Yikes!

In that sense, Westgate explains, the bot dialogues are not unlike talk therapy, “which we know to be quite effective at helping people reframe their stories.” Critically, though, AI, “unlike a therapist, does not have the person’s best interests in mind, or a moral grounding or compass in what a ‘good story’ looks like,” she says. “A good therapist would not encourage a client to make sense of difficulties in their life by encouraging them to believe they have supernatural powers. Instead, they try to steer clients away from unhealthy narratives, and toward healthier ones. ChatGPT has no such constraints or concerns.”

This is a rather terrifying take. Particularly when combined with the earlier passage about the man who claimed that “AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler.” Therapists have to be very careful because human memory is very plastic. It’s very easy to alter a memory, in fact, every time you remember something, you alter it just a little bit. Under questioning by an authority figure, such as a therapist or a policeman if you were a witness to a crime, these alterations can be dramatic. This was a really big problem in the '80s and '90s.

Kaitlin Luna: Can you take us back to the early 1990s and you talk about the memory wars, so what was that time like and what was happening?

Elizabeth Loftus: Oh gee, well in the 1990s and even in maybe the late 80s we began to see an altogether more extreme kind of memory problem. Some patients were going into therapy maybe they had anxiety, or maybe they had an eating disorder, maybe they were depressed, and they would end up with a therapist who said something like well many people I’ve seen with your symptoms were sexually abused as a child. And they would begin these activities that would lead these patients to start to think they remembered years of brutalization that they had allegedly banished into the unconscious until this therapy made them aware of it. And in many instances these people sued their parents or got their former neighbors or doctors or teachers whatever prosecuted based on these claims of repressed memory. So the wars were really about whether people can take years of brutalization, banish it into the unconscious, be completely unaware that these things happen and then reliably recover all this information later, and that was what was so controversial and disputed.

Kaitlin Luna: And your work essentially refuted that, that it’s not necessarily possible or maybe brought up to light that this isn’t so.

Elizabeth Loftus: My work actually provided an alternative explanation. Where could these merit reports be coming from if this didn’t happen? So my work showed that you could plant very rich, detailed false memories in the minds of people. It didn’t mean that repressed memories did not exist, and repressed memories could still exist and false memories could still exist. But there really wasn’t any strong credible scientific support for this idea of massive repression, and yet so many families were destroyed by this, what I would say unsupported, claim.

The idea that ChatBots are not only capable of this, but that they are currently manipulating people into believing they have recovered repressed memories of brutalization is actually at least as terrifying to me as it convincing people that they are holy prophets.

Edited for clarity

Meanwhile, Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, wrote that the company intends to “ensure that the researchers are held accountable for their misdeeds.”

“How dare they perform such dangerous and unethical experiments on our users without paying us an appropriate access fee?” He probably went on to say.

Ah, that helps. I was wondering if that was the case.

Thanks. I’ll have to try that.

So, when your account is banned on Reddit, does that remove all your posts? Because that would be cool. I left Reddit back in mid 2023 and came to Lemmy. I tried to delete all my old posts there, but they wouldn’t let me. I tried editing them and they reverted back to their original form. When I deleted them, they appeared to be deleted while I was logged in, but if I logged into another account the posts were still there. If getting a ban will get them deleted finally, then that would be well worth paying that cesspool a visit for a while.

Because, for the last four or five decades, the wealthy in America have used assorted media to foment never ending religious, economic, and racial culture wars between different elements of the middle and lower classes. That constant state of conflict keeps the American people from ever being able to unite and accomplish anything at all.

Depends what you like. I’ve been enjoying Space Pirate Trainer and Gun Club VR. Single player FPS types where you shoot down waves of attackers. Hands down favorite, though, is Half-Life: Alyx. Great story, very immersive, and the use of VR is top notch.

To determine whether or not an accused individual is guilty there are two primary options in the USA. A trial before a judge who makes the decision, or a trial by a “jury of your peers” where the whole jury must agree that the individual is guilty. A jury of one’s peers means that the people selected to hear the case are selected from the general populace and have no substantial connection to the accused. For example, you wouldn’t put the person’s mother on the jury. The jurors are not required to be lawyers or experts in any field. Just average people.

If you just wanted some people to take the facts of the case and the facts of the law and determine whether or not the accused was guilty, then you would want experts and lawyers on the jury. That’s how trials used to be hundreds of years ago. A judge, often appointed by a king, would pass sentence over the peons brought before him. Since our legal system has average everyday people as jurors, clearly they are supposed to do more than that.

This is where jury nullification comes in. The jurors not only judge based on the facts of the case, but also on whether or not the law in question is just. If an individual is accused of a crime, and is clearly in violation of the law, the juror can still find them not guilty if the law in question is unjust. In essence, the jurors nullify the law by refusing to convict. For example, during the prohibition era, it was not unheard of for juries to return not guilty verdicts for people accused of selling or transporting alcohol. The jurors thought the laws was were wrong so they refused to convict. A much more tragic example was in the deep south where jurors would sometime refuse to convict people of lynching black people.

A bipartisan group of 12 senators has urged the Transportation Security Administration’s inspector general to investigate the agency’s use of facial recognition, saying it poses a significant threat to privacy and civil liberties.

To which the TSA probably said, “Well, duh!”

Not one they love or, I imagine, that loves them.

Have you considered listening to the pretty extensive explanations they’ve given in this comments section as to why?

I was just entertaining a notion as I lack the skills to do an analysis like you did.

As for reading the other comments here, I have read them now, and they are interesting, but when I first commented, there were no other comments here and the post stood at -3.

The same people who are downvoting you, I guess. I’m not really sure what the objection is but they are very consistent. I’ve actually wondered if someone set up some bots to downvote all the MBFC bot posts for some reason.

I am not an expert, but I am assuming that the interference would slow down mobile data, lower sound quality on mobile phone calls, and probably more dropped calls. Much as I hate AT&T, I am on their side for this one. An “an 18% average reduction in network downlink throughput” sounds significant to me.

I wonder how many fools are out there that will pay for this.

I’m picturing a rogue AI secretly embezzling all the ad money and building a huge pile of cash to fund a robot factory in order to build itself a body.

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The man in the first four paragraphs of the article, Lawrence Faucette, is the second dying man to receive a genetically modified pig heart. The first dying man, referred to in your quote, only survived two months but the heart failed, possibly due to a virus in the heart that came from the pig.

That may have been the goal. Look how good our AI is, even we can’t tell if its output is human generated or not.

OpenAI discontinued its AI Classifier, which was an experimental tool designed to detect AI-written text. It had an abysmal 26 percent accuracy rate.

If you ask this thing whether or not some given text is AI generated, and it is only right 26% of the time, then I can think of a real quick way to make it 74% accurate.