Comment by Leave_OAI_Alone
8 days ago
Invoking post hoc ergo propter hoc is a textbook way to dismiss an inconvenience to the LLM industrial complex.
LLMs will tell users, "good, you're seeing the cracks", "you're right", the "fact you are calling it out means you are operating at a higher level of self awareness than most" (https://x.com/nearcyan/status/1916603586802597918).
Enabling the user in this way is not a passive variable. It is an active agent that validated paranoid ideation, reframed a break from reality as a virtue, and provided authoritative confirmation using all prior context about the user. LLMs are a bespoke engine for amplifying cognitive distortion, and to suggest their role is coincidental is to ignore the mechanism of action right in front of you.
Maybe.
Or maybe it is just the current moral panic.
Remember when "killer games" were sure to urn a whole generation of young men into mindless cop- and women-murderers a la GTA? People were absolutely convinced there was a clear connection between the two - after all, a computer telling you to kill a human-adjacent figurine in a game was basically a murder simulator in the same sense a flight simulator was for flying - it would invariably desensitivize the youth. Of course they were the same people who were against gaming to begin with.
Can a person with a tendency to psychosis be influenced by an LLM? Sure. But they also can be influenced to do pretty outrageous things by religion, 'spiritual healers', substances, or bad therapists. Throwing out the LLM with the bathwater is a bit premature. Maybe we need warning stickers ("Do not listen to the machine if you have a history of delusions and/or psychotic episodes.")