When he first started using Meta AI, Daniel recalls, his experience was “wonderful.” He was on a “spiritual journey” as he leaned into reflection and sobriety, he told us, and wanted be a “better human.” Meta AI, he felt, was helping him do that.

I’m not downplaying his struggles at all, but it seems like there already was a problem even before the AI stuff came into the picture, and it just exacerbated it.

I have not turned to LLM chatbots for conversations and companionship so I can’t say with 100% confidence I won’t fall down a similar rabbit hole, but I think there must have already been something going on if you do.

And people call me crazy for saying LLMs are a cognitohazard...

Do not buy the insanity glasses. Abhor the Abominable Intelligence.

Something like that happened to me when Pokemon Go first came out.

The same crowd that got "Do Not Drink" on bleach are the reason AI gets so many new headlines. It may never see broad adoption because it's too dangerous to vulnerable people.

That got way darker than expected. Wow!

I really think his family could and should have taken action a lot sooner.

AI moses?

While I'm thoroughly anti-LLM and concerned that we've known about the ELIZA effect since 1966 and apparently learned absolutely nothing, there is also a certain element of PEBCAK here.

I think the biggest thing is that people don't seem to understand how AI works. If they understood it's just predictive text and not like...actual intelligence, I think it would solve a lot of issues.

Part of this, though, is how AI companies keep pushing to personify their AI and keep making them sound better than they actually are. It makes people think its this magical thing

It’s always kind of weird to me when articles describe insanely wealthy people in such a way that they try to make them sound normal.

A 50 year old who worked at the same financial services company (in my experience, finance programmer bros are awful a lot of the time).

No way, they lived an affluent suburb??

In 2022, he leveraged his family’s finances to realize a passion project: a rustic resort in rural Utah

“He had it all… please ignore the many obvious issues.”

This article is asinine.

He’d struggled with alcoholism, but quit drinking in early 2023, months before he purchased the Meta smart glasses.

He was past being an alcoholic for months! How could this happen??

I believe that companies need to be held responsible for harm caused by their products, but this one might be on the user.

What can they do? Respond to every question about religion, spirituality, or aliens with links to mental health organizations?