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.
Tbh, it’s best practice to assume an LLM is wrong all of the time. Always verify what it says with other sources. It can technically say things that are factual, but because there is no way of directly checking via the model itself and because it can easily bullshit you with 100% unwavering confidence, you should never trust what it says on the face of it. I mean, it can have high confidence (meaning, high baseline probability strength) in the correct answer and then, depending on sampling of tokens and the context of things, get a bad percent on one token and go down a path with a borked answer. Sorta like if humans could only speak in the rules of improv’s “yes, and…” where you can’t edit, reconsider, or self-correct, you have to just go with what’s already there, no matter how silly it gets.