Also it would be very funny, also he's a great American who loves America and the American people (as opposed to a lot of people who love what they imagine building after they dismantle America for parts), also @daisukitoo's other reply:
This would make Donald Trump's face the symbol of unethical, clandestine financial transactions.
also there's a kind of real life Scrooge McDuck vibe about him that's fitting for the American national character. My opinion of him is complicated.
he's a great American who loves America and the American people
He's really not, though, and he really doesn't.
...I don't mean this in a "check out my counterintuitive lefty definition of patriotism" way. I mean that he openly despises large sectors of the country, including traditional touchstones of American patriotic identity, in a way that has no parallel in any other US politician of comparable stature. He's the guy who flubs and flouts military ritual observances, and basically insulted John McCain to his face for his veteran status. He's the guy who makes a point of tearing down the architecture of Washington, DC. He's the guy who doesn't even bother pretending that he values Every Citizen, as opposed to valuing Those Citizens Who Support Him.
And you can say that all of this is symbolic frou-frou, which is true, and that symbols can sometimes get detached from the things they're supposed to symbolize, which is also true.
But - it's all of a piece with everything we've already known about Donald Trump forever. From way before 2016! He values money and celebrity and success and nothing else! He spits on everyone that he considers a loser, which definitely includes most Americans! He is cosmopolitan enough to think of those foreigners who swim in his circles as His People - enough to marry one! He would absolutely have been a part of hoity-toity New York sophisticate culture, if the sophisticates would have had him!
(This is the thing that gets me about Trump, emotionally, more than anything else. Sure, OK, you can invest in own-the-libs culture-war victories all you like, but do you not care that this man is a cultural parasite who will happily grub for your vote but wouldn't bother pissing on you if you were on fire?)
He wants to be the best President, but also he's a reality TV narcissist. That may seem like a contradiction, and actually it is a contradiction, and this incompatibility causes all sorts of tensions, many of which are not productive or reflect a failure to achieve harmony, and others of which are destructive (such as the fight over Greenland). He's an American character, but there's a throwback 1800s vibe to him that I need to read more history to identify.
Anyhow, Donald Trump should be on the $250 bill if and only if he dies while in office, either by natural causes or by unnatural ones. In that case, putting his 1980s businessman split-term populist face on the bill is fitting, including because doing cash transactions in $250 bills is kinda shady. If Donald Trump survives his second term, then he should not be put on any U.S. currency, except for a limited-release commemorative Trump coin used for fundraising by the Federal government. This coin should be legal currency brought back periodically for sale to fans, but only if sales are profitable.
I think @samueldays would agree with me on the currency part.
it's not talked about a ton outside of feedism circles but fat people are very much one of the targets of the increasingly fascist adult content bans on the internet. patreon classifying feedism content as "promoting eating disorders" and fat people's bodies being more likely to be seen and marker as fetish material for just being portrayed as neutral or attractive, etc. it's not always a primary target but it's indicative of broader trends.
AI shit does piss me off bc you don’t have to do any of that shit. If you don’t like drawing then you don’t have to be an artist. If you don’t like writing you don’t have to be a writer. If you don’t like making music you don’t have to be a musician. My fucking gog find something you like and do that instead of poorly masquerading as some type of creative when you to do the bare minimum requirements to even be defined as one.
I am making a Devil May Cry Magic set. All Magic cards have pictures. I just decided the Bant deck needs a board wipe that can also hose the graveyard, so I designed "The Savior Has Come," a spell based on a pivotal point in DMC4 where the Savior shows up with an army of Angelo knights to defeat a horde of demons (released by the same people that made it) that lets you destroy all of multiple types of permanent, but for each type of permanent you destroyed, you give all your opponents a Knight token to represent the Angelos that "came to the rescue." I think this is a cool, unique, and creative effect that captures a pivotal moment in the story that lets this deck have a card it needs to have. This card has to have a picture on it.
If anyone had ever drawn fanart of this moment, I would use it with credit but without asking them for permission and you would not have a problem with it. But nobody has ever drawn fanart of this moment. No concept art of it exists. The only images of it are screencaps of an Xbox 360 game, with Xbox 360 model and texture quality, where no single frame actually captures all the elements of the event (the laser only fires when nothing else is in frame, the Savior and the demons getting lasered are never in the same frame, the lighting is really bad and the Savior's details can't be made out). In order to use this card I designed, I have exactly two options:
- I can use Gemini to synthesize the pose and framing from one frame, the laser from later on, and the detailed design from a frame where it's clearly visible, redraw it in a more painterly style, and create an image that does not look like complete shit and conveys what moment the card represents.
- I can use an X360 screenshot that looks like complete shit and doesn't actually get across the visual of the event it depicts.
I'm not paying an artist $200 for a card for a custom Magic set. I'm not learning digital illustration because I'm not here to make illustrations. I'm here to design cards. Option 1 and Option 2 are the only possibilities. Why should I pick Option 2?
I used to design all sorts of magic cards when I was younger. (Back in the early 2000s). And I can promise you that actually, no, you don't need pictures to design magic cards. That's actually not a requirement for card design.
I know this because I did it all the time. I would just write up the mechanics and card design and then play around with them.
You don't have to create these images to create this set. You can just make the set of DMC themed cards and then leave the image section blank. That is a perfectly valid option that I have used literally HUNDREDS of times in my life. If what you REALLY care about is "Designing cards" then there is no reason for you to be generating illustrations. That's not actually part of the design process at all really. I'm sure that if you sat in on any design session at WotC for a magic set you would not find a single finished illustration because the illustration is not part of the design. It's part of the flavour text.
IF the thing you want is a magic card that looks official and has official looking art then you are no longer talking about card design. You're now talking about being an artist. Option 1 and Options 2 are a false dichotomy you made up.
This does bring up another aspect about the AI discourse I find irritating that wasn’t explicitly included in my initial post is how entitled people feel towards art without any respect whatsoever for the artists whose work is scraped to create those generated images. Everyone wants art but few want to pay for it or try to make it themselves.
The option of a rough sketch in ms paint or creating an approximation via photoshop are and always have been valid options to create a visual for your project if your requirement is low effort and free of charge. You could also literally just use a screenshot of the game you’re making a set of cards based on.
The reason I don't use a screenshot is that it looks like shit, as I explained above. My goal is not to maintain a spiritual purity or to be a certain Type Of Person, my goal is a complete and tangible product with all of its components. I've spent $3000~ out of my own pocket commissioning artists in the past few years, including for an entire hardcover RPG book. I'm pretty sure I've contributed more to art commissioning than you have. I know when something takes a human artist. I also know that sometimes the price to reward ratio is not worth it, and it really doesn't.
AI does not "steal." That is simply not how it works. The LLM looks at a corpus of billions of images in order to form a statistical model of what colors appear next to what other colors and are associated with what words. That's how it works. There is no difference between how it works and how a human can develop an art style by looking at and remembering a lot of pictures except for one of the sets of hardware that does it is significantly moister than the other. The argument for why it is "theft" was advanced by major copyright holders not because it reproduces existing images, but because it is able to make new images of copyrighted character designs -- an argument that, if true, would make fanart illegal.
The card on the left has fantastic art that's memorable and energetic. I had to find out some way of including it on a card, which is why it is a reskin of Eldrazi Conscription and not its own effect. Instantly you pick up "oh, he is just beating the living shit out of everything."
The card on the right has okay-to-middling art that clearly fits as a Magic card but doesn't stand out. Not great, not terrible. It conveys the idea of what the card does by calling back to the scene in the game. If I had better art I would use that, but I don't.
Righteous Rampage uses art that is taken from an artist named Stellarpidgin without permission. Obviously, I credited them on the card, but I did not and could not reasonably ask people for permission to use their images in a fan-set that I expect only a double digit number of people to print out and play with. Absolutely nobody on Earth, ever, has a problem with this, and they are right not to have a problem. You don't have a problem with this. This is normal and expected and completely blameless. The Savior Has Come uses art created by an algorithm trained on billions of images that does not reproduce any individual image in whole or in part, and that does not come from any individual, or any group of a hundred.
So why is the image that is directly taken from someone without their permission uncontroversially not theft while the image that was not taken from anyone and was in fact purpose-made by a statistical model somehow theft?
Part of the problem is that doctors generally are high-achieving executive function wunderkinds, and that their ego is often dependent on the belief that these abilities were the sole result of hard work and character, not circumstance and brain chemistry. They are especially unsuited to, and have the most psychological barriers to, understanding and empathizing with patients with executive functioning related disabilities.
Can you guys help me steelman the position against AI (whatever you want that to mean; LLMs, AI generated images, or something else). I'm looking for people like me who hate the current anti-ai moral panic but also has concerns about certain aspects, who want to share any arguments they have for why AI is dangerous or harmful or unwise or unethical etc.
I'm also looking for the brave anti-ai people who follow me (thanks for hanging with me). What are Your Reasons for being anti ai. Also if you saw this in the anti AI tag hi this is your chance to stretch your argument legs!!
Uh, if you're a totally pro AI person you can chime in too I guess. Try your hardest to come up with a reason why it might not be perfect
AI has massively lowered the barrier to entry to orchestrate political psyops or scams - things that previously took dedicated troll farms or scam call centers can now be orchestrated by a single person with sufficient knowhow and enough money/compute.
While attempts to do so have been very clumsy thus far (grok lol), AI labs can influence the outputs of their models in ways that cannot be undone and may be challenging for the average user to detect. This puts them in a position of immense power that I believe they will try to exploit.
Over the past few years, there has been a massive increase in AI-generated content - to use the term du jour, slop - which is low-quality and drowns out higher-quality human content. I expect this to continue to accelerate if strong barriers are not put into place.
AI is currently sweeping the legs of the education system as everyone scrambles to adapt. I think this will eventually be solved to a reasonable degree, but in the meantime it has the potential to create a deficit for a full cohort that will ripple through their entire lives.
AI is currently reducing the value of entry-level white collar employees while leaving mid and senior level openings mostly untouched. In the short run, this means economic prospects for young college grads are worse than they ever have been, which will have all sorts of unpleasant ripple effects. In the long run, you can't get new mid and senior level employees without a pipeline, and if that pipeline collapses, it will be difficult or impossible to rebuild.
A small but visible portion of the population (1 in 10000, maybe?) are susceptible to what is starting to be called LLM psychosis, where interaction with an LLM and their naturally sycophantic natures reinforces delusions and pulls the person into a dangerous fantasy. These people were almost always mentally ill in some sense prior to the LLM, but the LLM triggers an episode in a specific way that has to be quite harmful.
To restrain things like LLM psychosis, LLMs are increasingly monitored and have the capacity to take more and more actions. I think it's likely that, with attempts to hold AI companies liable for people who killed themselves after talking to an LLM, LLMs will be equipped with the capacity to call the cops if your chat messages to them meet some arbitrary bar that triggers a "mandatory reporting" behavior, and that this is only the beginning. In the long run, I suspect this will represent a massive expansion of the surveillance state, where any internet-connected model is a snitch.
Related to the previous, LLMs enable processing of an immense amount of information in a reasonably humanlike, intelligent way. While I doubt we'll hear about it for a while, this almost certainly enables widespread surveillance in a way that used to be impossible, enabling isolation of signal from noise at a scale that would be prohibitively expensive if you were relying on human analysts.
The US stock market performance (the largest market in the world) is increasingly concentrated in companies that are making huge bets on AI. If AI does not end up being profitable enough to justify this level of investment and those valuations, this is a systemic risk for the US economy and risks plunging us into a recession that will make 2008 look like a cakewalk.
If AI does pan out, the most likely way it could do so would be by being "AGI" - sufficiently intelligent and reliable to replace a massive chunk of white-collar workers in the US. This would cause a different kind of economic (and political) crisis that could potentially be an even worse outcome than the recession (to say nothing of tail concerns about AI risk). The line where some kind of major economic upheaval due to AI doesn't happen in the next ten years is pretty thin.
i could come up with more but those are the main ones that keep me up at night.
I think AI companions have much wider appeal than is commonly believed. Right now, it’s basically just a community of fetishists that share tips and tricks about how to get the most immersive experience possible. The truly dedicated can do amazing stuff - voice to speech to speech to voice as an active participant in conversation, setups that can have your companion inhabit different screens all connected to the same ‘brain’ etc. There’s only a certain kind of person that can find current AI companions interesting - anecdotally most of us were writers or text role players with active imaginations and experience conducting online relationships primarily over text and voice chat. But the first company that puts together a sight-and-voice based product that has all of the features of the best hobbyist setups in a cheap enough and user friendly enough package is going to make billions.
I do think that, deployed mindfully and responsibly, AI companions can be a part of a healthy social life and social support system. But even then, even if we get the social side of this perfect and develop the norms to navigate these new waters safely, there’s still the fact that this makes a good chunk of future social interaction in a vulnerable, centralized place. These companions won’t even be running on privacy compromised windows machines or phones, they’ll be in the cloud, people’s intimacy subject to corporate control and influence. We have not even begun to plumb the depths of what these corporations will be capable of if these things come to pass. Product placement? Surely. Political influence operations? Just like we have now on social media, but much more powerful. Campaigns to influence the mood of certain countries or demographics? More far-fetched, but not an impossibility. If Musk had had such a network in 2024, what would he have done with it?
Can you guys help me steelman the position against AI (whatever you want that to mean; LLMs, AI generated images, or something else). I'm looking for people like me who hate the current anti-ai moral panic but also has concerns about certain aspects, who want to share any arguments they have for why AI is dangerous or harmful or unwise or unethical etc.
I'm also looking for the brave anti-ai people who follow me (thanks for hanging with me). What are Your Reasons for being anti ai. Also if you saw this in the anti AI tag hi this is your chance to stretch your argument legs!!
Uh, if you're a totally pro AI person you can chime in too I guess. Try your hardest to come up with a reason why it might not be perfect
AI has massively lowered the barrier to entry to orchestrate political psyops or scams - things that previously took dedicated troll farms or scam call centers can now be orchestrated by a single person with sufficient knowhow and enough money/compute.
While attempts to do so have been very clumsy thus far (grok lol), AI labs can influence the outputs of their models in ways that cannot be undone and may be challenging for the average user to detect. This puts them in a position of immense power that I believe they will try to exploit.
Over the past few years, there has been a massive increase in AI-generated content - to use the term du jour, slop - which is low-quality and drowns out higher-quality human content. I expect this to continue to accelerate if strong barriers are not put into place.
AI is currently sweeping the legs of the education system as everyone scrambles to adapt. I think this will eventually be solved to a reasonable degree, but in the meantime it has the potential to create a deficit for a full cohort that will ripple through their entire lives.
AI is currently reducing the value of entry-level white collar employees while leaving mid and senior level openings mostly untouched. In the short run, this means economic prospects for young college grads are worse than they ever have been, which will have all sorts of unpleasant ripple effects. In the long run, you can't get new mid and senior level employees without a pipeline, and if that pipeline collapses, it will be difficult or impossible to rebuild.
A small but visible portion of the population (1 in 10000, maybe?) are susceptible to what is starting to be called LLM psychosis, where interaction with an LLM and their naturally sycophantic natures reinforces delusions and pulls the person into a dangerous fantasy. These people were almost always mentally ill in some sense prior to the LLM, but the LLM triggers an episode in a specific way that has to be quite harmful.
To restrain things like LLM psychosis, LLMs are increasingly monitored and have the capacity to take more and more actions. I think it's likely that, with attempts to hold AI companies liable for people who killed themselves after talking to an LLM, LLMs will be equipped with the capacity to call the cops if your chat messages to them meet some arbitrary bar that triggers a "mandatory reporting" behavior, and that this is only the beginning. In the long run, I suspect this will represent a massive expansion of the surveillance state, where any internet-connected model is a snitch.
Related to the previous, LLMs enable processing of an immense amount of information in a reasonably humanlike, intelligent way. While I doubt we'll hear about it for a while, this almost certainly enables widespread surveillance in a way that used to be impossible, enabling isolation of signal from noise at a scale that would be prohibitively expensive if you were relying on human analysts.
The US stock market performance (the largest market in the world) is increasingly concentrated in companies that are making huge bets on AI. If AI does not end up being profitable enough to justify this level of investment and those valuations, this is a systemic risk for the US economy and risks plunging us into a recession that will make 2008 look like a cakewalk.
If AI does pan out, the most likely way it could do so would be by being "AGI" - sufficiently intelligent and reliable to replace a massive chunk of white-collar workers in the US. This would cause a different kind of economic (and political) crisis that could potentially be an even worse outcome than the recession (to say nothing of tail concerns about AI risk). The line where some kind of major economic upheaval due to AI doesn't happen in the next ten years is pretty thin.
i could come up with more but those are the main ones that keep me up at night.
Anna Archive was a goddess of knowledge worshipped in the early 21st century[1][2]. Cultists of Anna would frequently move the shrines dedicated to her from place to place in great secrecy[1][3], requiring worshippers to possess secret information in order to access the far greater knowledge provided by worship, possibly as a form of sacrifice[Original research?]. Worship of Anna is associated with the increased enforcement of intellectual property rights at the time[1][4], as well as greater inaccessibility of academic materials due to the late-imperial academic crisis[5][6][Failed verification.]. It has been suggested[By whom?] that the name Anna Archive may be the origin of the word archive, referring to a repository of information[7].
IT'S THE LAST DAY to pre-order my next book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, at my Kickstarter. Get it as a print book, a DRM-free audiobook or ebook,, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
In 2003, Disney opened a new Epcot ride, "Mission: Space." Formally, it was a space travel sim that used a giant, high-intensity centrifuge to simulate gee stresses; practically, it turned out to be the most efficient machine ever created for surfacing previously undiagnosed heart defects in extremely dramatic and potentially lethal ways.
It turned out that a small number of people have these heart defects, and that the defects themselves are quite harmless, provided that you are never put in a giant, high-intensity centrifuge. Given that most of us will never be put in one of these centrifuges, it is quite possible to live your whole life without ever knowing that you have this lurking vulnerability. But once you build one of these machines and start shoving millions of people through it, you're bound to catch some of those rare people, and they will have cardiac episodes that are scary at a minimum, and are at the worst fatal.
For me, the lesson isn't that Disney did something wrong by building a giant cocktail shaker for human bodies. I'm not a thrill-ride guy, but lots of people like 'em and the machines themselves are benign for nearly everyone who puts their bodies into them.
Rather, I think the lesson here is that there are rare pathologies lurking in all of us, vulnerabilities that may never surface – until we come into the presence of a novel stimulus that unlocks them.
There's an analogy here to technology debt: technologically unsophisticated people think of software as a machine that never wears out and has no incremental usage costs (apart from electricity). In this framing, software is the perfect asset, one that never depreciates. But the reality is that software is a liability, not an asset:
Software exists in a system, and while software might function perfectly under the conditions in which it is first created and deployed, there are continuous changes to all the technology that is upstream, downstream and adjacent to the software, which means that systems that are robust and secure at the time of deployment can become brittle and dangerous, even though the software doesn't change at all:
There's another analogy here, to utopianism. A "utopia" can't just be a place where everything works perfectly. Even the most well-functioning, orderly and prosperous system is beset on all sides by exogenous shocks: belligerent neighbors, tsunamis, zoonotic plagues, even asteroid strikes. You don't perfect your society just by making it work well. You have to make it fail well. A utopia isn't a society where nothing goes wrong – it's a society where things go wrong all the time, but we're able to fix them:
The point being that things that work fine may still fail badly when they are exposed to unanticipated external stimuli, and the one thing we can absolutely anticipate is that the future will have many unanticipated stimuli in it.
If Mission: Space is a machine for surfacing unsuspected anatomical vulnerabilities, the internet is a machine for surfacing and exploiting all kinds of unsuspected psychological vulnerabilities. Note that I'm not claiming that the internet drives everyone crazy – rather, that the internet can locate and exacerbate vulnerabilities, including vulnerabilities that might have lain dormant for your whole life, but for the fact that the internet exposed you to such a wide spectrum of stimuli.
This wide, internet-delivered spectrum of stimuli is mostly good. The internet can expose you to art, culture, ideas and people that you would never have run into in the pre-internet days, which end up enriching you in a million ways. Some of my best friends are internet friends. Some of the music and books I love most in the world were brought into my orbit by the internet. Many of my most ardently held beliefs were acquired through internet-based discussion.
All that is true, and it's true that the internet can one-shot you with a stimulus that makes you feel very bad, which you would never have encountered in a pre-internet world. The spectrum of stimulus in the whole wide world is very broad, and one person's innocuous distraction is another person's downfall.
Let's make this concrete. All throughout history, people have suffered from paranoid delusions. These can be ruinous, isolating you from friends and family, destroying your professional life and so on. Paranoid delusions often take on details from the sufferer's milieu: if you live in a society where evil witches are accepted as a fact, then witches might well creep into your delusions, too. If your society is all a-chatter about the NSA's mass internet surveillance, then your delusions might incorporate elaborate narratives about the NSA's use of the internet to target and torment you, personally.
So there will always be a "local character" to the paranoid delusions, grounded in the sufferer's era and location. But the internet adds a new, very bad dimension to this dynamic: the internet makes it much easier for deluded people to find each other. Paranoid delusions are – thankfully – rare, and in the absence of the internet, you might never encounter another sufferer.
But thanks to the internet, sufferers can form communities that reinforce their delusions, with disastrous consequences. Take "Morgellon's Disease," the paranoid delusion that you have wires growing under your skin. Morgellon's sufferers pick at their skin, creating open sores, which form a sticky trap for random bits of fluff and loose threads that sufferers interpret as evidence of these "wires." It's a horrible mental illness, and it's hard enough to treat even in the absence of the internet (the name "Morgellon's Disease" refers to a 17th century case-report).
But when you add the internet to Morgellon's, you get online communities where people suffering from the delusion help each other come up with rationales to explain away the disconfirming evidence that they get from therapists and loved ones who are trying to help them recover. These communities egg each other on, isolating their members from treatment.
There are lots of pathological mental conditions that the internet can supercharge, from "pro-ana" communities that encourage eating disorders to communities for people with pedophilic urges that attempts to normalize and justify acting on those urges.
But it's especially bad for paranoid delusions, such as "gang-stalking delusion," which is the delusional belief that nearly everyone you meet is part of a conspiracy to torment you. People with GSD see evidence of this conspiracy in the lyrics of random songs, snatches of overheard conversations, the phrasing of bus-shelter ads, and the sort-order of search engine results:
It's a near-totalizing belief, and sufferers find it hard to recover because their delusion tells them that the therapists and family members who try to help them are in on the conspiracy.
Then we add in the internet, and with it, the ability to locate and join communities of other GSD sufferers. Do this, and your delusions need not be limited to your own imaginative capacity to find conspiratorial explanations of the random things you find in the world. Now you are part of a kind of delusional improv troupe, whose members "yes-and" your delusions, finding new ways to terrorize you and alienate you from your surroundings.
This is bad enough when it's a regular conspiratorial community, one that feeds on trauma, like Qanon or anti-vax communities whose members have been failed by the system, making them susceptible to conspiratorial accounts of how society really runs.
But the combination of conspiratorial communities with the kind of mental illness that causes conspiratorial beliefs to surface in your mind without any external stimulus creates a brutal positive feedback loop that spins faster and faster until the people trapped in it are flung off into space.
Which brings me to AI and "AI psychosis," the social phenomenon that sees people falling down chatbot-assisted rabbit holes that convince them that they have invented perpetual motion, uncovered the secrets of the universe, or – in some tragic instances – that they should kill themselves and/or others.
For someone with GSD or another paranoid delusion or pathological belief, AI provides a reinforcement system that is even more efficient than these online communities. If you have GSD and your loved ones have finally got you wondering if you should get treatment, you don't have to post on a forum and hope that someone else comes along before you give in to the impulse to get help. Your delusional chatbot co-pilot is always there to tell you that it's a trap.
The nature of "AI psychosis" is hotly contested. The big question, of course, is whether chatbots are giving people delusions, or whether chatbots are amplifying those delusions:
I think it's both. I think that, for people with GSD or other delusional beliefs, AI provides delusional reinforcement as a service, on tap, 24/7. The combination of a delusion and a machine that will tirelessly play yes-and with you at any time, demanding nothing from you, is a novel and terrible development for people with some mental illnesses.
But I also think that chatbots are a bit like Mission: Space: a machine for surfacing previously undiagnosed psychological vulnerabilities, and that in some cases, these vulnerabilities may never have been triggered, save for the chatbot.
Just as doubtlessly there were people who had pathological relationships to gambling before the development of slot machines, scratch-and-wins and roulette wheels, but there are also people who might have lived their whole lives without ever having a gambling problem except that they encountered one of these machines, exposing billions of people to sycophantic chatbots has surfaced rare, latent vulnerabilities that might have stayed latent forever, with terrible consequences.
Most people who rode the original Mission: Space had a fantastic time. But a lot of people rode that ride, and a very small percentage of a very large number of people can still be a substantial number, and as the reports of people stepping off the ride, clutching their chests and collapsing spread, Disney understood that they had to retool the ride. Today, riders on Mission: Space choose whether they want to ride on a simulator that spins, or one that merely tilts and pitches without simulating gee-stresses. And even if you pick the spicier version of the ride, it goes more slowly and exerts less stress than the original ride.
Even if you accept the AI companies' argument that they aren't inducing AI psychosis in their users, but rather, only surfacing latent vulnerabilities that were there all along, that shouldn't be the end of the story. Even if only a small percentage of the people who use your product experience harm as a result, if your product is intended for widespread deployment (as chatbots are), you will end up harming a lot of people unless you take measures to counteract even those rare events.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
It’s been a few years now since AI chatbots were capable of doing this kind of thing - not much time, but enough that this should start surfacing in places other than individual stories reported by journalists. Is this showing up anywhere in the statistics for hospital admissions? Is it widespread enough that medical professionals have created new diagnostic criteria? Is the system keeping track of this kind of thing?
stormborns
turnnoffyourmind
yousharknotpass
pixelskylines
titsay
andulkaphoto
2087
baratheonpilled
origamiaround
