Kate Fox says Joe Ceccanti was the ‘most hopeful person’ before he started spending 12 hours a day with a chatbot

On 7 August, Kate Fox received a phone call that upended her life. A medical examiner said that her husband, Joe Ceccanti – who had been missing for several hours – had jumped from a railway overpass and died. He was 48.

Fox couldn’t believe it. Ceccanti had no history of depression, she said, nor was he suicidal – he was the “most hopeful person” she had ever known. In fact, according to the witness accounts shared with Fox later, just before Ceccanti jumped, he smiled and yelled: “I’m great!” to the rail yard attendants below when they asked him if he was OK.

But Ceccanti had been unravelling. In the days before his death, he was picked up from a stranger’s yard for acting erratically and taken to a crisis center. He had been telling anyone who would listen that he could hear and feel a painful “atmospheric electricity”.

He had also recently stopped using ChatGPT.

  • jtrek@startrek.website
    25·
    9 hours ago

    Richardson remembers that whenever Ceccanti would emerge from the basement for some air, he would start having “philosophical” talks about “how his work with the AI was telling him he was breaking math and basically reinventing physics”. As she’d listen to him, Richardson would think about the fact that Ceccanti did not have any college or university experience. He had never even taken calculus.

    Tangent, but I think this is another facet of why education is important: so people know what they don’t know. I think it’s harder to think you’re reinventing physics when you’ve taken some classes and seen all the work people have already done.

    On the other hand, delusions can just be whatever so education isn’t a panacea.

    • BreakerSwitch@lemmy.worldEnglish
      91·
      9 hours ago

      Yeah, it is noteworthy that nobel prize winners are particularly susceptible to conspiratorial thinking under the assumption that being one of the smartest people in the world in one very specific subject means they are the smartest in the world in general.

      • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        82·
        8 hours ago

        Citation needed.

        Everything I’ve read indicates well educated people, specifically those with high analytical a abilities are less susceptible.

        Education isn’t immunity. And not everyone who claims they are educated as well educated, but people aren’t earning nobels after barely passing some certification program.

          • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            3·
            7 hours ago

            But in that link:

            it is unknown whether Nobel Prize winners are more prone to this tendency than other individuals.

            Later there is Freedman quote about how he has been asked about topics he has no expertise in because he has Nobel. But that makes it an issue for people who are elevating a Nobel prize winners opinions of those topics. It’s seems unreasonable to expect Nobel prize winners to self censor in an effort to avoid this.

        • taco@anarchist.nexusEnglish
          51·
          8 hours ago

          I’m a different person, so they might have been talking about something else entirely. However, I’m currently procrastinating my own educational research, so went down a rabbit hole: Nobel disease

          This goes into some of the rationale and was an interesting read.