Technology

What I read in the first lines of the article is: "they go down the rabbit hole, just like social media echo chambers..." which are filled with bots and trolls, and have been for years - and that's the dataset that a lot of chatbots are trained on.

lactose intolerance. Most people can handle it just fine but some people simply can’t digest it and get sick. The problem is there’s no way to determine who can handle AI and who can’t.

Interesting analogy because: if you consume no lactose, your internal biome loses the ability to metabolize it and therefore you become "lactose intolerant." If you do start consuming lactose again, sooner or later you should also regain the ability to metabolize it (this isn't something that's encoded in your genome, it's encoded in the genome of all the things that live in your gut - a colony with more cells (albeit smaller cells) than your own body.)

I never thought “wow, this thing feels so real”.

Define "real." I have frequently thought "holy shit! This thing has produced a result that would have taken me hours, and it appears to be correct, and like an "NP hard" problem now that I have the proposed solution it's relatively trivial to verify if it is correct or not (and it tends to be correct more than 80% of the time lately.)

“it’s a conscious thing I can connect with”

Some people get that way about Magic 8 Balls and Ouija boards.

I suspect that the difference is to no small degree correlated with a person's isolation/social-integration.

People who aren't socially integrated have always been more vulnerable to predatory cults and scams. It's because human interactions is a psychological need that's been hardcoded into us by evolution.

Some people say "I don't need human interaction, I enjoy my time alone!" But that's because they have the privilege of enough social acceptance and integration that they get to enjoy their time alone. It's well-established within the field of psychology that true isolation can have a range of deep and far-reaching impacts on a person's well-being.

When people are developing, they need to socialize with their peers; and being unable to do so leads to maladaptive behavior patterns. Even as adults, people need regular social contact or their psychological state can quickly deteriorate. That's why solitary confinement is considered a method of torture in some circumstances, when it's used to depersonalize and destroy a person's sense of self-identity.

So that's why I suspect that people who are well-integrated with friends, family, acquaintances, and coworkers are probably less vulnerable to these sorts of delusions and can treat AI as "just a tool."

But for someone who hardly has any social interaction in a day, has no friends or family to talk to, and maybe their warmest interaction all week was with the clerk at the grocery store, then yeah I'd say it's predictable that they would be vulnerable to getting sucked into this trap of relying on an LLM for their social interaction.

It might be superficial, but it's a way of patching a hole. It's an expedient means to fulfill a need that they're not getting from anywhere else.

If we don't want this sort of stuff happening to people, then maybe we shouldn't ostracize them for being "weird" in the first place. Because nobody learns how to be "normal" by being alone all the time.

Surprisingly, the people who have that issues with it aren't the ones who contact to it emotionally, it's the people who offload their decision making to AI 

It's more like a codependence spiral than anything else

I think next step should be developing a test that can predict how someone will react to it.

Unnecessary: foolish people always gonna fool. Anyone that far gone in the lacking judgement department demands far more help than anyone can reasonably be expected to provide, and attempting to "foolproof" for them will only drag everyone else down while doing nothing for them. Likewise, just because some people overeat junk food doesn't mean we need to devise some test to decide who can safely get junk food: it's a personal choice, the risks of bad judgement are reasonably understood, & that bullshit's beyond paternalistic.

I bet it's probably correlated with low education as most things

Cults and toxic self-help literature have existed before LLMs copied them. I don't know if LLMs are getting people who couldn't have been gotten by human scammers.

Scams have many different vectors and people can be vulnerable to them depending on their mood or position in life. Testing people on LLM intolerance would be more like testing them on their susceptibility to viruses.

People can be immunocompromised for various reasons, temporarily or permanently, so as a society public hygiene standards (and the material conditions to produce them) are a lot more valuable. Wash your hands after interacting, keep public spaces clean, that sort of stuff.