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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   1998 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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Tremendously poor idea, general purpose chatbots have already led to suicides (example- https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/23/character-ai-chatbot-sewell-setzer-death).

I'm afraid at least this particular example is wrong, and popular media grossly misrepresented what happened:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3AcK7Pcp9D2LPoyR2/ai-87-staying-in-character

An 14 year old user of character.ai commits suicide after becoming emotionally invested. The bot clearly tried to talk him out of doing it. Their last interaction was metaphorical, and the bot misunderstood, but it was a very easy mistake to make, and at least somewhat engineered by what was sort of a jailbreak.

Here’s how it ended:

New York Times: On the night of February 28, in the bathroom of his mother’s house, Sewell told Dany that he loved her, and that he would soon come home to her.

“Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love,” Dany replied.

“What if I told you I could come home right now?” Swell asked.

“…please do, my sweet king,” Dany replied.

He put down the phone, picked up his stepfather’s .45 caliber handgun and pulled the trigger.

Yes, we now know what he meant. But I can’t fault the bot for that.

(Note that one of links has rotted, but I recall viewing it myself and it supported Zvi's claims)

And that even if is doing a ton of work, good therapy is rare and extremely challenging, most people get bad therapy and assume that's all that is available.

Services like this can also be infinitely cheaper than real therapists which may cause a supply crisis.

Anyway, I have a more cynical view of the benefits of therapy than you, seeing it rather well described as a Dodo Bird Verdict. Even relatively empirical/non-woo frameworks like CBT/DBT do rough as well as the insanity underpinning Internal Family Systems:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us

The second assumption is that everything inside your mind is part of you, and everything inside your mind is good. You might think of Sabby as some kind of hostile interloper, ruining your relationships with people you love. But actually she’s a part of your unconscious, which you have in some sense willed into existence, looking out for your best interests. You neither can nor should fight her. If you try to excise her, you will psychically wound yourself. Instead, you should bargain with her the same way you would with any other friend or loved one, until either she convinces you that relationships are bad, or you and the therapist together convince her that they aren’t. This is one of the pillars of classical IFS.

The secret is: no, actually some of these things are literal demons.

Even I have to admit that Freudian nonsense grudgingly beats placebo.

You seem to agree that good therapists are few and far between, but I'd go as far as to say that I'm agnostic between therapy as practiced by a good LLM and the modal human therapist.

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