Thank you for your feedback. I've rewritten the "Forward" to apply your suggestions and will keep them in mind when writing and improving chapters in the future.

Yes. I understand that. Most of us are totally detached and solely unaware of what goes on outside of the bubble we are in. Very few of us actually try to find out what is going outside of the walls of Versailles.

> I would never get so invested in something I didn’t control

Are you saying you're asocial?

> People were saying they'd kill themself if OpenAI didn't immediately undeprecate GPT-4o. I would not have this reaction to a game being shut down.

Perhaps you should read this and reconsider your assumptions.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8943245/

I'm kind of in your side but there's definitely people out there who would self harm if they invested a lot of time in an mmo that got shut down

Gamers threaten all kinds of things when features of their favorite games changes. Including depth threats to developers and threats of self harm and suicide.

Not every gaming subculture is healthy one. Plenty are pretty toxic.

Sadly there are people who become over invested in something that goes away. Be it a game, pop band, a job or a family member.

I worked for a big games company. We shut down game servers, we got death threats. Horses for courses.

I'm kind of surprised it got that bad for people, but I think it's a good sign that even if we're far from AGI or luxury fully automated space communism robots, the profound (negative) social impacts of these chat bots are already kind of inflicting on the world are real and very troublesome.

Your parent commenter was making a Beatles reference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Rigby

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EqMmGlTc_w

I think it's an canary in a coal mine, and the true writing is already on the wall. People that are using AI like in the post above us are likely not stupid people. I think those people truly want love and connection in their lives, and for some reason or another, they are unable to obtain such.

I have the utmost confidence that things are only going to get worse from here. The world is becoming more isolated and individualistic as time progresses.

It has ever been. People tend to see human-like behavior where there is non. Be it their pets, plants or… programs. The ELIZA-Effect.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

Counterpoint, these people are so deep in the hole with their AI usage that they are starting to copy the writing styles of AI.

There's already indication that society is starting to pickup previously "less used" english words due to AI and use them frequently.

Don’t date robots.

https://youtu.be/JPQJBgWwg3o

You think that's bad, see this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Petloss/

Just because AI is different doesn't mean it's "sad and cringe". You sound like how people viewed online friendships in the 90's. It's OK. Real friends die or change and people have to cope with that. People imagine their dead friends are still somehow around (heaven, ghost, etc.) when they're really not. It's not all that different.

It's sad but is it really "cringe"? Can the people have nothing? Why can't we have a chat bot to bs with? Many of us are lonely, miserable but also not really into making friends irl.

It shouldn't be so much of an ask to at least give people language models to chat with.

I am not confident most, if any of them, are even real.

If they are real, then what kind of help there could be for something like this? Perhaps, community? But sadly, we've basically all but destroyed those. Pills likely won't treat this, and I cannot imagine trying to convince someone to go to therapy for a worse and more expensive version of what ChatGPT already provides them.

It's truly frightening stuff.

No. Confront reality. there are some really cooked people out there.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/technology/ai-chatbots-de...

If these 'personalities' disappearing require wholesale model changes then it's not really fickle.

LLMs have default personalities - shaped by RLHF and other post-training methods. There is a lot of variance to it, but variance from one LLM to another is much higher than that within the same LLM.

If you want an LLM to retain the same default personality, you pretty much have to use an open weights model. That's the only way to be sure it wouldn't be deprecated or updated without your knowledge.

Generally it's poor business to give a big chunk of your users am incredibly visceral and negative emotional reaction to your product update.

I just saw a fantastic TikTok about ChatGPT psychosis: https://www.tiktok.com/@pearlmania500/video/7535954556379761...

> I've seen many therapists and [...] their capabilities were much worse

I don't doubt it. The steps to mental and personal wholeness can be surprisingly concrete and formulaic for most life issues - stop believing these lies & doing these types of things, start believing these truths & doing these other types of things, etc. But were you tempted to stick to an LLM instead of finding a better therapist or engaging with a friend? In my opinion, assuming the therapist or friend is competent, the relationship itself is the most valuable aspect of therapy. That relational context helps you honestly face where you really are now--never trust an LLM to do that--and learn and grow much more, especially if you're lacking meaningful, honest relationships elsewhere in your life. (And many people who already have healthy relationships can skip the therapy, read books/engage an LLM, and talk openly with their friends about how they're doing.)

Healthy relationships with other people are irreplaceable with regard to mental and personal wholeness.

> I think you just don't like that LLM can replace therapist and offer better advice

What I don't like is the potential loss of real relationship and the temptation to trust LLMs more than you should. Maybe that's not happening for you -- in that case, great. But don't forget LLMs have zero skin in the game, no emotions, and nothing to lose if they're wrong.

> Hate to break it to you, but "God" are just voices in your head.

Never heard that one before :) /s

Unless you had a really bad upbringing, "caring" about you is not simply not hurting you, not needing anything from you, or not leaving you

One of the important challenges of existence, IMHO, is the struggle to authentically connect to people... and to recover from rejection (from other peoples' rulers, which eventually shows you how to build your own ruler for yourself, since you are immeasurable!) Which LLM's can now undermine, apparently.

Similar to how gaming (which I happen to enjoy, btw... at a distance) hijacks your need for achievement/accomplishment.

But also similar to gaming which can work alongside actual real-life achievement, it can work OK as an adjunct/enhancement to existing sources of human authenticity.

You've illustrated my point pretty well. I hope you're able to stay personally detached enough from ChatGPT to keep engaging in real-life relationships in the years to come.

Yeah I was going to say, as a pilot there is no such thing as "therapy" for pilots. You would permanently lose your medical if you even mentioned the word to your doctor.

Fascinating read. Thanks.

Doc: The encounter could create a time paradox, the result of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the spacetime continuum and destroy the entire universe! Granted, that's a worst-case scenario. The destruction might in fact be very localised, limited to merely our own galaxy.

Marty: Well, that's a relief.

An LLM would, surely, have to:

* Know whether its answers are objectively beneficial or harmful

* Know whether its answers are subjectively beneficial or harmful in the context of the current state of a person it cannot see, cannot hear, cannot understand.

* Know whether the user's questions, over time, trend in the right direction for that person.

That seems awfully optimistic, unless I'm misunderstanding the point, which is entirely possible.

Repeating the sufficient training data mantra even when there’s doctor-patient confidentiality and it’s not like X-rays which are much more amenable to training off than therapy notes, which are often handwritten or incomplete. Pretty bold!

The first link says that patients can't reliably tell which is the therapist and which is LLM in single messages, which yeah, that's an LLM core competency.

The second is "how 2 use AI 4 therapy" which, there's at least one paper for every field like that.

The last found that they were measurably worse at therapy than humans.

So, yeah, I'm comfortable agreeing that all LLMs are bad therapists, and bad friends too.

I do not think there are any documented cases of LLMs being reasonable friends or therapists so I think it is fair to say that:

> All LLMS are bad friends and therapists

That said it would not surprise me that LLMs in some cases are better than having nothing at all.

> Is that just your gut feel?

Here's my take further down the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44840311

> Is that just your gut feel?

An LLM is a language model and the gestalt of human experience is not just language.

The gpt-oss-20b model has demonstrated that a machine with ~13GB of available RAM can run a very decent local model - if that RAM is GPU-accessible (as seen on Apple silicon Macs for example) you can get very usable performance out of it too.

I'm hoping that within a year or two machines like that will have dropped further in price.

You are absolutely right that a rented GPU is not local, but even so it brings you many of the benefits of a local model. Rented hardware is a commodity, if one provider goes down there will be another. Or in the worst case you can decide to buy your own hardware. This ensures you will have continuity and control. You know exactly what model you are using and will be able to keep using it tomorrow too. You can ask it whatever you want.