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Been thinking about LLM stuff and why (as far as I'm aware) nobody got AI psychosis from AI Dungeon (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by BeanisBrain@hexbear.net to c/chat@hexbear.net
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You could argue it was the low quality of the LLM, but I've seen the stuff platforms like Character.ai and Replika put out, and it isn't much better. You could argue it was the smaller userbase, and that could definitely be part of it, but I think there's a crucial factor at play here:

Everything about how AI Dungeon was promoted and presented.

AI Dungeon's original creator never anthropomorphized it, never pitched it as a companion, never talked about creating AGI, never invited debates about its sentience. He described it as exactly what it was: a procedural generation algorithm used to facilitate a freeform roleplaying game. The very first thing the interface did was prompt you for a genre and a character archetype. It created a character, gave that character a name, and from that point on, every time it addressed the player in second person, it was in such a way that anyone would read it as referring to the fictional character within the game's world. Its appearance matched its function: it was a Roguelike that procedurally generated text instead of level layouts.

As the community and platform developed (before OpenAI inevitably enshittified it), it also did so in a way that reinforced to those involved that the AI was a tool. People shared custom scenarios, scripts, advice on how to steer it toward session-appropriate outputs. It was talked about as a tool and treated as a tool, and the way the platform incorporated interfaces for things like generating and sharing scenarios.

I'm not going to go so far as to say that the only possible problem with LLMs is how they're marketed and pushed into everything, but I do think this is a striking example of how capitalism expresses every new technology in its most harmful and malignant form.

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[–] EnsignRedshirt@hexbear.net 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm not going to go so far as to say that the only possible problem with LLMs is how they're marketed and pushed into everything, but I do think this is a striking example of how capitalism expresses every new technology in its most harmful and malignant form.

The way that the tech industry has manifested this technology is the vast majority of the problem. Any new technology is going to create some issues, but none of this was inevitable. The push to make LLMs the next big growth play was a deliberate decision. Under different circumstances, LLMs would just be yet another computer science advancement, but because the tech industry needed to manufacture the next hypergrowth market, a bunch of grifters convinced everyone that they needed to invest all of the money in the world into making it a reality.

The rise of cryptocurrency is another example of the same phenomenon. Blockchain technology isn’t magic, but it is something, and at a moment when the tech industry was out of ideas and needed another avenue for growth, it was shoved down everyone’s throat until it turned into a going concern (although may be reaching its endpoint now).

The tragedy of LLMs in retrospect is going to be that we had a totally viable and modestly valuable technology that would have incrementally improved a bunch of things over time, and the powers that be decided to go all-in on it to a degree that is, without hyperbole, unprecedented in human history. It will likely end up settling into the niche it was always meant to occupy, but not before it uses up an ungodly amount of resources to build crumbling infrastructure for a market that doesn’t exist.

Something like AI dungeon is a perfectly good use case for this technology, and if the industry could have just been slightly normal about it, we’d all be able to actually benefit from it instead of having it turn into a combination of gigantic surveillance network and brain-melting psychosis machine.

[–] BeanisBrain@hexbear.net 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It will likely end up settling into the niche it was always meant to occupy, but not before it uses up an ungodly amount of resources to build crumbling infrastructure for a market that doesn’t exist.

Yeah, I'd liken the LLM industry in its current state to a red giant: massive and impressive-looking, but unsustainable, and it's only gonna be around for a cosmological blink before it collapses into a neutron star (which in this analogy is what I anticipate will be a much smaller LLM ecosystem driven primarily by hobbyists and conscious, deliberate adopters),

[–] EnsignRedshirt@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago

I don’t think it’ll be an obscure technology, but it’ll be just another kind of software that is mostly run locally to do a variety of modest tasks. The idea of creating massive, centralized data centers to deliver bleeding edge LLMs at premium prices is nonviable. The technology is still useful, but the market is probably two orders of magnitude smaller than current investments would imply. That still makes it a multibillion dollar technology, but it’s not a multitrillion dollar one.