Thoughts on this? I hate LLM but I think this article does a disservice by depicting the victims as perfectly normal before their mental health collapsed. They must have had some kind of preexisting problems that got exacerbated by their use of ChatGPT.
The point about these chatbots being sycophantic is extremely true though. I am not sure whether they are designed to be this way–whether it is because it sells more or if LLMs are too stupid to be argumentative. I have felt its effects personally when using Deepseek. I have noticed that often in its reasoning section it will say something like “the user is very astute” and it feels good to read that as someone who is socially isolated and is never complimented because of that.
I guess the lesson here is to use these chatbots as tools rather than friends because they are not capable of being the latter. I have tried a few times having discussions about politics with Deepseek but it is a terrible experience because of the aforementioned predisposition to being sycophantic. It always devolves into being a yes man.
So to me, a person who has gone through a psychotic break, the stories recounted just sound like an average psychotic break. They just happened to coincide with LLM usage. Its possible that the LLMs fed the break and exacerbated it but they could just as easily have been books or films that pushed them over the edge.
It could a good topic for clinical study to find out if commercial LLMs are any worse than other media for exacerbating mental illnesses but it takes science time to catch up with the cabal of techbros releasing a new iteration of torment nexus every week.
LLMs for accelerationism but this also includes brain scrampled egg
I have a mild feeling that the machine that has defense industry contracts, feeds off your browsing data/cookies and manipulates itself to change in accordance to your personality or features is a bit more psychologically engaging than regular media.
The fixation on media and over estimating its importance is a symptom of the illness not the cause. I’ve known people who were seeing the secrets of the universe communicated through road signs and house numbers. How engaging the media is is irrelevant. Most of the time its stress, sleep deprivation, and/or drugs that make this sort of thing happen. (like the guy in the article who just got a new more stressful job)
You can still acknowledge that and say some forms of media are more engaging with certain conditions. I feel as in the future, the same way that someone with epilepsy shouldn’t consume media with flashing lights, someone with schizophrenia shouldn’t be subject to feedback-reinforcing loops with personalized content that has a profile built off your data.
Is it still a symptom? Yes.
Most forms of propaganda would beg to differ.