this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
312 points (97.0% liked)
Technology
83150 readers
4032 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think what we're seeing is similar to lactose intolerance. Most people can handle it just fine but some people simply can't digest it and get sick. The problem is there's no way to determine who can handle AI and who can't.
When I'm reading about people developing AI delusions their experiences sound completely alien to me. I played with LLMs same as anyone and I never treated it as anything other than a tool that generates responses to my prompts. I never thought "wow, this thing feels so real". Some people clearly have predisposition to jumping over the "it's a tool" reaction straight to "it's a conscious thing I can connect with". I think next step should be developing a test that can predict how someone will react to it.
Interesting analogy because: if you consume no lactose, your internal biome loses the ability to metabolize it and therefore you become "lactose intolerant." If you do start consuming lactose again, sooner or later you should also regain the ability to metabolize it (this isn't something that's encoded in your genome, it's encoded in the genome of all the things that live in your gut - a colony with more cells (albeit smaller cells) than your own body.)
Define "real." I have frequently thought "holy shit! This thing has produced a result that would have taken me hours, and it appears to be correct, and like an "NP hard" problem now that I have the proposed solution it's relatively trivial to verify if it is correct or not (and it tends to be correct more than 80% of the time lately.)
Some people get that way about Magic 8 Balls and Ouija boards.
I suspect that the difference is to no small degree correlated with a person's isolation/social-integration.
People who aren't socially integrated have always been more vulnerable to predatory cults and scams. It's because human interactions is a psychological need that's been hardcoded into us by evolution.
Some people say "I don't need human interaction, I enjoy my time alone!" But that's because they have the privilege of enough social acceptance and integration that they get to enjoy their time alone. It's well-established within the field of psychology that true isolation can have a range of deep and far-reaching impacts on a person's well-being.
When people are developing, they need to socialize with their peers; and being unable to do so leads to maladaptive behavior patterns. Even as adults, people need regular social contact or their psychological state can quickly deteriorate. That's why solitary confinement is considered a method of torture in some circumstances, when it's used to depersonalize and destroy a person's sense of self-identity.
So that's why I suspect that people who are well-integrated with friends, family, acquaintances, and coworkers are probably less vulnerable to these sorts of delusions and can treat AI as "just a tool."
But for someone who hardly has any social interaction in a day, has no friends or family to talk to, and maybe their warmest interaction all week was with the clerk at the grocery store, then yeah I'd say it's predictable that they would be vulnerable to getting sucked into this trap of relying on an LLM for their social interaction.
It might be superficial, but it's a way of patching a hole. It's an expedient means to fulfill a need that they're not getting from anywhere else.
If we don't want this sort of stuff happening to people, then maybe we shouldn't ostracize them for being "weird" in the first place. Because nobody learns how to be "normal" by being alone all the time.
This is really good. Thank you for taking the time to write it.
Thank you for understanding. So many times when I discuss things that are adjacent to this topic, I get flamed in the comments with people accusing me of being some sort of redpiller from the manosphere.
Like, no, social isolation is a problem, and it's getting worse due to a variety of factors. To name a few, there's social media algorithms designed to keep people dependent on their phones; there's the long-standing consequences of the pandemic and the collective trauma that had in addition to the atrophied social skills due to quarantine; there's widespread political polarization which keeps tensions high and makes it difficult to navigate new situations if you can't prove you know the right social scripts and avoid any faux pas; there's the whole toxic influencer culture who are grifting on inflammatory rhetoric, ragebait content, exploiting people's vulnerabilities, and radicalizing them (which is a vicious cycle, because they prey on people who are already isolated!); and that's just to name a few!
But if I summarize all that as a "loneliness epidemic," then people call me an incel and act like I'm trying to coerce women into having sex with me simply by acknowledging the fact that social interaction is a deeply-set human psychological need.
Like, using "incel" as an insult is part of the problem. It feeds into this culture where "if you're a man, you must get laid, or else you're worthless." That's literally promoting toxic masculinity!
And it forces these people who are already isolated and vulnerable to go identify with these groups of similarly ostracized people in echo chambers where they're insulated from those insults, where those predatory "influencers" then have fresh pickings of new losers to neg and radicalize.
But somehow, if I point out the problem here (because how can we solve a problem if we can't talk about it?), then to most people's view that makes me part of the problem! Even though, why would I be calling out the pattern if it was something I identify with?
The people radicalizing these vulnerable "losers," yes they should be torched. But the vulnerable "losers" being radicalized need to be treated with compassion if they're ever going to be redeemed. It should be pretty easy to identify who's who, seeing as they have an entire social structure based on hierarchies of dominance and submission...
Starting with: I have found a great many of "those people" to be highly insecure, living in denial and fear that they themselves may be such a "loser" but are putting on the bully face for the world to misdirect people away from the fact that they themselves are very much the same as the people they are bullying.
Surprisingly, the people who have that issues with it aren't the ones who contact to it emotionally, it's the people who offload their decision making to AI
It's more like a codependence spiral than anything else
If they weren't offloading their decision making to AI, they'd be buying gold because a radio advertisement convinced them to, or refusing to pay their back tax penalties because they got advice about how to "beat the system" from someone, etc. etc.
Unnecessary: foolish people always gonna fool. Anyone that far gone in the lacking judgement department demands far more help than anyone can reasonably be expected to provide, and attempting to "foolproof" for them will only drag everyone else down while doing nothing for them. Likewise, just because some people overeat junk food doesn't mean we need to devise some test to decide who can safely get junk food: it's a personal choice, the risks of bad judgement are reasonably understood, & that bullshit's beyond paternalistic.
I bet it's probably correlated with low education as most things
But, is low education the cause of the issues, or just another symptom?
So you're saying there's a chance I can have cheese if I go to college?
Sign me up! Where's the cheddar?
"Look at all that cheddar!" but none for you. You've got to pay your tuition, put in the time, pay your dues, put in the time, work hard, put in the time, and by the time you've outlasted everyone else who got off the merry-go-round, your boss' nephew gets to jump over you in line for the promotion - that's the real education.
Unfortunately Its now in the Dean's pockets 😭
Cults and toxic self-help literature have existed before LLMs copied them. I don't know if LLMs are getting people who couldn't have been gotten by human scammers.
Scams have many different vectors and people can be vulnerable to them depending on their mood or position in life. Testing people on LLM intolerance would be more like testing them on their susceptibility to viruses.
People can be immunocompromised for various reasons, temporarily or permanently, so as a society public hygiene standards (and the material conditions to produce them) are a lot more valuable. Wash your hands after interacting, keep public spaces clean, that sort of stuff.
Many centering on the "unbelievably good deal, act fast before this opportunity gets away..."
Or, expose people to the challenges and teach (their immune systems, their frontal cortex, whatever) to recognize the bad actors and prevent harm before it starts.
Yes, definitely can be a temporary thing which would make it even harder to protect people from. It's also most likely some spectrum. If you're "resistance" is at 10 you may not be at risk even at your lowest point. Other people can be at 5 when they are doing great but risk psychosis when they are down for some reason. I just think it's kind of scary that people interact with it voluntarily (unlike with scammers or cults) without knowing how it will affect them. We all tried LLMs but most of us was lucky so far.
Man walks into a Casino lounge and orders a triple-shot of bourbon before heading off to the poker room... "It's perfectly fine, I can handle it."
I have yet to see any evidence that AI is inducing problems. People with problems use it just like anyone else and others consider that use problematic.
What do you mean? We already figured out, it's exactly like lactose intolerancez duh!
Based