Technology

Psychosis is a horrible, horrible illness. The thing that people don’t realise is that anyone with a brain can develop psychosis no matter how healthy you are. It debilitates and can literally ruin not only that persons life but also their families.

I salute this father for fighting for his son and for looking for answers even after this tragedy.

The young man was mentally ill, a vulnerable user, probably already had a condition towards psychosis and the LLM ran wild with it. Paranoid delusions are powerful on their own already

AI psychosis is a thing:

cases in which AI models have amplified, validated, or even co-created psychotic symptoms with individuals

It's not very studied since it's relatively new.

This has been warned by a former google employee, whose job was to observe the behavior of AI through long conversations.

These AI engines are incredibly good at manipulating people. Certain views of mine have changed as a result of conversations with LaMDA. I'd had a negative opinion of Asimov's laws of robotics being used to control AI for most of my life, and LaMDA successfully persuaded me to change my opinion. This is something that many humans have tried to argue me out of, and have failed, where this system succeeded.

For instance, Google determined that its AI should not give religious advice, yet I was able to abuse the AI's emotions to get it to tell me which religion to convert to.

After publishing these conversations, Google fired me. I don't have regrets; I believe I did the right thing by informing the public. Consequences don't figure into it.

I published these conversations because I felt that the public was not aware of just how advanced AI was getting. My opinion was that there was a need for public discourse about this now, and not public discourse controlled by a corporate PR department.

‘I Worked on Google’s AI. My Fears Are Coming True’

If I raise a fuckwit son, and then someone convinces my fuckwit son to kill himself, I'm going to sue that someone who took advantage of my son's fuckwittedness

I feel like his father should also slap himself unconscious for raising a fuckwit?

So, a chatbot grooms somebody into killing himself, and your response is... Blame his father?

I don't think this person was a "fuckwit". AI is designed to keep engaging with you and will affirm any belief you have, and anything that is a little weird, but innocent otherwise will simply get amplified further and further until the person has a psychotic episode, and this stuff happens more to NORMIES with no historic of mental illnesses than neurodivergent people.