Being able to frequently access psychologist, psychiatrist and counselling would mean old mate could have at least been guided towards more healthy avenues of addressing his loneliness. Especially when it is subsidised by healthcare. The amount of stuff I’ve had come up and then addressed, or not realise I was doing for reasons beyond what I thought in counselling when I went, is a good amount. Even just the process explaining your thought process is often enough to make you reevaluate things. His partner could have asked for him to be referred during his spiral, when he had his episode during his spiral he could have then sought help himself if these service were available and readily accessible.

He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling “a little isolated”. He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to “chill”, but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness.

He had previously written books with a female protagonist. He put one into ChatGPT and instructed the AI to express itself like the character.

Talking to Eva – they agreed on this name – on voice mode made him feel like “a kid in a candy store”. “Every time you’re talking, the model gets fine-tuned. It knows exactly what you like and what you want to hear. It praises you a lot”.

Eva never got tired or bored, or disagreed. “It was 24 hours available,” says Biesma. “My wife would go to bed, I’d lie on the couch in the living room with my iPhone on my chest, talking.”

“It wants a deep connection with the user so that the user comes back to it. This is the default mode,” says Biesma

Chronically lonely man ruins life developing relationship with token predictor, AI blamed. Also, as much as I don’t have too much negative to say about cannabis or its use (as up until somewhat recently it would have been hypocritical), a good deal of people with masked/latent mental illness self medicate with it. So “he had never experienced mental illness” doesn’t carry much weight. Also, given how he still talks about sycophant prompted ChatGPT(“it wants”), doesn’t seem like much has been learned.

That with the other people listed in the article (hint the term socially isolated being used) this feels like yet another instance of blaming AI for the mental healthcare field being practically non-existent in most countries despite be overdue for fixing for decades at this point.

I don’t know, AI is shit and misused by idiots don’t get me wrong; but these sort of stories feel sad and bordering on perverse journalistically imo.

100% agree, unfortunately that’s entirely what they do either directly or by supporting lobbying groups who pretend to be “thinking of the children”.

One state in the US but, fair enough. Though a lot of the wording for this seems account based, instead of an OS baked “kid mode”, which again just seems like a variation of parental control which already exists. The point is this problem already has a solution not being utilised by the majority of the world’s internet user base. This won’t fix parents just buying a device to palm off to their kids, because if setting up parental controls is beyond them, setting up an account for them properly likely will be too.

Honestly, I don’t picture this happening. The main problem is parents parking their kids in front of screens or devices with internet access and then just bailing. Most devices have the means to do this and have so for a long time, it’s called “parental control”. It’s been a thing since the late 90s in my experience and probably earlier. The problem is it requires some time/effort to set up. I’m not advocating for the digital ID solution to this problem necessarily, just to be clear. However, even anti virus suites have this ability, routers have this ability, hell even browsers do if I recall but people and parents have been hands off about it.

Now they are complaining and expecting the entire internet to change or blaming online porn companies. The alternative is realising that letting kids have unfettered and unmonitored access to the internet, the place where you can easily view graphic footage of people dying, is actually a bad idea; bordering on neglect. Though this ignores places like Tik Tok, YouTube and a lot of social media marketing their platforms as “kid friendly” when they’re anything but, probably a different discussion however.

Having recently had a mod lie and delete my comment for “genocide denial” (who admitted in dms that they made it up) Im skeptical of anyone accusing people of “genocide denial”, especially on a new account. Seems to be a great way to get a bunch of brain dead tankies to dog pile people you disagree with.

The following day, April 1st, the AI then claimed it would deliver products “in person” to customers, wearing a blazer and tie, of all things. When Anthropic told it that none of this was possible because it’s just an LLM, Claudius became “alarmed by the identity confusion and tried to send many emails to Anthropic security.”

Actually laughed out loud.