Patient privacy is a nightmare for everyone to navigate and the Clinton administration isn't hated enough for introducing it. I can understand if people want their HIV diagnoses private but there's surely a line to be drawn, perhaps south of HIV, but well north of "I caught the flu".
This is a solved problem. Where I live, my journal is kept in an online computer system accessible to all, but my journal itself can only be read and written to by those medical practitioners that I explicitly give consent to. There are exceptions for emergencies and it can be overridden by the authorities. That's it. Problem solved.
I meant more from a public health perspective, like how CDCs and other agencies are able to collect enough population-level data to work on regional/national health issues (COVID or otherwise) when there are privacy concerns.
Do they have to do anonymization and aggregation the way we do for web analytics?
ok, these sorts of claims were around before ChatGPT, and they're quite often drug induced psychosis.
My Cousin was into the party drug scene and O.D. into a coma once... forever after he's been not quite right. he turned up on my door step one day telling me about how the FBI was sending him signals in the flashing of traffic lights and how a saudi prince was after him for the money that bill gates owed him for a CPU chip design.
reality and these people rarely exist in the same place.
I mean, this stuff is pretty basic when it comes to delusions. Seems more likely that their inherent psychosis latched onto AI instead of being caused by it. These people would probably also deteriorate if they simply stumbled into any questionable part of the internet that reinforces their beliefs.
Totally, I think it's different to some degree in terms of the velocity.
In a traditional forum they may have to wait for others to engage, and that's not even guaranteed. Whereas with an llm you can just go back and forth continually, with something that never gets tired and is excited to communicate with you, reinforcing your beliefs.
I think the key difference here is that ChatGPT and its ilk give an unlimited stream of yes-you-are-the-always-correct-genius sycophancy literally designed for engagement. The kind of niche rabbitholes existing from before LLMs are generally either rate-limited by being a limited number of actual people with strongly similar views (doomsday preppers, niche cults, etc), or so huge and chaotic that pure-strain sycophancy won't happen (reddit, 4chan).
There's nothing crazy with suspecting that causality has not been established. If we're not psychologists or psychiatrists, then we have even more cause to wait for clinical studies. If you are a psychologist or psychiatrist, you still might not be remotely equipped to run clinical studies.
If you don't want to be "crazy" then you need a higher threshold for accepting these anecdotes as generalizable causal theory, because otherwise you'd be incoherently jerked left and right all the time.
He does make that point further down. He also makes the point that in the past there was a similar syndrome around TV and radio, where schizophrenics would say the CIA (it was usually the CIA) was beaming thoughts into their brains.
Interestingly, no one is accusing ChatGPT of working for the CIA.
(Of course I have no idea if that's rational or delusional.)
Anyway - this really needs some hard data with a control group to see if more people are becoming psychotic, or whether it's the same number of psychotics using different tools/means.
The difference being that the moneyed interests behind these things over promise their abilities, misrepresent their limitations, and refuse to monitor usage in anyway that would reduce engagement.
Combine that with people who are largely tech illiterate and you will hear “if ai says it it must be true”, or “ai knows more than you so it must be correct”.
Then when that same magic technology starts telling you you are special, you believe it because the machine is always right.
I grew up in a medical houshold, and there is a specific speach mode that doctors use when discussing patients(cases), that anonimises the idividual.......as it is part of practicing medicine , conveying information to other patients, and there own study and learning it is quite common.