Can anyone give me a tldr on how LLMs are linked to mental health breakdowns?
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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There was a spate of news articles recently about AI feeding people's delusions to the point that they start thinking they're the chosen one, emphasising that it was happening to people with no prior history of mental health issues. It was supposedly linked to an update to ChatGPT that made it even more sycophantic than usual.
It's a mix of sensationalist media and moral panic with just a hint of truth IMO. If people can fall for scams, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories then they can definitely get pushed off the deep end by an AI saying "yes and" to their every thought.
People get attached to a machine with no emotions, no morals, no ability to think before it speaks. A 14 year old boy killed himself because his AI girlfriend told him to. An LLM doesn't know what's okay and what's abuse. A person's heart doesn't know it either.
It's just another money/power grab. Tech bros want to spy on your kids to train their mythical AGI God, make shit loads of money and be in a position of influence.
Take away people's economic independence. Take their intellectual capital. Take their capacity to learn and think independently and ultimately their capacity to play and imagine.
The sheep are being led towards a very fucking grim world.
Lets be clear it isn't the tech that is bad. Self hosting a model for a task that suits it like speech recognition for a disabled person is righteous and liberating.
I hate to agree with the Marxists of Lemmy but the problem is very much capitalism as it is with global warming, pollution and a social inequality. Where I will split with them historically is I still believe in liberal democracies capacity to regulate capitalism for a common good. But when everyone has outsourced their thinking to a corporate AI from birth to death democracy is fucked isn't it.
We need to be aware of how we are being fucked over, sceptical of people pushing this shit and engaged politically to make sure it is regulated appropriately otherwise these cashed up AI fuckers are going to write legislation for our politicians to rubber stamp.
it isn’t the tech that is bad. Self hosting a model for a task that suits it like speech recognition for a disabled person is righteous and liberating.
Even that is tricky. One must check how the model itself was trained, namely :
- was the trained data acquired rightfully (e.g. not stolen images without creator permission)
- was the training done properly (e.g. not out of a datacenter running on polluting generators)
- was the annotation of the training data done within worker rights (e.g. psychological support if violence or porn data to remove)
rather than just solely have a positive use case and being privacy preserving.
prediction: right wing hysteria claiming the chatgpt toys are turning the kids gay/trans and/or the actual cause of school shootings.
Oh shit, AI is evolving by natural selection. There's a feedback loop of how people interact and training the data.
You think there are mental health problems now? The more AI takes people's jobs, the worse mental health problems we'll see.
I still remember when computers took everyone's jobs. Suprised there are any left.
It took decades for the computer revolution to become the personal computer revolution and businesses could adapt workflows and build out new ways to spend their R&D money (remember this was all back when stock buybacks were illegal, so companies were still investing in themselves) to fill the headcounts. It's taken mere months for generative AI to upend businesses and schools, destroying entire professions. I do not see the two as being highly comparable.
It’s taken mere months for generative AI to upend businesses and schools, destroying entire professions.
"Computers" used to be people who did math to run calculations. "Electronic Computers" destroyed those entire professions too. The world did not end.
Was this before or after the robots that took everybody's jobs?
The great water wars opened up a lot of jobs. I was a blood bag for a while, good dental plan but worked outdoors way too often.
that one horrifying movie where action figures and dolls come to life rings a bell.
The Indian in the cupboard? But I don’t remember if he was a toy or not.
Toy Story? You were afraid of Toy Story?
I think he's talking about Small Soldiers.
There’s also Child’s Play. Honestly it’s an entire trope.
Finally, a subject I know about! I have watched a lot of really bad movies over the years. Many of them included that particular trope.
Demonic Toys. Puppet Master (sort of). M3gan. Annabelle (I guess, I didn't see this one on moral grounds). Dolls. One of the Krampus movies. If you're willing to stretch your meaning of the word toy there's also The Hug. The Goosebumps TV show had a puppet. Loads of others.
Can’t forget Talking Tina all the way back in the Twilight Zone days.
What were moral reasons for avoiding annabelle? I never heard about the movie until your comment.
It's loosely based on the lies of grifters Ed and Lorraine Warren. I have a strong aversion to anything dealing with them.
To be fair, I watched The Conjuring before I knew about their connection and didn't like it. It wasn't my style and I can't imagine the other films in that universe are either. And I don't judge others for not caring that they were involved, especially since they're both dead now.
Oh they're the amityville horror people. That's all I need to know 👍
How dare you call Puppet Master a bad movie.
also my people
I stand by the fact that it's a bad movie and that I love it. And the majority of the sequels. And the Demonic Toys crossover movie.
If you don't believe it's a bad movie then all I have to say is that I support your right to feel that way.
my people!
My buddy searched for a specific horror movie for years that he only saw a piece of when he was a kid. I watched a bunch as a teen, then we were in the Navy together he hosted bad movie day where a bunch of us would get together and watch 3 or 4 depending on the length of the movies. Worst movie that week won. 90% or more were horror.
Those were good times. He introduced me to Troma, The Granny, a bunch of movies with evil toys, weird shit you can't tell people you watched without them looking at you like you might be a murderer, Killer Klown and tomatoes, and nearly every off brand slasher the 80s had to offer. I've kept watching ever since.
And I have no idea if he found out what the movie was. He hadn't by the time we stopped doing movie day.
I figured, but then I thought about how his description was basically Toy Story too.
maybe Small Soldiers lol
The lord of the rings? You were afraid of the LOTR?
Hey a buck is a buck, why do you hate America?
/s