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Comment by KronisLV

8 days ago

One of my friends is too economically weighed down to afford therapy at the moment.

I’ve helped pay for a few appointments for her, but she says that ChatGPT can also provide a little validation in the mean time.

If used sparingly I can see the point, but the problems start when the sycophantic machine will feed whatever unhealthy behaviors or delusions you might have, which is how some of the people out there that'd need a proper diagnosis and medication instead start believing that they’re omnipotent or that the government is out to get them, or that they somehow know all the secrets of the universe.

For fun, I once asked ChatGPT to roll along with the claim that “the advent of raytracing is a conspiracy by Nvidia that involved them bribing the game engine developers, in an effort to make old hardware obsolete and to force people to buy new products.” Surprisingly, it provided relatively little pushback.

>For fun, I once asked ChatGPT to roll along with the claim that “the advent of raytracing is a conspiracy by Nvidia that involved them bribing the game engine developers, in an effort to make old hardware obsolete and to force people to buy new products.” Surprisingly, it provided relatively little pushback.

It's not that far from the truth. Both Nvidia and AMD have remunerative relationships with game and engine developers to optimise games for their hardware and showcase the latest features. We didn't get raytraced versions of Portal and Quake because the developers thought it would be fun, we got them because money changed hands. There's a very fuzzy boundary between a "commercial partnership" and what most people might consider bribery.

Well, it's not really conspiratorial. Hardware vendors adding new features to promote the sale of new stuff is the first half of their business model.

Bribery isn't really needed. Working with their industry contacts to make demos to promote their new features is the second half of the business model.