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.
The sycophancy is one reason I stopped using it.
Everything is genius to it.
I asked about putting ketchup, mustard, and soy sauce in my light stew and that was “a clever way to give it a sweet and umami flavour”. I couldn’t find an ingredient it didn’t encourage.
I asked o3 if my code looked good and it said it looked like a seasoned professional had written it. When I asked to critique an intern who wrote that same code it’s suddenly concerned about possible segfaults and nitpicking assert statements. It also suggested making the code more complex by adding dynamically sized arrays because that’s more professional than fixed size.
I can see why it wins on human evaluation tests and makes people happy — but it has poor taste and I can’t trust it because of the sycophancy.
Nothing is “genius” to it, it is not “suggesting” anything. There is no sentience to anything it is doing. It is just using pattern matching to create text that looks like communication. It’s a sophisticated text collage algorithm and people can’t seem to understand that.
i often feel like a sophisticated collage algorithm.
AI knows as much about the subjects I ask it as my predictive text keyboard does.
Hehe yeah, it’s basically an advanced form of the game where you type one word and then keep hitting whatever autocomplete suggests in the top spot for the next word. It’s pretty good at that, but it is just that, taken to an extreme degree, and effectively trained on everyone’s habits instead of just one person.
And many of the most typical matching patterns are psychologically harmful
I used chatgpt before but never had conversation with it. I ask for code I couldn’t find or have it make me a small bit of code that then will rewrite to make it work.
Never once did I think to engage with it like a person, and damn sure don’t ask it for recipes. Hell I have Allreciecpies for that or hell google it There are thousand blogs with great recipes on them. And they are all great because you can just jump to recipe if you don’t want to read a wall of text.
Damn sure don’t want story ideas, and people using it to write articles or school papers, is a shame. Because its all stolen information.
Only thing it should be used for is coding and hell it can’t even get that right, so I gave up on it.
I don’t like that part about it either but instead of stopping using it, I simply told it to stop acting that way.
When I use this tool it destroys the planet and gives me bad information but I am going to keep using it.
Umm OK, good luck with that I guess.
It gives me value - unlike the smug, unsolicited moral judgement of a stranger.
Sounds like it doesn’t but ok
There is a reason they chose that as their screen name. I don’t know if they built that account as a troll, or if they got told their opinions are wrong so often in life that having “opinions” became their whole identity. Anytime I see someone with the most “swimming against the current” ideas, I look up, and there is that name again. At this point, I’m very much rooting for troll, as their life would suck even more if it’s all genuine. As much as the life of a troll would suck already.
I’m more than happy to elaborate on any of my unpopular opinions that you view as trolling. I’m very much sharing my honest views here.