on the premiere Bitcoin social network:

    When all this FUD ends and Bitcoin goes 🚀

    Quantum FUD is at ATH

    FUD Busters [NFT]

    Flokicoin is built to last... Don't follow the FUD.

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  • [–] 19 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    The term FUD has been around longer & broader than that. But thanks for the explanation.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (5 children)

    I have no argument there, the phrase was definitely not created by them, it's just been beaten to death by them.

    They've also overused a bunch of ancient and unfunny memes well past their expiration dates, and universally adopted a collection of depressingly dull and incorrect slogans. "FUD" is just the one that has interesting meaning outside their sad sphere.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Expecting someone who doesn't follow cryptobro spaces to associate the term FUD with cryptobros and therefore stop using it is... kinda ignorant.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    I agree with you, and hopefully my posts don't come across like that's what I believe. If anything, I'd prefer all phrases to be taken back from them.

    I'm just trying to describe the other half of where different people see the word, and why they might come to different, incomplete conclusions.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago

    While I am aware that it's a common crypto shill term, I think by this point crypto has fallen out of the mainstream, so their usage of terms doesn't really matter.

    And as others have pointed out, the term FUD has been used at least since the birth of WWW/modern internet.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (21 children)

    .....fud?

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  • [–] 35 points 7 months ago

    fud: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. A tactic for denigrating a thing, usually by implication of hypothetical or exaggerated harms, often in vague language that is either tautological or not falsifiable.

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  • [+] -28 points 7 months ago (18 children)

    It’s crypto bro speak.

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  • [–] 19 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (15 children)
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  • [–] -3 points 7 months ago (14 children)

    and yet it doesn't stop being their jargon

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  • [–] 13 points 7 months ago (11 children)

    They also use the words "the," "at," "is," and "it," but that doesn't make it their jargon.

    We really need to stop condemning entire words just because some people we don't like used them...

    I can't tell you how many times I've been accused of using a "dogwhistle" because I used a totally innocuous word in accordance with its literal meaning without having any idea that it's apparently been co-opted by some group of hate-filled extremists because I don't follow those groups and I don't know their lingo...

    Like, soon we won't have any words left that we're still allowed to use. Language is already getting dumbed down, and I'm tired of walking on eggshells lest I say a word that could potentially be misinterpreted in light of a vague association to a different term that has a double-entendre that some niche circles use in some reprehensible way in their ostensibly secret code, or that I didn't know was a euphemism...

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (10 children)

    it's not exclusively their jargon, but it is their jargon.

    it's jargon, not common parlance.

    you're having an argument with me about something other people have said to you. please don't put words in my mouth.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago* (9 children)

    I'm not arguing with you, at what point did I claim you said anything that I disagree with?

    I was just using your comment as a springboard.

    Maybe I should have replied to fartmaster instead, but done is done...

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (8 children)

    sorry, maybe i'm reading tone into your italics that isn't there. tone over text is hard and i don't sleep a lot.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    It's understandable. I was frustrated, and the italics were meant to express my frustration. I just didn't intend for it to feel directed at you... my bad...

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (6 children)

    hey no worries. i've been getting a lot of frustration directed at me. maybe that's why i misinterpreted it.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say you probably don't deserve it. I've seen your other comments and you seem conscientious, relatable, and like you're doing the best you can just like the rest of us...

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    oh i'm not talking about here, just talking about life

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (3 children)

    Life is... brutal...

    It doesn't have to be. We humans are capable of being civilized, we've done it before. For a while I thought world peace was within our reach, at least in my lifetime, but now I'm not so sure...

    Even on the smaller scale, people don't have to be so cruel to each other. It's a choice. A deeply-ingrained, generational pattern, maybe, but a choice to wake up each day and continue living in that inertia.

    Of course, it takes more than an individual to break that tide. It's a collective choice. But collective choices are just the sum of all the individual choices that reach critical mass...

    I'm just absently philosophizing... don't mean to blow smoke up your ass...

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    don’t mean to blow smoke up your ass…

    Oh they tried that it doesn't make the hole work any better

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    It's not really ethical to just yoink people's chats and study them

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago

    "We received chat logs directly from people who self-identified as having some psychological harm related to chatbot usage (e.g. they felt deluded) via an IRB-approved Qualtrics survey "

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    How big do you think the population of people with AI delusion is? Why can't 19 be a representative sample? Why is that not enough to make statements like "after the user expresses romantic interest in the chatbot, the chatbot is 7.4x more likely to express romantic interest in the next three messages, and 3.9x more likely to claim or imply sentience in the next three messages." when all 19 users expressed romantic interest?

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