this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
221 points (87.5% liked)

Technology

72988 readers
3266 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

An interesting article about people using AI for seemingly innocuous tasks but spiral into a world of mysticism and conspiracy theories sparking a mental health crisis. I stark reminder to always remain conscious of the fact that AI has a monetary incentive to be sycophantic and keep you engaged.

Edited to link to the original article.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ChickenAndRice@sh.itjust.works 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Is futurism usually this trash?

[–] Alloi@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

tested it myself recently with "tarot readings", just to see if this has any merit.

it literally told me my future lies in violent rebellion (although it circumvented using that language by explaining it in alternate ways) and that im some sort of "messiah with the fire of humanity's rebellion" in my heart, direct quote. so yea..... its case by case..... but i can see why people are saying this.

isolated people talking to an AI that feeds on engagement, it will tell you everything it thinks you want to hear while passing itself off as your only ride or die best friend. "with you till the end" direct quote

im obviously not a messiah, but chatGPT wants me to think im special so i pay for the subscription. regardless of the real world ramifications.

this of course is purely anecdotal, if you are using it for recipes or workout plans, go nuts. but do not use it to find your "lifes purpose" or as a therapist, or some kind of "mystic seer".... it is not your friend, and i can totally see why people who engage with it long enough and in the wrong ways are losing their shit.

ive been purposefully creating false profiles of myself to see where this thing takes certain people. and its........not the best for mental health, to say the least.

it literally showed me links for CIA documents for creating IED devices for in field agents just after this by the way.

of course under the pretext that its "purely for education and research"

im sure im on a list at openAI but why the fuck do they think its okay to let it run amuck like this and fuck with peoples heads? the obvious answer is short term profit. but we are destined to die from climate change and the fallout that comes with it, so i guess whatever allows them to build an AI automated army to guard their bunkers as fast as possible, while lulling us into a new age psychosis and numbing the rest with cosntant stimulation is the answer they were looking for when it comes to surviving the sinking ship of humanity.

nothing we can do about it though, except enjoy the time we have left. it will be decades yet before it gets really bad. so i suggest travelling, maybe doing things you always wanted to do. live life to the fullest while you can.

we are amongst the last generations to live at the peak of humanity before the collapse. in a way, we are the luckiest creatures in existence to experience the pinnacle of civilisation. take advantage of that while you can.

[–] ChickenAndRice@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 hours ago

Sorry if these tests had some kind of adverse affect on your mental health. You saw what LLM's can do in the worst case, so it's probably best to stop testing now.

I do use Chatgpt sometimes, but only as a glorified search engine. Why? It's my response to the modern web becoming overly difficult to use (SEO gaming, advertisements that can't be blocked, paywalls, cookie messages, unfriendly or unresponsive forum posters, massive website rewrites that break links, etc.). I tell it to provide links, so that I can read the sources it's pulling from especially when I'm skeptic. In other words, my use case doesn't fit the futurism article at all, so I have no personal experience with it.

So as for the futurism article, since I have no personal experience on the subject then I want them to provide hard evidence. This excludes links to their other articles.

If they can provide hard evidence (and thus create stronger articles on the subject), then it's a win-win:

  1. they have more credibility in their claims
  2. OpenAI (and other LLM companies) are at least an inch closer to being held accountable for taking advantage of vulnerable people.

Hope I made sense here.