Comment by bee_rider
13 days ago
Well. Huh. Without regard to whether or not it was basically healthy to get that emotionally dependent on the bot… you’d think that if they could manipulate people into being so attached to the things, they’d also be able to manipulate people into accepting the end of the situation.
Go look at any tweet by sama, or twitter generally, it's full of pretty angry people who feel like something tangible in their life has been ripped away - I read someone posting about how they got an email from OAI saying they'd been concerned about the users usage of the service so they'd "upgraded them" to the "newest model". This whole situation has been really distressing for me and I'm not even involved in it, so SO glad they're getting rid of 4o, that thing is genuinely a scourge on our societies.
They didn't intentionally manipulate the people though, or lets say they didn't intend for it to go as far as some of the more /intense/ users took it. It was just a byproduct of making the bot way too agreeable and follow-y. That doesn't mean they can manipulate these people into anything OpenAI wants to undo the issue, 4o wasn't persuading these people to believe it was going along with something they desperately wanted to believe.
> you’d think that if they could manipulate people into being so attached to the things, they’d also be able to manipulate people into accepting the end of the situation.
That seems like a very unlikely conclusion to me. Why is it your prior?