I've seen and thought there might be a few programmers maybe with a related (not psychosis) "ai mania" - where one thinks one changing the world and uniquely positioned. It's not that we're not capable in our small ways with network effects, or like a hand touch could begin the wave breaking (hello surfers!) what distinguishes this capacity for small effects having big impacts from the mania version is the mania version bears no subtle understanding of cause and effect. A person who is adept in understanding cause and effect usually there's quite a simple, beautiful and refined rule of thumb the know about it. "Less is more". Mania on the other hand proliferates outward - concept upon concept upon concept - and these concepts are removed from that cause and effect - playful interaction with nature. As a wise old sage hacker once said "Proof of concept, or get the fuck out"
Where mania occurs in contrast to grounded capacity that does change the world is in the aspect of responsibility - being able to respond or be responsive to something. Someone who changes the world with their maths equation will be able to be responsive, responsible and claim, a manic person there's a disconnect. Actually, from certain points of view with certain apps or mediums that have a claim to universality and claiming "how the world is" it looks like there's most definitely already some titans of industry and powerful people inside the feedback loop of mania.
The should just go for a walk. Call a childhood friend. Have a cup of tea. Come to their senses (literally).
it's good to remember we're just querying a datastructure.
So, to me, “to bring someone to their senses” is significantly about reinforcing a shared map through interpersonal connection—not unlike how before online forums it was much harder to maintain particularly unorthodox[0] worldviews: when exposure to a selection of people around you is non-optional, it tempers even the most extreme left-field takes, as humans (sans pathologies) are primed to mirror each other.
I’m not a psychologist, but likening chatbot psychosis to an ungrounded feedback loop rings true, except I would say human connection is the missing ground (although you could say it’s not grounded in senses or experience by proxy, per above). Arguably, one of the significant issues of chatbots is the illusion of human connection where there’s nothing but a data structure query; and I know that some people have no trouble treating the chat as just that, but somehow that doesn’t seem like a consolation: if treating that which quite successfully pretends to be a natural conversation with a human as nothing more than a data structure query comes so naturally to them, what does it say about how they see conversing with us, the actual humans around them?
[0] As in, starkly misaligned with the community—which admittedly could be for better or for worse (isolated cults come to mind).
However, several Neuromorphic computing projects look a lot more viable, and may bring the energy consumption needs down by several orders of magnitude. =3
"Ghost in the Shell" was a far better story.
what if llms are actually equivalent to humans in sentience ? wouldn't that make everyone psychotic except those in "chatbot psychosis" ?
sublinear•1h ago
Take the example of music. Most musicians probably don't want crap like Suno. What they actually want is a fountain of ideas to riff on based on a locally trained AI where they have finer-grained control over the parameters and attention. Instead of "telling" the AI "more this and less that" would it not make more sense to surface facets of the training data in a more transparent and comprehensible way, and provide a slider control or ability to completely eliminate certain influences? I'm aware that's probably a tall order, but it's what's necessary.
Instead of producing delusions left to random chance and uncurated training data, we should be trying to guide AI towards clarity with the user in full control. The local training by the user effectively becomes a mirror of that user's artistic vision. It would be unique and not "owned" by anyone else.