The moderators of a pro-artificial intelligence Reddit community announced that they have been quietly banning “a bunch of schizoposters” who believe “they’ve made some sort of incredible discovery or created a god or become a god,” highlighting a new type of chatbot-fueled delusion that started getting attention in early May.
This feels a bit like PTA-driven panic about kids eating Tide Pods when like one person did it. Or razor blades in Halloween candy. Or kids making toilet hooch with their juice boxes. Or the choking game sweeping playgrounds.
But also, man on internet with no sense of mental health … sounds almost feasible.
I directly work with one of these people - they admit to spending all of their free time talking to the LLM chatbots.
On our work forums, I see it’s not uncommon at all. If it makes you feel any better, AI loving is highly correlated with people you shouldn’t ever listen to in the first place.
What an absolutely pathetic life that is holy shit
The Internet is a pretty big place. There’s no such thing as an idea that is too stupid. There’s always at least a few people who will turn that idea into a central tenet of their life. It could be too stupid for 99.999% of the population, but that still leaves about 5 000 people who are totally into it.
And the glory of the interwebz is that those 5000 people are bound to find each other and start a movement around it, where just 25 years ago they would have been laughed out of the local pub as a raving idiot…
And that’s exactly why we have flat-earthers, antivaxxers and “truthers” of various kinds. Although, due to the same phenomenon, we also have communities like !WhatsThisRock@lemmy.world, !capybara@lemmy.smeargle.fans, !NatureIsMetal@kbin.social, !captionthis@hilariouschaos.com, !HandmadeMarketplace and so many other interesting and quirky places. You win some, you loose some.