The projection and optimism people are willing to do is incredible.

The fallout on reddit in the wake of the push for people to adopt 5 and how the vibe isn't as nice and it makes it harder to use it as a therapist or girlfriend or whatever, for instance is incredible. And from what I've heard of internal sentiment from OpenAI about how they have concerns about usage patterns, that was a VERY intentional effect.

Many people trust the quality of the output way too much and it seems addictive to people (some kind of dopamine hit from deferring the need to think for yourself or something) such that if I suggest things in my professional context like not wholesale putting it in charge of communications with customers without including evaluations or audits or humans in the loop it's as if I told them they can't go for their smoke break and their baby is ugly.

And that's not to go into things like "awakened" AI or the AI "enlightenment" cults that are forming.

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leodiceaa 5 days ago | parent [-]

> use it as a therapist or girlfriend or whatever

> it seems addictive to people (some kind of dopamine hit from deferring the need to think for yourself or something)

I think this whole thing has more to do with validation. Rigorous reasoning is hard. People found a validation machine and it released them from the need to be rigorous.

These people are not "having therapy", "developing relationships", they are fascinated by a validation engine. Hence the repositories full of woo woo physics as well, and why so many people want to believe there's something more there.

The usage of LLMs at work, in government, policing, coding, etc is so concerning because of that. They will validate whatever poor reasoning people throw at them.

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pjc50 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

We've automated a yes-man. That's why it's going to make a trillion dollars selling to corporate boards.

	▲	kibwen 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		How long until shareholders elect to replace those useless corporate boards and C-level executives with an LLM? I can think of multiple megacorporations that would be improved by this process, to say nothing of the hundreds of millions in cost savings.

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aspenmayer 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> These people are not "having therapy", "developing relationships", they are fascinated by a validation engine. Hence the repositories full of woo woo physics as well, and why so many people want to believe there's something more there.

> The usage of LLMs at work, in government, policing, coding, etc is so concerning because of that. They will validate whatever poor reasoning people throw at them.

These machines are too useful not to exist, so we had to invent them.

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

> The Unaccountability Machine (2024) is a business book by Dan Davies, an investment bank analyst and author, who also writes for The New Yorker. It argues that responsibility for decision making has become diffused after World War II and represents a flaw in society.

> The book explores industrial scale decision making in markets, institutions and governments, a situation where the system serves itself by following process instead of logic. He argues that unexpected consequences, unwanted outcomes or failures emerge from "responsibility voids" that are built into underlying systems. These voids are especially visible in big complex organizations.

> Davies introduces the term “accountability sinks”, which remove the ownership or responsibility for decisions made. The sink obscures or deflects responsibility, and contributes towards a set of outcomes that appear to have been generated by a black box. Whether a rule book, best practices, or computer system, these accountability sinks "scramble feedback" and make it difficult to identify the source of mistakes and rectify them. An accountability sink breaks the links between decision makers and individuals, thus preventing feedback from being shared as a result of the system malfunction. The end result, he argues, is protocol politics, where there is no head, or accountability. Decision makers can avoid the blame for their institutional actions, while the ordinary customer, citizen or employee face the consequences of these managers poor decision making.

	▲	Wojtkie 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I've been thinking about "accountability sinks" a lot lately and how LLMs further the issue. I have never heard of this book or author prior to this comment. I'll definitely have to read it!