The moderators of a pro-artificial intelligence Reddit community announced that they have been quietly banning “a bunch of schizoposters” who believe “they've made some sort of incredible discovery or created a god or become a god,” highlighting a new type of chatbot-fueled delusion that started getting attention in early May.
“LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities,” one of the moderators of r/accelerate, wrote in an announcement. “There is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment.”
The moderator said that it has banned “over 100” people for this reason already, and that they’ve seen an “uptick” in this type of user this month.
The moderator explains that r/accelerate “was formed to basically be r/singularity without the decels.” r/singularity, which is named after the theoretical point in time when AI surpasses human intelligence and rapidly accelerates its own development, is another Reddit community dedicated to artificial intelligence, but that is sometimes critical or fearful of what the singularity will mean for humanity. “Decels” is short for the pejorative “decelerationists,” who pro-AI people think are needlessly slowing down or sabotaging AI’s development and the inevitable march towards AI utopia. r/accelerate’s Reddit page claims that it’s a “pro-singularity, pro-AI alternative to r/singularity, r/technology, r/futurology and r/artificial, which have become increasingly populated with technology decelerationists, luddites, and Artificial Intelligence opponents.”
The behavior that the r/accelerate moderator is describing got a lot of attention earlier in May because of a post on the r/ChatGPT Reddit community about “Chatgpt induced psychosis,”
It’s going to take us a solid decade to understand the mental health crisis that is unfolding from this shit. So many of us called for “common sense legislation” and “guardrails” only to be mocked as Luddites and shouted down. But as always, the almighty dollar came first.
