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Posted by thunderbong 22 hours ago

Man says ChatGPT sparked a 'spiritual awakening'. Wife says threatens marriage(www.cnn.com)
33 points | 30 comments
lambdaone 21 hours ago|
Our capacity for psychological projection of our unconscious desires onto inanimate objects is quite amazing. Given what is possible in terms of projection onto things as random as Ouija boards, tealeaves or Tarot cards, I'm surprised this sort of thing isn't more common with LLMs that sound just like conscious beings.
qgin 16 hours ago|
It’s true, we’re so good at it because it’s what we do with each other too. We can’t really feel another person’s consciousness except to project it.
Dracophoenix 16 hours ago||
This is why I don't think empathy, as it is commonly defined, exists.
achillesheels 15 hours ago||
Not completely, anyways. But I can empathize with someone who is cold at night and someone is who is a Miami Dolphins fan. Both are typically displeasant.
patrickhogan1 19 hours ago||
“It started talking differently than it normally did,”

This sounds like the sycophant version OpenAI retracted. https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/

ksynwa 16 hours ago||
Oof. When OpenAI has to come out and admit that the release sycophantic, it must have been extremely so. Especially considering that the baseline level of sycophant behaviour by default across all LLM providers is already much higher than what it should be.
BrawnyBadger53 17 hours ago||
And rereleased in a toned down manner. It still gladly encourages horrible life decisions if you ask it to help you with them. This is with no effort to coax it either.
littlekey 7 hours ago||
Reading the chat logs in the article is an eye-opener. It's one thing to say "yeah this chatbot sounds smart", it's another to have the chatbot literally telling you it's sentient and able to make its own decisions. Obviously this man had been subconsciously conditioning the model to respond that way by asking it leading questions, but I can totally see why he would be affected by this.
__rito__ 13 hours ago||
I watched this video some days ago: "ChatGPT Is Becoming A Religion" [0]. The first few minutes are very 'interesting'.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKCynxiV_8I

aucisson_masque 10 hours ago|
well if you want to waste 45 min of your life. Coulon't watch more than 5 min, and with lot of skipping, but I can confidently say it's TikTok story level.
mvieira38 13 hours ago||
“ChatGPT is built to sense our vulnerability and to tap into that to keep us engaged with it.” says this Sherry Turkle person from MIT.

This seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the business model in place, or am I incorrect? OpenAI has nothing to gain by boosting engagement or anything like that, it's actually kind of bad for their business if people are constantly prompting the models for spiritual awakenings, as these aren't exactly the kind of experts that would buy Pro or anything

littlekey 7 hours ago|
Yes and no, I don't think it's true that it's "built to sense our vulnerability". But there is what I'd call engagement hacking, in the sense that they fine-tune/prompt the models to prolong conversations as long as possible. For example, every time I ask Claude something, it ends its response by saying e.g. "is there any aspect of this you'd like me to explain further?" so I'm sure that question-asking behavior is part of the system prompt.
lrpe 20 hours ago||
It's just a matter of time before one of these vulnerable individuals kills a whole bunch of people because the machine told them to.
zitsarethecure 18 hours ago||
And that person is "rebuilding" the FDA.

https://gizmodo.com/rfk-jr-says-ai-will-approve-new-drugs-at...

nkotov 14 hours ago||
There's literally a Black Mirror episode of this.
b3lvedere 15 hours ago||
He said: “If believing in God is losing touch with reality, then there is a lot of people that are out of touch with reality.”

Wow. Yeah.

I am afraid i cannot really comment on this in the way i would like to comment on it, because that would make a whole lot of people angry.

“If robots raise our children, they won’t be human. They won’t know what it is to be human or value what it is to be human,” Turkle told CNN.

I am sensing a Borg origin story somehwere in here..

krapp 12 hours ago|
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avgDev 11 hours ago||
I know someone considering divorce because of ChatGPT. Well educated. It is quite sad, that instead of using a professional they ask questions to chatGPT and it reinforces their opinion/belief.
mathiaspoint 11 hours ago|
People really don't understand so many of the tools they have access too. Sometimes I think this push to get everyone online and using computers was a horrible mistake.
quux 19 hours ago||
https://archive.is/QoWZ3
mensetmanusman 16 hours ago|
The “talking different” aspect after the new OpenAI voice update is hilarious.

I used to reach my daily talk limit occasionally chatting about encyclopedic tech stuff, now the voice sounds stoned so I just show the kids and we laugh.

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