RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116219642373307943
I wish I could recommend this piece more, because it makes a bunch of great points, but the "normal technology" case feels misleading to me. It's not _wrong_, exactly, but radium paint was also a "normal technology" according to this rubric, and I still very much don't want to get any on me and especially not in my mouth
@glyph this thread feels important
@glyph Asbestos - to use a comparison he has used himself - was also a 'normal technology'.
But then people came to their senses and decided to rip it out of the walls because of the effects of exposure to it.
See also: Lead paint
The "critic psychosis" thing is tedious and wrong for the same reasons Cory's previous "purity culture" take was tedious and wrong, a transparent and honestly somewhat pathetic attempt at self-justification for his own AI tool use for writing assistance. It pairs very well with this Scientific American article, which points out that pedestrian "writing AI tools" influence their users in subtle but clearly disturbing ways. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-autocomplete-doesnt-just-change-how-you-write-it-changes-how-you-think/
@glyph You're so extremely full of yourself that I didn't even finish reading your comment, and I no longer care about anything you have to say. Go touch grass.
Cory also correctly points out that "AI psychosis" is probably going to be gatekept by medical establishment scicomm types soon because "psychosis" probably isn't the right word and already carries an unwarranted stigma. And indeed, I think the biggest problem with "psychosis" as a metaphor is going to be that the ways in which AI can warp our minds are mostly NOT going to be catastrophic psychosis, and are not going to have great existing analogs in existing medical literature.
@glyph I tend to reserve it for when the person I'm interacting with seems to be having a legitimate psychotic break with reality.
@glyph if this was a tablet/pill taken that promised to help you write better emails, and it accidentally caused psychological disorders, it would be put through vigorous testing before being loaded onto a dishwasher or pushed into every system available. This is the Sacklers of tech, grifting every last cent out of people who are already struggling, promising all the while that it’s non addictive.
@glyph LLMs seem to use many of the same techniques as mentallists, psychics, fortune-tellers and mediums in how they manipulate their victims, like suggestions, cold reading, flattery, confidence and in the victims confirmation bias and suggestibility. People are influenced, by the politeness and the well structured text, into ignoring factual issues, and then by having a conversation they fix the glaring problems themselves, and later attribute it to the model.
@glyph Honestly - speaking as someone with a psychotic disorder, but who is not a medical professional - "AI psychosis" seems pretty appropriate, from the behaviours I've seen it result in? Even in more mild cases of people babbling inane bullshit, but not like, so far off reality that they're at risk of physical harm (to themself or others)
@glyph I'm sure the mechanism - how they got there - has more in common with emotional abuse and brainwashing/indoctrination techniques.
But the end result - that detachment from reality - is kind of the core of the psychosis experience, and trying to find ways to keep tethered and avoid drifting off into wonderland like that is a persistent part of my day-to-day life.
Which is part of *why* I avoid the chatbots like they're carrying the plague.
@miss_rodent to be clear I think that the existing cases that have been described are fairly accurately described as AI psychosis, a bunch of them fall into the clinical definition even. my point is that I think it falls on a continuum and there are a wide variety of less dramatic cognitive distortions which don’t look like psychosis but are caused by AI. case in point, the scientific american article, “having one’s views on an issue gently nudged by an autocomplete suggestion” isn’t “psychosis”
@glyph Similarly, “hallucination” and “delusion” are pre-poisoned for use in this scope
I have on occasion made use of “phantasmagoria” around parts of this dynamic, especially for stuff like the droll “omg the AI is learning to lie to us, we’re cooked!” type bullshit posts, but that’s still not expansive enough to include the various other mental affectations
we need other perorations, and better perseverations alongside
If I could use another inaccurate metaphor, AI psychosis is the "instant decapitation" industrial accident with this new technology. And indeed, most people having industrial accidents are not instantly decapitated. But they might get a scrape, or lose a finger, or an eye. And an infected scrape can still kill you, but it won't look like the decapitation. It looks like you didn't take very good care of yourself. Didn't wash the cut. Didn't notice it fast enough. Skill issue.
@glyph
Here's an industrial accident that's easy to miss:
A hydraulic fluid line bursts while you're working on a machine, injecting toxic and/or hot liquid under your skin at high pressure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_pressure_injection_injury
"Although the initial wound often seems minor, the unseen, internal damage can be severe. With hydraulic fluids, paint, and detergents, these injuries are extremely serious as most hydraulic fluids and organic solvents are highly toxic."
@dec23k okay definitely not clicking on that link, yeesh
@glyph All the possible harm is just mental, and the mental - this seems to be an unspoken tenet held by many - isn't really real. Mental health in general doesn't really seem to be taken that seriously before it manifests physically as chainsaw wielding or some other eccentricity. Nothing to see here, just move on.
@glyph I've been using "AI delusion" for these milder cases. As I understood AI psychosis it pertains only to those cases where people fully lose grasp of reality...
I've seen it used colloquially as "being wrong because of or about AI", but that always hit me like people calling someone "crazy" for doing something odd or impulsive—and that word use isn't really a good look imo.
More to the point though in this metaphor where you're getting a potentially-infected scrape at work, we are living in the pre-germ-theory age of AI. We are aware that it might be dangerous sometimes, but we don't know to whom or why. We are attempting to combat miasma with bloodletting right now, and putting the miasma-generator in every home before we know what it's actually doing.
@glyph potentially an even better metaphor is RSI, though that does lead to the "you're holding it wrong" argument which isn't applicable, but incidental injuries are in the same bucket but it's just less obvious.
For me, this is the body horror money quote from that Scientific American article:
"participants who saw the AI autocomplete prompts reported attitudes that were more in line with the AI’s position—including people who didn’t use the AI’s suggested text at all"
So maybe you can't use it "responsibly", or "safely". You can't even ignore it and choose not to use it once you've seen it.
If you can see it, the basilisk has already won.
@glyph this is why "AI" boosterism or "both sides" debate gets an instant block
my little chunk of reality is free of this slop
@glyph i like to let them sort it out - ask the same question to like 3 models, sort of crude arbitrage
@glyph This basilisk thing (great imagery) is very true in translation. Once you've seen the MT suggestion, with its wonky syntax and not quite right tone, it's very hard to dismiss it. The cognitive load is consequently enormous
@glyph when teams autocorrect rewrites something it decides i misspelled, i am filled with hatred and disgust and usually delete the entire sentence and try again regardless of if it had suggested the word i meant to write. i don't want it anymore
@glyph i can absolutely use it responsibly because i'm not new to NLP, but unfortunately it is liquified shite.
@glyph Glyph's Basilisk > Roko's
@glyph "Interestingly, the people in the study didn’t tend to think the AI autocomplete suggestions were biased or to notice that they had changed their own thinking on an issue in the course of the study. Warning the participants that they might be exposed to misinformation by the AI didn’t temper the persuasive effect either."
Also, being aware that it can fuck with your head does not make you less susceptible to it fucking with your head. So you can't really judge if you could use it safely.
@glyph oh man, that’s dangerously close to giving an abstinence-based push some fuel and whew does my rather hedonistic ass have some thoughts on that
Now, for rhetorical effect, I'm obviously putting this fairly dramatically. Cory points out that people have been doing this *to each other* mediated by technology, in emergent and scary ways, with no need for AI. He shows that people prone to specific types of delusions (Morgellons, Gang Stalking Disorder) have found each other via the Internet and the simple availability of global distributed communication has harmed them. But obviously that has benefits, too.
I'm open to a future where we do some research and figure out the limits of how AI influence works, and where the safety valves are, and also the extent to which it's *fine* that AI can influence our views because honestly many different kinds of stimuli can influence our views, not least of which is each other. But it sure looks right now like it has a bunch of very dangerous feedback loops built-in, and it's not clear how to know if you're touching one.
But, as Cory puts it:
"""
It is nuts to deny the experiences these people are having. They're not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They're not generating tech debt at scale.
"""
I had a very visceral emotional reaction to this particular paragraph, and I find it very important to refute. Here are two points to consider:
1. YES THEY ARE.
They are vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They are generating tech debt at scale. They don't THINK that that's what they're doing. Do you think most programmers conceive of their daily (non-LLM) activities as "putting in lots of bugs"? No, that is never what we say we're doing. Yet, we turn around, and there all the bugs are.
With LLMs, we can look at the mission-critical AWS modules and ask after the fact, were they vibe-coded? AWS says yes https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/after-outages-amazon-to-make-senior-engineers-sign-off-on-ai-assisted-changes.1511983/
2. If it is "nuts" to dismiss this experience, then it would be "nuts" to dismiss mine: I have seen many, many high profile people in tech, who I have respect for, take *absolutely unhinged* risks with LLM technology that they have never, in decades-long careers, taken with any other tool or technology. It reads like a kind of cognitive decline. It's scary. And many of these people are *leaders* who use their influence to steamroll objections to these tools because they're "obviously" so good
The very fact that things like OpenClaw and Moltbook even *exist* is an indication, to me, that people are *not* making sober, considered judgements about how and where to use LLMs. The fact that they are popular at *all*, let alone popular enough to be featured in mainstream media shows that whatever this cognitive distortion is, it's widespread.
Furthermore, it is not "nuts" to dismiss LLM user experiences. In fact, you must dismiss all subjective experience of LLM use as evidence of objective phenomena, even if the LLM user is yourself. Fly by instruments because the cognitive fog is too thick for your eyes to see.
Because the novel thing about LLMs, the thing that makes them dangerous, is that they are—by design—epistemic disruptors.
They can produce symboloids more rapidly than a thinking mind. Repetition influences cognition.
@glyph “You must dismiss all experiences of LLM users”
This is where you lose me. There’s no universe in which I’m comfortable dismissing the lived experiences of people that categorically. The most important lesson I’ve learned from decades of activism is “believe people when they tell you about their experiences” — and I see no reason to change now. I’m not willing to give up my curiosity and empathy and I hope you aren’t either.
@[email protected] @[email protected] I think I'm currently at a point in my journey where I try very hard to believe people when they talk about what they have experienced internally, and have become increasingly sceptical of people's ability to judge accurately what actually happened and the results (in both cases for pretty much the same reasons as Glyph as I've noticed the difference between my #adhd internal experience and real world what actually happened).
So "using an LLM made me feel a god-like developer!" I'll completely take as your experience. "My productivity went up by 15 times after I started using agents" (actual claim I have seen) will leave me asking for hard evidence and possibly a scientific study.
It's awkward that we use 'experience' to cover both, and I had the same reaction you're expressing when I read that section but assuming (from the context) that Glyph means the second type of experience I think he has a strong argument, if not the clearest wording.
@[email protected] @[email protected] It certainly reads more clearly to me now.
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