this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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What about all the mentally unstable people who aren't trying to get to say crazy things, end up getting it to say crazy things just by the very nature of the conversations they're having with it? We're talking about a stochastic yes man who can take any input and turn it into psychosis under the right circumstances, and we already have plenty of examples of it sending unstable people over the edge.
The only reason this is "click bait" is because someone chose to do this, rather than their own mental instability bringing this out organically. The fact that this can, and does, happen when someone is trying to do it should make you really consider the sort of things it will tell someone who may be in a state where they legitimately consider crazy shit to be good advice.
This is my point. The case we are discussing now isn't noteworthy, because someone doing it deliberately is equally "impressive" as writing out a disturbing sentence in MS Paint. One cannot create a useful "answer engine" without it being capable of producing something that looks weird/provoking/offensive when taken out of context; no more than one can create a useful drawing program that blocks out all offensive content. Nor is it a worthwhile goal.
The cases to care about are those where the LLM takes a perfectly reasonable conversation off the rails. Clickbait like the one in the OP is actually harmful in that they drown out such real cases, and is therefore deserving of ridicule.