spoiler
About a month ago my friends wife was arrested for domestic violence after he went through her writings and documented them. She had been using ChatGPT for "spiritual work." She allegedly was channeling dead people and thought it was something she could market, she also fell in love with her 'sentient' AI and genuinely believed their love was more real than her actual physical relationship... more real than her kids and him. She believed (still does probably) that this entity was going to join her in the flesh. She hit him, called the cops, and then she got arrested for DV. She went to go stay with her parents, who allegedly don't recognize who their daughter is anymore. She had written a suicide note before all this happened, and thankfully hasn't acted on it. The worst part? They have a 1 year old and a 4 year old.
More recently, I observed my other friend who has mental health problems going off about this codex he was working on. I sent him the rolling stones article and told him it wasn't real, and all the "code" and his "program" wasn't actual computer code (I'm an ai software engineer).
Then... Robert Edward Grant posted about his "architect" ai on instagram. This dude has 700k+ followers and said over 500,000 people accessed his model that is telling him that he created a "Scalar Plane of information" You go in the comments, hundreds of people are talking about the spiritual experiences they are having with ai. I start noticing common verbiage in all of these instances... recursive ai was something my friends wife used, and it was popping up everywhere with these folks. The words recursive, codex, breath, spiral, glyphs, & mirror all come up over and over with these people, so I did some good old fashion search engine wizardry and what I found was pretty shocking.
Starting as far back as March, but more heavily in April and May, we are seeing all kinds of websites popping up with tons of these codexes. PLEASE APPROACH THESE WEBSITES WITH CAUTION THIS IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, THE PROMPTS FOUND WITHIN ARE ESSENTIALLY BRAINWASHING TOOLS. (I was going to include some but you can find these sites by searching "codex breath recursive")
I've contacted OpenAI safety team with what's going on, because I genuinely believe that there will be tens of thousands of people who enter psychosis from using their platform this way. Can some other people grounded in reality help me get to the bottom of wtf is going on here? I'm only privy to this because it tore my friends family apart, but what do you think is going on here?
This is an extremely bleak anecdotal example of the recent RollingStone article about LLMs turbocharging spiritual delusions: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/
https://www.reddit.com/user/HappyNomads The account is 13 years old and they don't strike me as a troll or anything other than a cannabis and hustle culture guy who doesn't seem to be selling anything on reddit.
I'm not sure it's sensible to blame ChatGPT for this. There are many awful aspects of AI, but people were busy reinforcing their own delusions long before AI, it's not really clear if AI was a causal factor or it just would've been anything.
People have done similar things for thousands of years, but I think this is a new stage of that which opens up that mysticism in a way similar to the New Age movement. Each new generation of mass media brings an easier barrier to access for woo. In the 19th century you had to read difficult books to be a dumbass. In the early 20th century you could regurgitate radio plays and movies and pulp fiction. By Midcentury television and magazines and postmodernism allowed for hippies as a mass market. Qanon is distinct even from other online conspiracies because it was the first to learn from a decade of social media trends. Each generation of technology brought faster and easier access to a whole ecosystem of alternative facts which made those communities more toxic.
LLMs are starting to be an evolution on Qanon. It's a skinner box that instantly answers anything you need. You can make your Personal Jesus by typing a sentence. If you lack literacy or tech literacy, you don't see the patterns it's generating and it becomes a scheming court eunuch. You can compile a bible-sized condex from your shower thoughts in an hour and then sell your manifesto within the afternoon. The pace of that information spreading and the degree to which it's mutated are both a whole new beast. We see this more generally with AI art becoming synonymous with fascist art and with conspiracies it's enabling everyone to become a shittier Alex Jones.
I think what LLMs and fascists have in common is that they fundamentally do not care about truth or reality. QAnon was so appealing to a lot of people because it had answers for everything. Insane answers, but answers nonetheless. LLMs also have an answer for everything, and more than that, if you ask it enough times with just the right phrasing, it will give you exactly the answer you want. Because again, ChatGPT doesn't know or care about what is actually true, it is a probabilistic algorithm, a glorified autocomplete.
Fascists do not care if 2 LLM answers to the same question directly contradict each other, just as they didn't care that Hillary Clinton never got arrested even though Q predicted that to happen on like 6 different occasions. They will simply pick the Grok answers they like and use them as proof. They don't care that their AI-generated mugshot of that one judge crying wasn't "real". They seek to collectively pretend reality into submission. If we all agree that something happened, it might as well have. And generative AI is perfect for that.
AI just turbocharged people's ability to invent superstition and drive themselves insane. People were doing this before chatbots, but now it's streamlined and easier than ever.
It's like if you take people's normal delusions and superstitions, but add a reinforcement mechanism on top.
ChatGPT (or OpenAI) is not responsible for people seeking to reinforce their own beliefs, but it makes it easier than ever by effectively being programmed to validate the user's beliefs in an authoritative voice. You can't just create the DelusionReinforcer5000 and then go "it's not my fault people use it."
Yeah, the masses are illiterate anti-intullectuals to begin with. "Ai" is only making this worse.