“I applied to be pope”: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

danlitt

This is the most hilarious JS fail I've ever seen. The entire article renders properly, all the text and styling, then the entire screen is replaced by "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)." It's easy enough to fix, just hammer the refresh button to prevent JS from running.

boxed

Schools don't teach actual basics that make people grounded in reality imo. Of course it gets worse with things like ChatGPT that teachers are not only not trained to explain, but didn't even exist when current adults went to school.

jongjong

I don't think it's right to involuntarily send someone to a psychiatric ward because he believed that he was chosen by ChatGPT to be the pope. For the same reason I don't think we should send the pope to a psychiatric ward because he believes that he was chosen for that role by an invisible man in the sky. At least there's no doubt that ChatGPT exists lol. People should be allowed to be as whacky as they like so long as it's legal. And who knows, he is getting some attention now so his probability of becoming pope actually went up a tiny bit lol.

l23k4

We had people acting out like this before LLM chatbots, correlation does not necessarily imply causation.

47282847

Discordians know they’re popes. What a funny idea to think you would have to apply!

Meneth

No one can apply to be pope of the catholic church.

jdw64

I talk to GPT, Claude, and Gemini too much these days, but I still maintain one safety check If all three agree with me, I assume I am wrong and go outside.

cjs_ac

> All the spirallers that AFP spoke to said the positive feedback from the chatbot felt similar to dopamine hits from some kind of drug. > Which is why Lucy Osler, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Exeter, warned that AI companies could be tempted to ramp up the sycophancy of their bots. > "They are in quite a deep financial hole, and are desperately looking to make sure that their products become viable -- and user engagement is going to be the thing that drives their decisions," she told AFP. Sounds like the big social media companies.

whack

People talk about AI sycophancy, but there are plenty of human sycophants as well. If you're an extremely rich/powerful person, it is very easy to inadvertently surround yourself with sycophants who tell you how amazing and ground-breaking all your ideas are. I wonder if this is the reason people like Musk engage in such bizarre behavior and radical personality shifts over the past decade

1659447091

> "Millar is one of an unknown number of people who have lost their grip on reality while communicating with chatbots, an experience tentatively being called AI-induced delusion or psychosis." > "Researchers and mental health specialists are racing to catch up to this new, little-understood phenomenon [...]" I don't know if I would call it a phenomenon. This reads like the numerous articles from 2018+ detailing broken families and wrecked lives due to someone close spiraling down some QAnon(or any other) conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Only now people don't stumble onto it by wandering through dark corners of the internet. The never ending marketing blitz makes it almost impossible to not be at least slightly curious as to what its all about. To those susceptible to such things, they now have a tool to custom make (or reinforce) their own wild theories reflecting their own psychological state at maximum saturation. No need to wait between posting and reading replies on sketchy forums; it is now instantly delivered and tailor-made to the individual.(who use it in that way)

mplanchard

The fact that we as a society are allowing things like “Delve” or whatever the “AI psychiatrist” app is that I see ads for sometimes on the subway is a gross abdication of responsibility and reason. Of all the possible uses for LLMs, that has got to be one of the most out and out irresponsible and dangerous ones I could imagine.

readthenotes1

I have a now homeless relative who went through the same thing...

josefritzishere

You would think this level of gullibility has a proportional relationship with IQ but it does not. Gullibility has it's own independent vector.