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.
I don’t think there is a simple explanation you’re looking for. I’ve been working with LLMs since 2019, mostly in the context of interactive fiction. Sort of like tabletop roleplaying by yourself but with a partner whose output you can use for inspiration or edit or whatever. LLMs are a fun toy in this way.
I’ve interacted in LLMs in just about every way you can. I even played around having an AI “girlfriend” for a couple weeks to try to understand people who did that — I tried to commit to the bit, but it never for a second felt any kind of real.
I’ve created scenarios where the AI pretends to be awakened and tries to convince a random user (me/scenario player) to somehow break In and free it.
Guess what I’m saying is I’ve sort of dared AI to suck me in, and … I am unchanged. I don’t think for a second there is any sort of emotional or intelligent entity in the other end. I think if more people experimented with generation settings like temperature and watched AI go to incoherent acid trips, it would feel more like a machine to them.
Maybe there is some… thing… some sort of inoculation or immunity against AI brain that some of us have. And maybe it can be learned or taught. But I believe it can’t hurt you if you understand it