Comment by ArcHound

You can make an LLM play pretend at being opinionated and challenging. But it's still an LLM. It's still being sycophantic: it's only "challenging" because that's what you want.

And the prompt / context is going to leak into its output and affect what it says, whether you want it to or not, because that's just how LLMs work, so it never really has its own opinions about anything at all.

> and it's not too difficult to make an opinionated and challenging chatbot

Funnily enough, I've saved instructions for ChatGPT to always challenge my opinions with at least 2 opposing views; and never to agree with me if it seems that I'm wrong. I've also saved instructions for it to cut down on pleasantries and compliments.

Works quite well. I still have to slap it around for being too supportive / agreeing from time to time - but in general it's good at digging up opposing views and telling me when I'm wrong.

>People opting for unchallenging pseudo-relationships over messy human interaction is part of a larger trend, though.

I don't disagree that some people take AI way too far, but overall, I don't see this as a significant issue. Why must relationships and human interaction be shoved down everyone's throats? People tend to impose their views on what is "right" onto others, whether it concerns religion, politics, appearance, opinions, having children, etc. In the end, it just doesn't matter - choose AI, cats, dogs, family, solitude, life, death, fit in, isolate - it's just a temporary experience. Ultimately, you will die and turn to dust like around 100 billion nameless others.

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> even a real human can repeat ideas back at you in a conversation, but there's still some minimal level of vetting or filtering or rephrasing by another human mind.

The mental corruption due to surrounding oneself with sycophantic yes men is historically well documented.

are you sure they are internal? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45957619

> To be honest, the alternative for a good chunk of these users is no interaction at all, and that sort of isolation doesn't prepare you for human interaction either.

This sounds like an argument in favor of safe injection sites for heroin users.

Wouldn't they be seeking a romantic relationship otherwise?

Using AI to fulfill a need implies a need which usually results in action towards that need. Even "the dating scene is terrible" is human interaction.

Why would that be the alternative?

Human relationships are part of most families, most work, etc. Could get tedious constantly dealing with people who lack any resilience or understanding of other perspectives.

Someone has to make the babies!

ugh. speak of the devil and he shall appear.

Unless someone is harming themselves or others, who are we to judge?

We don't know that this is harmful. Those participating in it seem happier.

If we learn in the course of time (a decade?) that this degrades lives with some probability, we can begin to caution or intervene. But how in God's name would we even know that now?

I would posit this likey has measurable good outcomes right now. These people self-report as happier. Why don't we trust them? What signs are they showing otherwise?

People were crying about dialup internet being bad for kids when it provided a social and intellectual outlet for me. It seems to be a pattern as old as time for people to be skeptical about new ways for people to spend their time. Especially if it is deemed "antisocial" or against "norms".

There is obviously a big negative externality with things like social media or certain forms of pay-to-play gaming, where there are strong financial interests to create habits and get people angry or willing to open their wallets. But I don't see that here, at least not yet. If the companies start saying, "subscribe or your boyfriend dies", then we have cause for alarm. A lot of these bots seem to be open source, which is actually pretty intriguing.

Words are simula. They're models, not games, we do not use them as games in conversation.

AI friends need a "Disasters" menu like SimCity.

One of the first thing many Sims players do is to make a virtual version of their real boyfriend/girlfriend to torture and perform experiments on.

Ah, 'suffering builds character'. I haven't had that one in a while.

Maybe we should not want to get prepared for RealPeople™ if all they can do is break us and disappoint us.

"But RealPeople™ can also elevate, surprise, and enchant you!" you may intervene. They sure than. An still, some may decide no longer to go for new rounds of Russian roulette. Someone like that is not a lesser person, they still have real™ enjoyment in a hundred other aspects in their life from music to being a food nerd. they just don't make their happiness dependant on volatile actors.

AI chatbots as relationship replacements are, in many ways, flight simulators:

Are they 'the real thing'? Nah, sitting in a real Cessna almost always beats a computer screen and a keyboard.

Are they always a worse situation than 'the real thing'? Simulators sure beat reality when reality is 'dual engine flameout halfway over the North Pacific'

Are they cheaper? YES, significantly!

Are they 'good enough'? For many, they are.

Are they 'syncophantic'? Yes, insofar as that circumstances are decided beforehand. A 'real' pilot doesn't get to choose 'blue skies, little sheep clouds in the sky', they only get to chosen not to fly that day. And the standard weather settings? Not exactly 'hurricane, category 5'.

Are they available, while real flight is not, to some or all members of the public? Generally yes. The simulator doesn't make you have a current medical.

Are they removing pilots/humans from 'the scene'? No, not really. In fact, many pilots fly simulators for risk-free training of extreme situations.

Your argument is basically 'A flight simulator won’t teach you what it feels like when the engine coughs for real at 1000 ft above ground and your hands shake on the yoke.'. No, it doesn't. An frankly, there are experiences you can live without - especially those you may not survive (emotionally).

Society has always had the tendency to pathologize those who do not pursue a sexual relationship as lesser humans. (Especially) single women that were too happy in the medevieal age? Witches that needed burning. Guy who preferred reading to dancing? A 'weirdo and a creep'. English knows 'master' for the unmarried, 'incomplete' man, an 'mister' for the one who got married. And today? those who are incapable or unwilling to participate in the dating scene are branded 'girlfailure' or 'incel' - with the latter group considered a walking security risk. Let's not add to the stigma by playing another tune for the 'oh, everyone must get out there' scene.

> In Autistic / ADHD circles

i.e. HN comments

Is this clearly AI-generated comment part of the joke?

Wow, are we already in a world where we can say "Most people who develop AI psychosis..." because there are now enough of them to draw meaningful conclusions from?

I'm not criticising your comment by the way, that just feels a bit mindblowing, the world is moving very fast at the moment.

Right, next time you have a headache don't let yourself be enabled by aspirin.

> To support someone with PTSD you help them gradually untangle the strong feelings around a stimulus and develop a less strong response.

It's about replaying frightening thoughts and activities in safe environment. When the brain notices they don't trigger suffering it fears them less in the future. Chatbot can provide such safe environment.

>instead of real treatment

As yes, because America is well known for actually providing that at a reasonable price and availability...

I don't disagree that AI psychosis is real, I've met people who believed that they were going to publish at Neurips due to the nonsense ChatGPT told them, that believed that the UI mockup that claude gave then were actually producing insights into it's inner workings instead of just being blinking SVGs, and I even encountered someone participating at a startup event with an Idea that I'm 100% is AI slop.

My point was just that the interaction I had from r/myboyfriendisai wans't one of those delusional ones. For that I would take r/artificialsentience as a much better example. That place is absolutely nuts.

Wouldn't there necessarily be correlative effects in professional settings a la programming?

"PTSD" is going through the same semantic inflation as the word "trauma". Or perhaps you could say the common meaning is an increasingly more inflated version of the professional meaning. Not surprising since these two are sort of the same thing.

BTW, a more relevant word here is schizoid / schizoidism, not to be confused with schizophrenia. Or at least very strongly avoidant attachment style.

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Probably all the choking.

You're being weird and racist, please stop.

A friend broke up with her partner. She said she was using ChatGPT as a therapist. She showed me a screenshot, ChatGPT wrote "Oh [name], I can feel how raw the pain is!".

WTF, no you don't bot, you're a hunk of metal!

I completely agree that it is certainly something to be mindful of. It's just that found the people from there were a lot less delusional than the people from e.g. r/artificialsentience, which always believed that AI Moses was giving them some kind of tech revelation though magical alchemical AI symbols.

There's a large swath of people who try desperately to get the practice you speak of and end up with none or worse. We're biological beings we all try pretty hard to connect. Many just get broken down to the point where trying to connect is more painful than avoiding it.

I personally don't ever see a chatbot ever being a substitute for myself but can certainly empathize with those who do.

> You aren't going to build the skills necessary to have good relationships with others - not even romantic ones, ANY ones - without a lot of practice.

Other people don't owe you being your training dummy. I'd prefer you sort that out with a chatbot.

"It takes a village" is as true for thinking patterns as it is for working romantic relationships.

> That's exactly it. Romantic relationships aren't what they used to be. Men like the new normal, women may try to but they cannot for a variety of unchangeable reasons.

Men like the new normal? Hah, it seems like there's an article posted here weekly about how bad modern dating and relationships are for me and how much huge groups of men hate it. For reasons ranging from claims that women "have too many options" and are only interested in dating or hooking up with the hottest 5% (or whatever number), all the way to your classic bring-back-traditional-gender-roles "my marriage sucks because I'm expected to help out with the chores."

The problem is devices, especially mobile ones, and the easy-hit of not-the-same-thing online interaction and feedback loops. Why talk to your neighbor or co-worker and risk having your new sociological theory disputed, or your AI boyfriend judged, when you instead surround yourself in an online echo chamber?

There were always some of us who never developed social skills because our noses were buried in books while everyone else was practicing socialization. It takes a LOT of work to build those skills later in life if you miss out on the thousands of hours of unstructured socialization that you can get in childhood if you aren't buried in your own world.

It's not limited to men. Women are also finding that conversations with a human man doesn't stack up to an LLM's artificial qualities. /r/MyboyfriendIsAI for more.

Funny. Artificial Boyfriends were a software problem, while Artificial Girlfriends are more of a hardware issue.

A slight non-sequitur, but I always hate when people talk about the increase in a "chance". It's extremely not useful contextually. A "4x more likely statement" can mean it changes something from a 1/1000 chance to a 4/1000 chance, or it can mean it's now a certainty if the beginning rate was a 1/4 chance. The absolute measures need to be included if you're going to use relative measures.

Sorry for not answering the question, I find it hard because there are so many differences it's hard to choose where to start and how to put it into words. To begin with one is the actions of someone in the relationship, the other is the actions of a corporation that owns one half of the relationship. There's differing expectations of behavior and power and etc.

If there's a widespread and growing heroin epidemic that's already left 1/3 of society addicted, and a small group of people are able to get off of it by switching to cigarettes, I'm not going to start lecturing them about how it's a terrible idea because cigarettes are unhealthy.

Is it ideal? Not at all. But it's certainly a lesser poison.

Would it be better if someone were to gamify the needs like video game romance? Seems easy enough to do.

Curious does the ultra popular romance book genre many women use to feel things they aren't getting from men around them bother you?

TIL Soulbonding is not a CWCism.

> Even the temporarily embarrassed founders that populate this message board do it openly.

Not a wannabe founder, I don't even use LLMs aside from Cursor. It's a bit disheartening that instead of trying to engage at all with a thought provoking idea you went straight for the ad hominem.

There is plenty to disagree with, plenty of counter-arguments to what I wrote. You could have argued that human connection is special or exceptional even, anything really. Instead I get "temporarily embarrassed founders".

Whether you accept it or not, the phenomenon of using LLMs as a friend is getting common because they are good enough for human to get attached to. Dismissing it as psychosis is reductive.

We need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for all of this someday, and a lot of people will need to be behind bars, if there be any healing to be done.

Social media aka digital smoking. Facebook lying about measurable effects. No gen divide same game different flavor. Greed is good as they say. /s

Fyi, the `si` query parameter is used by Google for tracking purposes and can be removed.

> social connections will form whether you want them to or not

Not true for all people or all circumstances. People are happy to leave you in the corner while they talk amongst themselves.

> it'll seem like the only answer is more numbing

For many people, the only answer is more numbing.

Gen Alpha is people born roughly 2010-2020, younger than gen Z, raised on social media and smartphones. Gen Beta is proposed for people being born now.

Radicalising forums are already filled with bots, but there's no need to finely tune them to each participant because group behaviours are already well understood and easily manipulated.