Zum Inhalt der Seite gehen


RE: mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11621964…

I wish I could recommend this piece more, because it makes a bunch of great points, but the "normal technology" case feels misleading to me. It's not _wrong_, exactly, but radium paint was also a "normal technology" according to this rubric, and I still very much don't want to get any on me and especially not in my mouth

Als Antwort auf Glyph

The "critic psychosis" thing is tedious and wrong for the same reasons Cory's previous "purity culture" take was tedious and wrong, a transparent and honestly somewhat pathetic attempt at self-justification for his own AI tool use for writing assistance. It pairs very well with this Scientific American article, which points out that pedestrian "writing AI tools" influence their users in subtle but clearly disturbing ways. scientificamerican.com/article…
Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (2 Tage her)
Als Antwort auf Glyph

Cory also correctly points out that "AI psychosis" is probably going to be gatekept by medical establishment scicomm types soon because "psychosis" probably isn't the right word and already carries an unwarranted stigma. And indeed, I think the biggest problem with "psychosis" as a metaphor is going to be that the ways in which AI can warp our minds are mostly NOT going to be catastrophic psychosis, and are not going to have great existing analogs in existing medical literature.
Als Antwort auf Glyph

If I could use another inaccurate metaphor, AI psychosis is the "instant decapitation" industrial accident with this new technology. And indeed, most people having industrial accidents are not instantly decapitated. But they might get a scrape, or lose a finger, or an eye. And an infected scrape can still kill you, but it won't look like the decapitation. It looks like you didn't take very good care of yourself. Didn't wash the cut. Didn't notice it fast enough. Skill issue.
Als Antwort auf Glyph

More to the point though in this metaphor where you're getting a potentially-infected scrape at work, we are living in the pre-germ-theory age of AI. We are aware that it might be dangerous sometimes, but we don't know to whom or why. We are attempting to combat miasma with bloodletting right now, and putting the miasma-generator in every home before we know what it's actually doing.
Als Antwort auf Glyph

For me, this is the body horror money quote from that Scientific American article:

"participants who saw the AI autocomplete prompts reported attitudes that were more in line with the AI’s position—including people who didn’t use the AI’s suggested text at all"

So maybe you can't use it "responsibly", or "safely". You can't even ignore it and choose not to use it once you've seen it.

If you can see it, the basilisk has already won.

Als Antwort auf Glyph

Now, for rhetorical effect, I'm obviously putting this fairly dramatically. Cory points out that people have been doing this *to each other* mediated by technology, in emergent and scary ways, with no need for AI. He shows that people prone to specific types of delusions (Morgellons, Gang Stalking Disorder) have found each other via the Internet and the simple availability of global distributed communication has harmed them. But obviously that has benefits, too.
Als Antwort auf Glyph

I'm open to a future where we do some research and figure out the limits of how AI influence works, and where the safety valves are, and also the extent to which it's *fine* that AI can influence our views because honestly many different kinds of stimuli can influence our views, not least of which is each other. But it sure looks right now like it has a bunch of very dangerous feedback loops built-in, and it's not clear how to know if you're touching one.
Als Antwort auf Glyph

But, as Cory puts it:

"""
It is nuts to deny the experiences these people are having. They're not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They're not generating tech debt at scale.
"""

I had a very visceral emotional reaction to this particular paragraph, and I find it very important to refute. Here are two points to consider:

Als Antwort auf Glyph

1. YES THEY ARE.

They are vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They are generating tech debt at scale. They don't THINK that that's what they're doing. Do you think most programmers conceive of their daily (non-LLM) activities as "putting in lots of bugs"? No, that is never what we say we're doing. Yet, we turn around, and there all the bugs are.

With LLMs, we can look at the mission-critical AWS modules and ask after the fact, were they vibe-coded? AWS says yes arstechnica.com/civis/threads/…

Als Antwort auf Glyph

2. If it is "nuts" to dismiss this experience, then it would be "nuts" to dismiss mine: I have seen many, many high profile people in tech, who I have respect for, take *absolutely unhinged* risks with LLM technology that they have never, in decades-long careers, taken with any other tool or technology. It reads like a kind of cognitive decline. It's scary. And many of these people are *leaders* who use their influence to steamroll objections to these tools because they're "obviously" so good
Als Antwort auf Glyph

The very fact that things like OpenClaw and Moltbook even *exist* is an indication, to me, that people are *not* making sober, considered judgements about how and where to use LLMs. The fact that they are popular at *all*, let alone popular enough to be featured in mainstream media shows that whatever this cognitive distortion is, it's widespread.
Als Antwort auf Glyph

Furthermore, it is not "nuts" to dismiss the experience of an LLM user. In fact, you must dismiss all experiences of LLM users, even if the LLM user is yourself. Fly by instruments because the cognitive fog is too thick for your eyes to see.

Because the notable, novel thing about LLMs, the thing that makes them dangerous and interesting, is that they are, by design, epistemic disruptors.

They can produce symboloids more rapidly than any thinking mind. Repetition influences cognition.

Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (2 Tage her)
Als Antwort auf Glyph

I have ADHD. Which means I am experienced in this process of self-denial. I have time blindness. I run an app that tells me how long I've been looking at other apps, because if I trust my subjective perception, I will think I've been looking at YouTube for 10 minutes instead of 4 hours. Every day I need to deny my subjective feelings about how using software is going, in order to function in society.
Als Antwort auf Glyph

This disability gives me a superpower. I'm Geordi with the visor, able to see what everybody else's regular eyes are missing. This is basically where the idea for blog.glyph.im/2025/08/futzing-… originally came from: since I already monitor my time use, and I noticed that my time in LLM apps was WAY out of whack, consistently in "hyperfocus" levels of time-use, without any of the subjective impression of engagement or pleasure. Just dull frustration and surprising amounts of wasted time.
Als Antwort auf Glyph

The suggestion that the article makes is all about passive monitoring of the amount of time that your LLM projects *actually* take, so you can *know* if you're circling the drain of reprompting and "reasoning". Maybe some people really *are* experiencing this big surge in productivity that just hasn't shown up on anyone's balance sheet yet! But as far as I know, nobody bothers to *check*!
Als Antwort auf Glyph

I don't want to be a catastrophist but every day I am politely asking "this seems like it might be incredibly toxic brain poison. I don't think I want to use something that could be a brain poison. could you show me some data that indicates it's safe?" And this request is ignored. No study has come out showing it *IS* a brain poison, but there are definitely a few that show it might be, and nothing in the way of a *successful* safety test.