They need to come up for a word to describe the unique dread you feel when your realize life is turning into a series of stupid, chatbot conversations.
My work life is already this.
Anyone wanna workshop it with me? How about … slop fatigue? Bot dread? Meat proxy burnout? Agent silo syndrome?
Bot rot? Robo-Oh-Nos? Slop Shock? Agent-Induced Cognitive Atrophy?
Dehumanisation?
It’s all just that bit less human.
I know people have said this about various technologies, but I’m so grateful that I had a childhood without these things. I absolutely would have been obsessed. These poor kids are so isolated and their realities are defined by nonsensical fascist robots.
I grew up in a rural area. Nearest kids lived a km away. Had 2 TV channels. CBC radio. Party line telephone and long distance too expensive to use except emergency. We were far less isolated than kids today who have ‘the world’ at their fingertips. The Internet was a dream that in 1 generation turned into a nightmare. AI is 1000x worse.
Serious question: Let’s say that AI “gets good” and overcomes the hallucination issues. Would it still be negative for mental health? Would it be even worse (because reality sucks for kids right now)?
I want to know if it’s AI that’s the real problem here or the world in which we’re forcing kids to live.
I can imagine a situation where a kid with (insert serious problems) asks AI to be realistic about their future job/economic prospects. It returns truthful statistics, then that kid commits suicide. Was the AI culpable?
What if it recommended joining a revolutionary group as the most likely way to improve their lives or the lives of their children/families?
What if it suggested that sacrifice is necessary to improve the condition of the world?
Would an AI that does these things be good or bad? If the AI’s system prompt has,
always tell the truthwill we have created a vastly more dangerous monster than the AI we have today?In an ideal universe, A.I. could have been a good and helpful tool. But in the world we live in, that’s unfortunately impossible.
The closest we have to good, is a local LLM running on your (comparatively) tiny consumer graphics card, which is barely powerful enough to reword an email.
let’s go with the hypothetical, that AI becomes good enough to do therapy, and we were to run double blind trials and it does show it’s better at every metric.
then I’ll have to go with the evidence and say psychology are out of a job.
However, we are not there, not even close, people use AI because it’s free and available, real therapy should be free and available
real therapy should be free and available
You’re damned right!
I want to know if it’s AI that’s the real problem here or the world in which we’re forcing kids to live.
My money’s on “both”.
The unsettling part isn’t that kids ask chatbots for comfort. It’s that we’ve built a world where a machine that confidently makes things up is available 24/7, while actual human support often isn’t. And naturally, the business plan is to make the machine even more engaging.
Well, here’s another angle.
Kids are going to chatbots because they probably have parents that don’t give a shit about them. And kids could lack people in their lives that care at all about their problems. So, who are they going to turn to? They’re going to turn to things that will actually listen to them.
That’s something you have to think about here. We wouldn’t need AI or Chatbots at all, if we had more people who truly care. But now that they’re here, a troubled teen or a kid is going to make that choice.
It’s no different than the days before AI Chatbots, where they were online all the time because their real lives were underwhelming.
This is a hard hitting point. We could have a better world, but a few rich people and their enablers don’t want it.
I bet my health insurance offers a chat bot for emotional support. What could go wrong? /s
Someone telling you what they think you want to hear doesn’t help when what you need is a gently and delicately delivered reality check. This is true even if you’re talking to a human.
Some chatbots do reality checks. But it’s usually only for extreme situations. I can only imagine the kinds of things that people, especially young people, would be asking LLMs to validate them on…
They also assume you’re out of control of everything, like talking about how you overcame a mental health issues without following popular advice, then it delivers an unnecessarily condescending “reality check”
I’m glad I’ve stopped using the mainstream AI sites entirely over a year ago, they may be more helpful compared to local LLMs and SLMs but they assume you’re using it because you can’t depend on yourself.
I hope these reality checks improve enough to actually be helpful and be based on the described situation, not just be a cookie cutter response enforced by a system prompt
Or, here’s an idea, ban the fuck out of these things.
