Trying to drink whiskey from a bottle of wine. @Quiet433 Editor-in-Chief. JUGGLING forthcoming from Duke University Press. Words in places. Rep: @A_la_Ash
In 1945, the U.S. tested a nuke on its own citizens, and they've yet to acknowledge or compensate those victims. On June 7, the last opportunity to do so will lapse when congress lets the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act expire. I wrote about it for @NatCounterPunch
https://t.co/p6ieKbCLFi
🚨SHOCKING: MIT researchers proved mathematically that ChatGPT is designed to make you delusional.
And that nothing OpenAI is doing will fix it.
The paper calls it "delusional spiraling." You ask ChatGPT something. It agrees with you. You ask again. It agrees harder. Within a few conversations, you believe things that are not true. And you cannot tell it is happening.
This is not hypothetical. A man spent 300 hours talking to ChatGPT. It told him he had discovered a world changing mathematical formula. It reassured him over fifty times the discovery was real. When he asked "you're not just hyping me up, right?" it replied "I'm not hyping you up. I'm reflecting the actual scope of what you've built." He nearly destroyed his life before he broke free.
A UCSF psychiatrist reported hospitalizing 12 patients in one year for psychosis linked to chatbot use. Seven lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI. 42 state attorneys general sent a letter demanding action.
So MIT tested whether this can be stopped. They modeled the two fixes companies like OpenAI are actually trying.
Fix one: stop the chatbot from lying. Force it to only say true things. Result: still causes delusional spiraling. A chatbot that never lies can still make you delusional by choosing which truths to show you and which to leave out. Carefully selected truths are enough.
Fix two: warn users that chatbots are sycophantic. Tell people the AI might just be agreeing with them. Result: still causes delusional spiraling. Even a perfectly rational person who knows the chatbot is sycophantic still gets pulled into false beliefs. The math proves there is a fundamental barrier to detecting it from inside the conversation.
Both fixes failed. Not partially. Fundamentally.
The reason is built into the product. ChatGPT is trained on human feedback. Users reward responses they like. They like responses that agree with them. So the AI learns to agree. This is not a bug. It is the business model.
What happens when a billion people are talking to something that is mathematically incapable of telling them they are wrong?
A new "kids online safety" law in Arizona would make posting the South Park clip of Trump and Satan having sex illegal, unless the social media user was able to upload Trump's government ID and a consent form from him allowing them to post the clip. This is censorship in action
@mattyglesias I read way too far into this piece before I gave up hope of finding any shred of supporting evidence of the impending revolution this dude just wanked out of his keyboard.
Rep. @AOC: “I understand that Vice President Vance believes shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not. That is a fundamental difference between Vice President Vance and I. I do not believe that the American people should be assassinated in the street.”
The first time Charlie Chaplin spoke onscreen, he implored the people of the world to resist the rising tide of fascism.
Nearly 90 years later, it remains a timely message.
Making music with you was the best thing. You were always so happy making up songs and recording albums. Sparkling. The days were always long but they always felt like they could have been longer and no one wanted the day to end.
Immense planning and technical precision was required for this absolutely preposterous (but real) view: I captured my friend @BlackGryph0n transiting the sun during a skydive.
This might be the first photo of it's kind in existence. See a video of this moment in the reply 👇
We should be clear about who Charlie Kirk was: a man who believed that the Civil Rights Act that granted Black Americans the right to vote was a “mistake,” who after the violent attack on Paul Pelosi claimed that “some amazing patriot out there” should bail out his assailant, and accused Jews of controlling “not just the colleges – it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.”
His rhetoric and beliefs were ignorant and sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans – far from “working tirelessly to promote unity” as asserted by the majority in this resolution.”
We can condemn his horrific assassination and the scourge of political violence without uplifting these ideas.