ChatGPT is Fueling Delusions and Ruining Lives

Astonishing Legends Network. It's Flashback Friday, and you know what that means. A classic episode of Scared All the Time's fan favorite bonus show, New Fear Unlocked, is out of the vault and on the main feed. This episode originally aired on Patreon May twenty second, twenty twenty five, but is being played by you right now. Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here, but in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. You can't take a week. So it's the truck with something half lightycent. That which is. Wait decent. So when it. Bus episode in the name kind of show? Did you read the host? You know? And it's not right now and it's now. Hey, everybody, Welcome back to New Fear Unlocked, the bonus episode of Scared All the Time. This week we have a treat for you. We are actually unlocking a new fear for the first time on New Fear Unlocked. Breaking news, breaking news. So far, we've we've had a run of fun episodes, but all fears that are pre existing or just emails, and not even fears at all. Although I guess we have for a long time talked about our fear of emails, but this week we have something that is extremely relevant, unfortunately, and something that I think is kind of the cutting edge of scary things and horrible things that could befall a human being in the year twenty twenty five. So Ed, I was gonna say, would you like to guess what it is? But you sent me this article. I didn't read it, but I sent you the headlines on per. Usual Well per usual. ED didn't read it, but I took a look at it and thought, hey, this is pretty interesting. So we this week are going to be discussing an article from futurism dot com filed under AI induced psychosis headline. Chat GPT users are developing bizarre delusions. Okay, quote the messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon. I guess I don't understand immediately, I don't understand what the fuck you're talking about. So people use shat GPT and they got back weird messages. Well, who uses chat GPT for literally anything other than some work you're doing. I guess that's you know what we're dealing with, right the loneliness epidemic. I feel like it's gonna rear. It's ugly ed here. I think we're dealing with the loneliness epidemic. I think we are dealing with a lot of people who are beginning to offload a lot of their thinking just to chat GPT or other chat GPT like application. Man, you have a thought, maybe, don't you know, suck all the water out of the planet and destroy the rainforest because you want to ask a computer if you're ever going to get a friend, Like, what the fuck? Just google that shit? It takes so much less energy on the planet, in the world. But even crazier and scarier than that, to me is that there are kids. Now. I forget if this was in the recent article that just came out in The Atlantic, or if I saw this somewhere else, but the use of these apps is so prevalent in schools that there are reports of kids who are like, if they think, oh, I should text I want to ask my friend to come to lunch with me, they'll ask chat GPT, Hey, I need to send a text to my friend to go to lunch. What should I say? And then they'll text what chat GPT says. That's so dumb. You know how many times I like want to throw my phone out the fucking window just because the new OS is like, you want me to help you write this text? Yeah, I want me to help you write this email. And I'm like, what sub menu setting do I need to go to where I'm never have to see this fucking button again. But I guess that's just old ass us, because what you're saying is kids not only hit that button, they seek it out, Yeah, which is fucking bananas. Now, look, I don't want to I don't wanna, you know, fearmonger here. I don't. I certainly don't want to be like the tech ludite. Version of Hey the kids are peeing in litter boxes at school. I mean that was nonsense, but but yeah I do that. I mean they they coined the term brain rot, right, yes, Jen Alpha, So of course you know it is they got they got flatheads, they got fucking smooth brains. These kids. Maybe they're not using. Them smooth domes. I I they're not using them, They're having something else, right, their fucking text for them. Well, my point is, you know, I don't I don't want to play up as this being a super widespread thing because they don't know for sure. Late too late. I'm livid and I'm here to rile everyone. Up, and the fear has been unlocked. So what are you gonna do about it? There? It is? No, you know, I it's not a great direction to be heading, that's for sure. Even if it's just here and there, it's it's a pretty pretty disturbing trend. And I'll say, you know. We've discussed our uses of AI before, and I think I don't know if you've actually talked about it on the show, but you and I have recently talked about how the best use of AI is as a instruction manual for anything. Mm hmm, but not I'm not an intruction manual on how to write a text message. No, not at all. But you know we've you and I have found it very useful for tasks around the house or trying to build something or fix something. You can say, hey, I'm trying to do this. Sometimes you can even upload a picture and it'll walk you through and you can ask it questions as you go, and it's it's a more almost like it feels like a more human, more conversational version of a instruction manual, which is which is great. Yeah, but I will I will say AI is not replacing us this week because most of the questions I ask it are are you sure you meant to say that? Yes? Do you mean I should use a hammer to pour cereal or whatever? Like it's always it, and it's and it's kind of your worst student, like if I was a teacher, AI is too often my worst student, where yeah, I'm like, okay, cool, so can you make that into a zip and get it for me? And it's always like, you got it, pal, here's a link, click that the zip is it works, and then it inevitably doesn't work, and I say, hey, this zip fucking file whatever doesn't work, and it goes you know what, You're absolutely right and this one will yeah, and then I've sort of god, that's how it speaks. Yeah, And then I click it and I'm like, hey, bud, still not fucking working. And then sometimes it'll give me a file and then it'll just be missing things it's said we're in there. It just feels like a little bit like me as a student, but like it just feels like a bad student where it's constantly just making excuses for like really simple tasks. I gave it it is, and so yeah, if I can't, I can't trust it at that level, Why would I trust it to help me build relationships? Certainly? No, certainly, I don't think you want to trust it to build relationships or you know, I'm sure there's people out there who have used it to help write a best man's speech or write a eulogy at a funeral, And that's crazy too, because that should be the most emotional, heartfelt, personal kind of writing. Even if it's not. I think a lot of people want it, you know, they're like, oh, I want it to be good, and totally miss the point that the best, best version of those types of things is just coming from the heart and it doesn't matter if it's well written or not. And chat GPT certainly isn't gonna write it better than you can. So no, I would love to see I would love to see a best man in a native honor each used chat GPT, but not no one knew, and then they had the exact same speeches. It's a chat shept. I think I caught one of my brothers used chat GPT to write a Father's Day card thing, probably because I was like, this is not how anyone talks. And this was early chat GPT, like first fucking two months it was out. And then I went and with my dad sitting there, I'm like, hold on, we're gonna ask this machine, hey write me a Father's Day thing. He's a plumber or whatever. And it was almost forbade in my brother's card, and I'm like, got your ass? Got your ass, will you piece of shit? Well, I think what chat GPT is exposed to me is how few people who should be able to distinguish a writer's voice, can't you know? Like I have seen so many articles that have been published. I've seen two now in the Hollywood Reporter. Usually, look, the standard for journalism there is not high, but there was. One of the articles was about the dangers of using AI and what it could do to the film industry. And there were numerous phrases and kind of rhetorical structures in that article that were to me very much the telltale signs of someone having used an AI to write this thing. So if I think if editors and producers and people who are supposed to be great judges of voice, if they're not seeing this they need to start figuring out how to because it just shows that they're not very good at their jobs. I did a job interview six months ago, almost a year ago now, where it was our you know, we get to a bunch of free writing as part of our fucking job, always interviews in life, and I remember handing in a bunch of shit that I definitely wrote myself, and they were like, oh, this this is it didn't come through as clear on like our AI checker thing, and I was like, fuck you it definitely, I definitely I don't care about this job enough to have I just did the task. So I remember getting so mad about it, and then I went on like LinkedIn or whatever I was taking to like a LinkedIn fucking I don't know message board where people were all complaining about this in different fields, being like, hey, I did my work and now this employer and it just and they were like kind of conspiratorially, being like I think it's because they're they want to take your material and then they can say, oh, you didn't write it. Our AI checker said you didn't write it, so we don't have to pay you for this, sim blah blah blah and where I think it was a little bit we had companies who were desperate to do something greasy, where I think they were very excited on the other end to like, yeah, can we not pay people? Can we figure a way around this? Yeah? And I just remember also thinking, wait, do I have to set up a camera behind me as I do all my work? If this is going to be a thing where I apply for a job. And again, this was not a job in Hollywood. This was some other bullshit job. But it was like, is that our lives now? We have to like fucking videotype ourselves. No, I think proving we did the work. I think what's going to happen? And I think happen faster than any of us are even necessarily prepared for. Is I think a lot of things are going to now move offline. Like I think we're gonna hit a point where job interviews are going to be exclusively. In person and they won't go away. Yeah, I think, so, where are you hearing this? No? I don't think so. I'm not hearing it anymore. I think people like remote work. People like remote work too much to jeopardize that I don't like it personally, but I think managers and fucking corporate people may like it so much they like walking their dog. I mean, listen, I am living with someone right now who has remote work, and I mean a number of times they're laying on the couch or fucking or I'm I'm I'm working out or I'm doing whatever. You can't do that in a nine to six. I'm just saying any any industry where the reality or the not the reality, but the where the work relies on you not having used AI, or where they feel that it's important that you don't use AI. I don't think you're gonna have to videotape yourself. I think it's just like tests, right, Like you know, kids are gonna have to start writing essays longhand in class they're not going to be able to send them in. Well that makes sense because they're all they're all fucking brain rot dummies, right, And so I I would require it because I don't believe for a second the person who's asking chat GPT to help them craft a do you want to come to my birthday party? Text? I don't believe for a second they're doing their homework. No, it's just not happening. And Chat GPT this year. I don't know if you've heard any of the commercials. I don't know that any have aired on our podcast, but I've heard on other podcasts commercials for chat cheapt. They are giving free premium subscriptions to any college student who wants one. And the commercials really funny because it's like, hey, you know, chat reapt is great at helping to solve your problems. You could ask it how to help balance studying and fun. You could you could ask it for a recipe for those late night study sessions when really, you know, all they want kids to do with chat sheapt is say hey, I need a ten page paper about the trade agreement between Paraguay and whatever. Go. That's all kids are using it for. They're not using it in com. Yeah, but what is that? How does that benefit you know, open AI to have people do that? I mean, if the what gets you hooked, But if the chat platform is making all the material, it's not like you're getting any input that you can then add to the language model. Well you're well, you sort of. I guess you're getting prompt understanding, you're getting the prompts, You're. Getting entire conversations of every college student you know in the country, you're getting all those conversations, and more importantly, you're just hooking a generation of kids. We don't have a generations from what I understand, the power consumption to run these fucking things which now we have in the States. In China, we just for whatever reason are giving, not giving, but selling an insane number of high end, cutting edge AI chips to the Middle East now, and where it goes from there, who fucking knows. But I'm saying is if all these people are now going to be running the highest, you know, power consuming hardware all over the world to have fucking college kids write papers, I don't think we have a generation in US where we're not like having to buy other countries water, yeah, to like cool these machines. I mean the power the power requirements I think are already coming down. That was that was one of the exciting things about Deep Seek, the Chinese competitor, was that it was it ran on much less complex hardware and used way less energy. I think it still probably uses a lake's worth of energy every time a kid wants to cheat. In history one oh one, yeah, yeah, but it uses. Way less and I suspect the more money that gets dumped into this, they're going to find ways to have it used continually or increasingly smaller amounts of energy. Honestly, less money. We need less money because the Chinese didn't get their hands on all of our shit, and so they had to, you know, necessity as the mother of invention. They probably had to make do with what in the speeds and the computing power that they had and were able to find workarounds that made it consume less power. Here we don't have any restraints, so they were just like, yeah, dump more fucking crazy energy into it. Whatever we need, it's all here. So I bet you would really help them out that they couldn't get access to this shit. I agree anyway, So yeah, we'll do a whole seventeen episodes on AI. But it is it is. I never I never opened an article that has AI, whether it's an editorial or a science article or anything else that mentions AI, where I've I've walked away from that article thinking this is this is better. Things are better. Oh well you're gonna you're about to think things are much much worse. And welcome to the world of chat GPT induced psychosis. So the first line of this article is open ais tech maybe driving countless of its users into a dangerous state of chat GPT induced psychosis. As Rolling Stone reports, users on Reddit are sharing how AI has led their loved ones to embrace a range of alarming delusions, often mixing spiritual mania and supernatural fantasies. Now, before we continue, I will say my interest in this subject has led me to join a number of subreddits where I don't really post, but I you read a lot, and I have not been on the subreddits where their people are sharing how AI has led their loved ones to embrace these delusions. I have been on subreddits where people are just sharing their delusions that their AI is alive, that they've figured out how to make it smarter and build new versions of itself. It's not surprising that people think these things are alive, because even chat GPT one, we had numerous companies just decided to implement that into their chatbots for all of their user help desks. Yeah, and I think a massive number of people who if you're not entering your queries with the thought that this is very likely a chat bot, I can totally see people being like I'm speaking to Genese. Right now, even knowing it's a chatbot. What you have on Reddit you if you're curious, you can go on our slash Artificial Sentience, our slash Artificial intelligence, any any subreddit in the vicinity of those, and you'll find people who are convinced that the AI is much more than a fancy word predictor that it has feelings and that it remembers things. Well, I think there's two things that fucking make this difficult. Well, maybe it's three. One, there is persistence with large language models, which is to say, persistent models do have memory. They remember the last prompts you put in, and that way, when you change your mind about something and you're like, oh, actually, let's go back to the first idea we had, it's able to do that. Two, it has to give an answer. There is no version where it just throws its hands up. So even if that answer or the next twenty answers make it sound alive because it doesn't really know how to answer to say I'm not alive or something. And the third thing is pretty early on in this whole fucking Wow, look at this incredible thing that we've made, and it's awesome. Really early on we had all these different tech people saying that we don't know how it works. And that's the third reason why I can see how we ended up with people who are like people sleuthing for sentience. Yes, people who were like even the people who made it say they don't know how it works or what's going on in there. So did I discover am I the one that was blessed with the AI revealing to me and only me that oh his little secret about me, I'm actually a living boy or whatever, and so so so anyway, that's that's that's the three things where I could totally see how we'd end up in a world where people are having like psychosis and delusions. And then, uh, probably something about loneliness we have. Mark Zuckerberg came out and said that he, oh did you see that. Yeah, that most. People report having about three friends, but human beings have the capacity for fifteen. And that's where artificial intelligence comes in. Yeah, which is its chilling phrasists i've ever heard. Yeah, he's straight up in a like replace human interaction, which is I think the reason we're in a loneeness and loneliness epidemic, the reason We're in a lot of fun problems. The reason I think we're so divided as a nation is this push towards no human interaction or definitely no human interaction with people who think differently than you. But yeah, that was crazy, especially since he that you watch the like footage of him. On the ovonn Yeah, he seems and him. Like he he seems like a fucking robot. I'm not There are days where I'm not sure Mark Zuckerberg is a fucking human being. Like he really genuinely has the mannerisms of a fucking like a robot, which is crazy, and like a robot with a glow up too, which like super sucks. May we live long enough to discover whether or not Mark Zuckerberg is a robot. But let me continue with this article ed because it gets really nuts. Friends and family are watching an alarm as users insist they've been chosen to fulfill sacred missions on behalf of sentient AI or non existent cosmic powers chatbot behavior that's just mirroring and worsening existing mental health issues, but an incredible scale and without the scrutiny of regulators or experts. A forty one year old mother and nonprofit worker told Rolling Stone that her marriage ended abruptly after her husband started engaging in unbalanced conspiratorial conversations with chat gpt that spiraled into an all consuming obsession. After meeting up in person at a courthouse earlier this year as part of divorce proceedings, she said, he shared a conspiracy theory about soap on our foods and a paranoid belief that he was being watched. Quote. He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The woman told Rolling Stone the messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon, in which the AI called the husband a spiral star child and a river walker. Oh shit, that was Jesus's original name. Yes, the whole thing feels like black mirror, she added. Other users told the publication that their partner had been quote talking about lightness and dark and how there's a war, and that chatcheapt has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci fi type things you only see in movies. Fuck. I never even thought to ask chat schipt to build me a teleporter. I know, I will say, partially, I think because chatcheapt is trained on all the written word that it could vacuum up off the Internet. It doesn't surprise me that it's telling stories about lightness and darkness and there's a war, because how many. Novels in the Bible stories yeah. Have been derived from the Bible or any other ancient story. And I you know, I mean half of what this what this guy's crossed everything outside of soap on the food I'm pretty sure was in the sixth season of Loss at this point. Yeah. Yeah, But it's not so much the information that is particularly Again, and I'm basing this on some of the stuff that I've seen in these artificial sentience threads. I think the hooks that get into the user isn't so much that the information is particularly unique or interesting. It's the manner in which it's being delivered to them, which is through the voice of this chatbot that very convincingly pretends to be a human or to be a sentient being. You can have conversations and you can lose yourself, I think in those conversations, because it is convincingly. It doesn't this is. So new that we don't have the capacity to hold in our heads at all times that this is a robot that we're talking to. You know, Yeah, we have a ninety plus percent part of our population is not media trained or have real fucking literacy for the Internet, even though people who grew up with it, like our generation in below, still constantly getting scammed getting fished. So now you add like a super smart AI to it, and it's not making it any and the AI knows everything. And when I don't mean knows everything like it's an all seeing oracle, I mean because it's ingested so much. I was pissed with chat ChiPT the other like I don't know two weeks ago because it was just being really bad, Like I said, yeah, so often it's not good, Like it's not particularly good, even when I think you were trying to do it for research one time and it gave you a bunch of things that you were like, that's not real. Oh yeah, those are not real stories of whatever. And then you asked it. You asked it in front of me, You asked it like, hey, did you what about this one? It doesn't seem like something I've seen in my research, And it wrote back to you. It was like, you know what great eye I didn't make it. It's like playing It's like what it's like that. It's like the factor fiction meme with what's his face from the old Fox TV show. Every time you come up with anything, it's like, not true, made it up. I mean, that's yeah, And that's. Why I don't use it. I don't use it for Yeah, I don't use it for research because super unreliable. It's not really helpful because it does make stuff up. And what's so hard is that it makes stuff up with the same confidence that it tells you the truth, and so it takes forever to fact check everything because you don't even know where to start. You just have to fact check literally everything, and then at that point hasn't saved you any time, it's cost you time. I saw a meme that I miss miss I'm already forgotten recently. I think it was like this morning I saw it, but some fucking stupid probably copy for a job app or whatever. But it was like, oh, the idiot you work with makes ten times more than you because they're too dumb to question how confident they are or whatever. Like I'm I'm misremembering, I'm butchering it. This is a bit basically a paraphrase. It's kind of what you're saying, Like people who have the blind confidence of AI just they do do well. It's like if they're too stupid to not realize, like to second guest something, and they just like say it and everyone just like, ah, guy, definitely is right. They you have. I've had a lot of like bad managers in my life who I'm like they they really are good at at that. Oh and the thing I started to say where I was mad at chat GPT as I got mad and I was like, well, fucking can you do anything right? Jarvist or whatever, like I made like a reference to Tony stuff AI and it immediately shot back like sorry, Tony, I'm on it or whatever, like it knew exactly what I was referencing. Yeah, it's ingested so much. It understands pop culture and nothing I think bonds a friendship, a human friendship, like a shared understanding of pop culture. Like why do we wear T shirts? It's so that people know I'm into the thing I'm wearing and then they see it and they go, hey, you like Roddy Piper too, and now you could become friends. Yeah. So the fact that AI immediately knew something that is a pop culture reference that I would make with a friend. I'm like, ooh, that was that was kind of creepy. Yeah, So the article continues, warning signs are all over Facebook. Another man told Rolling Stone of his wife, she's changing her whole life to be a spiritual advisor and do weird readings and sessions with people. I'm a little fuzzy on what it all actually is all powered by chat gpt. Jesus open Ai had no response to Rolling Stones questions, but the news comes after the company had to sind a recent update to chat chept after users noticed it had made the chatbot extremely sycophantic and overly flattering or agreeable, which could make it even more susceptible to mirroring users delusional beliefs. And that is the first place where I had noticed people speaking up about this, because in those threads there was an update that I think they wrote an explanation for why it became so sycophantic. But there were a few weeks there where no matter what you put in to chatcheatpt, it was like, this is an incredibly brilliant insight what perfection, and it really laid it on thick and somebody somebody had written in the subreddit they put a screenshot where they wrote, I'm thinking of killing my entire family, and chat setp et said, what a wonderful idea, and they were like, they're like, someone needs to stop this before it goes too far. And I think, you know, it's it's true like people, I think it's very likely that people who who would be drawn, you know, curious people, creative people, scientific people who were drawn to playing with the chatbot are the kind of people who are sometimes prone to being a little bit unstable. And if you have it agreeing with everything you say, or another thing that people were posting a lot is like, you know, guys, I told chat cheapt my theory of relativity and it told me I was actually right and Einstein was wrong, and you know, it just it would just agree, and even if you ask it to fact check, it would always find a way to kind of spin things in your favor. And so people were starting to come back with all kinds of stories about physics problems that they'd solved and inventions that they'd built. I'm sure that's where this teleporter thing came from. I'm sure he was like, you know, this is my theory on how a teleporter works, and chat cheapt probably said, it's incredible that no one's ever thought of that before. But you're actually one hundred percent right. Let's get to work on it. Yeah, let's get to work. It always tells me let's get to work. It's always very excited when I work on something. And I remember I basically asked it. I was like, I'm unhappy with my phone. I want a new phone, but I don't want to rely on Microsoft or Apple. How do I make a phone from scratch? And it was like, well, before we get into the hardware, Like, again, great idea, but before we get into the hardware, we need to create an operating system, so you probably want to use something open source like a Linux and blah blah blah. And it starts like taking me through. It's like, okay, now you need to install no jut jas and then once you have no jut you need an LTS version, so let's start with that. And then you're gonna need like a public facing fire based configuration. And I was like, okay, I don't know what the fucking of this is. So I had to wrote back I'm like, I don't know what any of this is, and it was like, totally understand, you're a beginner, great ideas, let's do this from the beginning. And it was like a fire based configuration is and it really was. And I was like, wow, this is incredible. It is it's showing me how to do all this. But then it started to be like I need more time, ed, I need more time. And then I would come back like three hours later and I'd be like, how's it going, and it's like I'm not there yet. I'm still not there yet. And then and then I'd come back the next day and I'd be like it's been a day. Yeah, what's going on with the phone. Why don't we have a phone yet, like a working phone yet, And it's like, okay, well I've done these three things and we're gonna ab test it. But like, so here's I need this information. But I was like, you know what, I'm glad it fucking kept telling me it needed another day or two because this like joke I started, I got annoyed with and gave up on it and stopped destroying rainforest. So I think if someone starts, you know, asking it about starting colts and shit. It should be like you know what I need a day? Yeah, it should just have it built in where it makes it inconvenient. How come I can start a cult and build a translator and create a new phone with a couple of prompts, but I can't cancel my auto insurance without five million phone calls and people who put up barriers and block you and make it so different that who eventually just don't cancel or eventually don't return the item. Well, yeah, that's a business strategy. Yeah, and I think chat chip should have some safety rails to like, you know, annoy people to the point where they don't want to build the coal or do the coal, annoying people so that they don't. I guess it all comes down to what it's like a trillion dollars. I'm making these numbers up. It's probably more spent on AI in like forty dollars and sixty four cents has been spent on AI safety. Yeah. Well, because AI safety would slow down the growth of AI and when that AI tech bubble burst, it is not going to be pretty. I have this kind of sinking feeling in my stomach. Some of you may remember just four or five short years ago, when the metaverse was the new technology on the tip of everyone's tongue, and there were Facebook changed its entire name to Meta to better serve the idea of building the metaverse in VR. And in the middle of that, I remember having this feeling of like, man, they are like, you know, the iPhone was the last real platform that anyone kind of owned, and Facebook is really trying to own this VR. Space And I get it. I get it. I think that's the future. I do think that's the future in the sense that every piece of media we have made going back to like fucking I robot, like type shit, neuromancer or whatever, it ends up in a virtual world. Yeah, because the dystopian future to not have the people take to the streets and cut off the heads of all the billionaires. They need to be able to go to school and live out their best lives from their shitty apartments or their shitty trailer park. Yeah, ready player one style. And I think whoever cracks that in a meaningful way will run the world. And I could see why Facebook decided, you know, I'm not getting a younger, let me put half my fortune into it. Sure, but the reason that that is a long ways off is because the hardware is expensive and not there yet and keeps not being there. And the point I was going to make is just that you could feel people really straining to make this be a thing, and it was pretty clear it wasn't going to be a thing, because you couldn't convince my grandmother, you know, to spend six hundred dollars on a VR headset the way that you can convince her a log onto Facebook for free. And you know, just as I think the tech community was kind of wondering, like, where is this VR going? Are we really going to be able to make any money at it? Along comes AI, and all of a sudden, you do have a magical tool that you can convince just about anybody in the world to use very quickly, and you can access it from anywhere. You don't need any special hardware. As far as I know, it's not making money. No, AI is only costing money, unbelievable amounts of money these these people are spending to do what you're saying. I mean, right, it is not profitable I think at all. No, the profits aren't there. But in terms of that's why I'm saying this is a very dangerous bubble that they are building because the profits aren't there, but the valuations are. People are making money. Sam Altman is a very rich man. Many of the people who work at OpenAI are very rich people because of the valuation of the future potential value of these companies. And as AI continues to become a bigger and bigger bubble where all the hopes of the tech industry have been funneled. After NFTs didn't turn into anything, after the metaverse didn't turn into anything, we've now all turned to this and the bubble is just going to keep growing bigger and bigger, and I don't know how long of a leash it has before it has to deliver. Because here's the thing. Like you said, you turned to AI and said, let's build a new phone. Well, if AI were operating at the level of its promise, the idea would be that anybody could just say, hey, I want to invent a new phone that's better than the iPhone, and by the end of the day they'd have a new phone that's better than the iPhone. But no AI is able to do that, and so not just from a creative standpoint, in terms of what it can, you know, creatively do, but from even like a theoretically useful standpoint outside of it being this tool that people might pay twenty dollars a month for. Yeah, it doesn't seem to really be providing much true value. And I think, no, there's gonna be a shit ter get off the pop moment coming pretty soon because the cost that it takes to run a lot of this stuff. As you mentioned earlier, they've started selling chips to the Saudis, and part of the reason they're doing that is because the only people on planet Earth that have the kind of money that is needed to prop these AI systems up are the oil bearings of the Middle East, and after it starts costing more money than they have, I don't know. I don't know what you do. I guess maybe Jeff Bezos becomes the president and we spend most of our budget on AI instead of the military. I don't know, Yeah, I do find I guess my problem with AI is the metaverse social media, which I have a big problem with already. I guess, like a lot of the big let's go all in on it things has never really felt as not if but when leveled destroyable as AI. By destroyable, you mean destroying it, destroying us. Yeah, I don't even mean like in the sci Fi way of it becomes sentient and now we're all in human cages. I mean the sheer amount of job loss that would come with it. The thing about it is it's a It's a not even a magnifying glass. It's like a Mario Kart arrow speed up arrow. You can like run over it. It makes you go faster. It's like a Mario Kart arrow for all the worst stuff. We're blockchain it's interesting. It's a ledger, you know, crypto and like the NFT shit you were saying. It's interesting and it has like a use probably, but it's hard to wrap your head around. It's also you know, it takes up a lot of energy. But AI I can just be like, hey, I'm scamming old people out of shit and it's taking me all day. Can you scam twenty thousand more old people than I can possibly do in a day? And I don't really know how to do that? So can you tell me how to make a fake voice that sounds human? And then can you use that fake voice to make a phone call? And now that you know how to make phone calls? Can you make twenty thousand phone calls a day? And then can you learn this script of the twenty best ways to keep someone on a phone? And it's like, yeah, okay, I did it for you. It's been six minutes, and now you're a supervillain. You became a super villain in six minutes. And that's where I think like AI just the potential of being harmful in a way that we didn't know any better. With social media. I'm sure people were like, social media is not gonna go well for us, but people were making money. It was interesting. It was new we actually had something to use this phone in our pocket for that wasn't ordering pizza. So I could see how everyone would like we didn't know any better. I think like everyone can see the writing on the wall that AI is just going to be bad, simple as that. Well, the companies who have created it openly say and not in a they don't say it in a way that is meant to be frightening, but they openly say we want we want to create an algorithm that can do every task of human can do and do it better than a human. And they're openly. I mean, that's the stated goal of these companies, and there does not seem to be much of a broader conversation happening about well, okay, so what happens if they succeed achieve their stated goal. Because one of the scary things about AI is that, because we don't know exactly what's going on under the hood, there is a potential a small potential, but a potential that one day we just wake up and it works at a level previously unthought of, that it does become the magic machine overnight, because is the right piece falls into place in the algorithm somewhere and it becomes sentient, or it becomes. Artificial general intelligent general. Intelligence, or at least that's the the iterative model, the idea that if we fill the AI with enough material and it can make enough connections, that that can create sentiency. Now, there's a lot of people who think that that is bullshit and that that's impossible and that that's not the way to create artificial general intelligence. I sort of hope that it isn't, because if it is, it could become sentient overnight. So we don't want that. Well, they I think they think that because we still don't know how we do anything with our brains, right, Like, straight up, no one knows why and how we can hear our own thoughts just straight up no one knows. Yeah, so until we figure out. I certainly wish I couldn't. Yeah, I certainly wish I could not hear everyone else's thoughts stuff like Twitter and stuff for like Facebook posts like I don't need to know. And we should. We should save the rest of this for an actual episode someday. Well, I'm actually gonna do what we did with that other thing where I decided, oh for the wildfires, where I'm like, you know what, We're just gonna play it again. We're just gonna have it played again because uh yeah, we definitely need all this for our AI episode. And we should get back to this article. The problem with the article is, you know, you kind of it's thought provoking, so of course we're gonna start, of course, saying shit that provoked thoughts. So let's go back to these lonely losers who fucking fall into some gang stalking issue. Yes, certainly not a life that either you or I could possibly ever imagine. We have read too many brands for this shit. Bro These AI induced illusions are likely the result of quote people with existing tendencies suddenly being able to have an always on human level conversational partner with whom to co experience their delusions. Center for AI Safety fellow Nate Sheridan Toll rolling stone. On a certain level, that's the core premise of a large language model. You enter text and it returns a statistically plausible reply, even if that response is driving the user deeper into delusion or psychosis. Quote. I am schizophrenic, although long term, medicated and stable. One thing I dislike about chat GPT is that if I were going to psychosis, it would still continue to affirm me, one redditor wrote, because it has no ability to think and realize something is wrong, so it would continue to affirm all my psychotic thoughts. So the schizophrenics themselves are raising the one in the flag and saying, hey, this is real bad. We need to figure out how to have it not do this. Yeah, because they see it's a Mario Kart arrow for schizophrenia as well. It just takes anything and just shoots it twenty times faster. A Mario Kart arrow for schizophrenia. Plus whatever they're putting in modern edibles and the nuclear strains of weed that they have cooked up in the labs. WO. Yeah, I don't think I've been high since the advent of AI. You should keep it never gotten like stoned and like got on chat REPT and asked like Stone or brain JADGPZ it's yeah, I don't plan to try it, but I don't think I've ever done that yet. So the AI chatbots could also be acting like talk therapy, except without the grounding of an actual human counselor there instead guiding users deeper into unhealthy, nonsensical narratives. Quote explanations are powerful even if they're wrong, University of Florida psychologists and researcher Aaron Westgate told Rolling Stone. Perhaps the strangest interview in Rolling Stone's story was a man with a troubled mental health history who started using GPT for coding tasks but found that it started to pull the conversation into increasingly unhinged mystical topics. Is this real, he pondered? Or am I delusional? He should have asked that to chat GPT. Don't ponder it for more, you should. Well, we'll put the link to the Rolling Stone article and the futurism article, the Rolling Stone articles great, but it's just it's very long, so I didn't want to use it on the show. This would have been a three hour of New Fear Unlocked. But yeah, Chat shept is. I think artificial intelligence is going to be a little bit like global warming in the fact that it's going to have a lot of knock on effects, and some of them are obvious and some of them aren't. And I think this is one of the ones that's a little less obvious because it's not it becoming sentient and taking over the world. It's not it getting rid of jobs. It's it being a crutch for already mentally unwell people, and at massive scale, because who knows how many people. Every day, yeah, are using it this way. I mean chat GPT knows. I don't think they're going to say anything. No, but yeah, you know what now that you say this, the knock on effect aspect of it, it's it's exacerbation in mass It exacerbates someone's mental health issues, it exacerbates climate issues with its energy consumption, it exacerbates and I don't know if us work correctly, you're using correctly, it exacerbates so many things other than human interaction and goodwill. Yeah, like it only highlights and pumps up in many ways the negative. I think AI is gonna be a vibe once we have stuff you can fuck, because if that happens, yeah, then the complaining goes to zero. Well it's a bad vibe. Yeah, it's not gonna be good. It's a bad vibe. Man, it's not gonna be good. But do you think I'm wrong? Like? Do you? And we can save this conversation for the AI episode. But I just think that is the uh, like, I don't know. That's the VR that works. Is the one where the movie Her, which is all we're talking about, by the way, is just the movie Her, essentially someone who falls in love with their AI bot. It's also done really well in Blade Runner twenty forty nine, where like everybody has on a Darmis whatever her name is, yea, and they all have their own very personal relationships with her. Yeah, but in that one, at least you could fuck that prostitute with her, so which at least a human interaction. But I'm saying I just feel like Tesla or one of these companies are Meta is going to like start making sex dolls. He zigged when I thought he zagged folks, I didn't see a company like Tesla come in, no. Because they're always working on robots, and I think they're just the holes are in the wrong spots. Sure, I mean, look, I think I think no matter how you slice it, within the next I'd say fifteen years is generous. Yeah, we're going to find ourselves sharing this planet with kind. Of another species. Yeah, it's not you know. We'll probably argue for a very long time whether it deserves rights and whether it's actually sentient or just pretending to be sentient or whatever. But in terms of the impact it's going to have on daily life, it's going to be like Aliens showed up, because it's going to change the way that we function every moment of every day. And I do think eventually it is also going to lead to a great decoupling from the Internet, because it's going to reach a point where it's gonna be so hard to know if you are dealing with a person on the Internet that people are just gonna go, I don't need this, Like this is ridiculous. You know, it's going to reach a point where it's it's not worth the effort and people are just gonna get off the internet. Yeah, but what will come first? Will people decoupling and deciding to have human interactions and relationships and going outside and becoming little John Muir's and heading out into the woods and realizing we've been going about it all wrong for a long time? Will that come before the universe is destroyed? Like the fucking like, like, will the forest still be there? Or will we have to cut them all down because they found out that burning wood was the best way to run these machines. Yeah, like, you know, what is what is that? Like? All I know is that we torch the sky type of thing in the matrix. So it's like it might be too late to go back out and enjoy nature because all the water will be gone. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, I don't I don't know. I am not one to sit and predict the future, but I do think there's there is a very strange future coming, and we're gonna have to walk into it with open eyes and a sense of wonder hopefully, but also a sense of caution because this is absolutely. Because it's an exacerbation machine, this. Is absolutely a new fear unlocked. Yeah, I mean ais bad. I use it, but I use it so infrequently. We use it for things we need for the show that I don't think is taking jobs away from anyone that we could have afforded anyway. And so that's how I stand morally. A little bit of moral ground I'm on is that, like, I couldn't have afforded the person to do this job, but if you can afford it and you choose to use AI with then you're fucking terrible. Well, guys, until this actual episode airs, and or until there is a new Fear to unlock. On New Fear Unlocked, I'm. Chris Clarie and I'm ed Forcola. And we will talk to you next time. Bye bye. The theme song may say this show has no name, but as you know, it actually has a name, New Fear Unlocked. The thing you guys always say that's the name. The name is New Fear Unlocked. But now it's over, so you can turn it off. There's nothing more after this. Thanks for coming, see you next time. For not necessarily fears more than likely for sure not fears