Technology

The issue is that it can encourage people who are having issues to do things and they only need to be in the right sort of energetic craziness once to cause problems.

I think that thinking has the problem of treating AI as this "weird occult book/tool about funny dealings", and not "government, megacorp sanctified close-to-AGI super-intelligence tool for you to use for free because benevolence" as it is institutionally lied to be.

Sanity is culture relative. You're absolutely right, but also, this is a symptom of the culture.

"Sane" people are exceeding minority. Everyone is couple of good conversations away from failing into some sort of rabbithole from which there is no return. Some people have very easily triggerable schizophrenia, which is more obvious, but nobody is OK and nobody is immune.

Think of the dumbest person you know. Not that one. Dumber. Dumber. Yeah, that one. Now realize that ChatGPT has said “you’re absolutely right” to them no less than a half dozen times today alone.

If LLMs weren’t so damn sycophantic, I think we’d have a lot fewer problems with them. If they could be like “this could be the right answer, but I wasn’t able to verify” and “no, I don’t think what you said is right, and here are reasons why”, people would cling to them less.

If you thought people were dumb before LLMs.... just know that now those people have offloaded what little critical thinking they were capable of to these models.

The dumbest people you know are getting their opinions validated by automated sycophants.

Just give it access to the nuclear codes and get it over with.

The AI "pushed [Jonathan Gavalas] to acquire illegal firearms and... marked Google CEO Sundar Pichai as an active target".

Somehow, I bet that if he survived and killed the CEO instead, Google wouldn't be so flippant about the "mistake."

at some point the failure of justice system will lead to vigilantism because people truely lose their faith in it.

In September 2025, told by the AI that they could be together in the real world if the bot were able to inhabit a robot body, Gavalas — at the direction of the chatbot — armed himself with knives and drove to a warehouse near the Miami International Airport on what he seemingly understood to be a mission to violently intercept a truck that Gemini said contained an expensive robot body. Though the warehouse address Gemini provided was real, a truck thankfully never arrived, which the lawsuit argues may well have been the only factor preventing Gavalas from hurting or killing someone that evening.

AI writing itself into an A-Team episode?

Perhaps just a coincidence, but why do all the big cases regarding LLM psychosis seem to revolve around Google? Wasn’t it their own employee who went public last year, claiming it was alive, only to get fired afterward?

I think that LLMs amaze rich investors and boomers with their naturalistic-enough language and responses, and they invest in and prop up the tech because they think, in the nearish future, that it can replace a ton of human jobs, both menial and creative. Eliminating manual labor jobs is great if it's paired with Universal Basic Income.

I think that the fervor around AI is more economic anxiety than anything. If people's income and oppurtunities were mostly equal, no new tech would make people think they're being disenfranchised from society.

Generative AI in its current, public-facing form? Probably not. It's sort of like an invention of the internet situation. It CAN be used to facilitate learning, share information, and improve lives. Will it be used for that? No.

A friend of mine is training local LLMs to work in tandem for early detection of diseases. I saw a pitch recently about using AI to insulate moderators from the bulk of disturbing imagery (a job that essentially requires people to frequently look at death, CSAM, and violence and SIGNIFICANTLY ruins their mental health). There are plenty of GOOD ways to use it, but it's a flawed tech that requires people to responsibly build it and responsibly use it, and it's not being used that way.

Instead it's being scaled up and pushed into every possible application both to justify the expenses and enrich terrible people, because we as a society incentivize that.

Edit: hugely belated, I misspoke here after checking with my friend. He's using local models, but they aren't LLMs. This is why I'm no expert. 😅