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by glenstein 4 days ago
>Seems like you think AI psychosis has taken over Substack?

I wasn't touching the question of psychosis one way or the other, though it's an interesting question in its own right. (I have seen one account dedicated to defending a personal deep friendship with Claude and a few others analogizing our ignorance of LLM welfare to historical disregard for African Americans, which I think is a bit much. Most cases I think are just wrong but short of full on psychosis. I think there are likely psychosis cases out there but probably one-offs).

And I know Substack covers a lot of stuff so even just AI talk is a slice of everything, and whatever psychosis on that subject a smaller slice of that slice. But using LLMs to make overextended arguments about LLMs being conscious is popular right now, more popular than it is well substantiated I think.

I agree you raised a big question, but I think yours is one of many big questions: whether some future version of LLMs might literally be conscious is also a big question and not a moot one in the way you seem to be suggesting. I think that what you're right about is that replaceability renders moot any question of whether it's ability comes from being "actually" intelligent.

1 comments

While "psychosis" is kind of an overextension, I think there's a more general problem of peole falling victim to AI syncopancy, leading to them creating their own bubble chamber for their worst (and often most self destructive) ideas.

I feel like I got my fingers burnt last year trying to solve a technical problem, and the AI was just good enough to seem convincing, but not good enough to fool me when I stopped to think. These days, I expect the AI ability to defend my bad ideas will be beyond my ability to refute.