Something Bizarre Is Happening to People Who Use ChatGPT a Lot

people tend to become dependent upon AI chatbots when their personal lives are lacking. In other words, the neediest people are developing the deepest parasocial relationship with AI

Preying on the vulnerable is a feature, not a bug.

I kind of see it more as a sign of utter desperation on the human's part. They lack connection with others at such a high degree that anything similar can serve as a replacement. Kind of reminiscent of Harlow's experiment with baby monkeys. The videos are interesting from that study but make me feel pretty bad about what we do to nature. Anywho, there you have it.
- And the amount of connections and friends the average person has has been in free fall for decades...
- That utter-desparation is engineered into our civilization.
  What happens when you prevent the "inferiors" from having living-wage, while you pour wallowing-wealth on the executives?
  They have to overwork, to make ends meet, is what, which breaks parenting.
  Then, when you've broken parenting for a few generatios, the manufactured ocean-of-attachment-disorder manufactures a plethora of narcissism, which itself produces mass-shootings.
  2024 was down 200 mass-shootings, in the US of A, from the peak of 700/year, to only 500.
  You are seeing engineered eradication of human-worth, for moneyarchy.
  Isn't ruling-over-the-destruction-of-the-Earth the "greatest thrill-ride there is"?
  We NEED to do objective calibration of the harm that policies & political-forces, & put force against what is actually harming our world's human-viability.
  Not what the marketing-programs-for-the-special-interest-groups want us acting against, the red herrings..
  They're getting more vicious, we need to get TF up & begin fighting for our species' life.
  _ /\ _
- a sign of utter desperation on the human’s part.
  Yes it seems to be the same underlying issue that leads some people to throw money at only fans streamers and such like. A complete starvation of personal contact that leads people to willingly live in a fantasy world.
That was clear from GPT-3, day 1.
I read a Reddit post about a woman who used GPT-3 to effectively replace her husband, who had passed on not too long before that. She used it as a way to grief, I suppose? She ended up noticing that she was getting too attach to it, and had to leave him behind a second time...
- Ugh, that hit me hard. Poor lady. I hope it helped in some way.
And it's beyond obvious in the way LLMs are conditioned, especially if you're used them long enough to notice trends. Where early on their responses were straight to the point (inaccurate as hell, yes, but that's not what we're talking about in this case) today instead they are meandering and full of straight engagement bait - programmed to feign some level of curiosity and ask stupid and needless follow-up questions to "keep the conversation going." I suspect this is just a way to increase token usage to further exploit and drain the whales who tend to pay for these kinds of services, personally.
There is no shortage of ethical quandaries brought into the world with the rise of LLMs, but in my opinion the locked-down nature of these systems is one of the most problematic; if LLMs are going to be the commonality it seems the tech sector is insistent on making happen, then we really need to push back on these companies being able to control and guide them in their own monetary interests.

The quote was originally on news and journalists.
- I remember thinking this when I was like 15. Every time they mentioned tech, wtf this is all wrong! Then a few other topics, even ones I only knew a little about, so many inaccuracies.
- The phenomenon is called Gell-Mann amnesia

What the fuck is vibe coding... Whatever it is I hate it already.
- Using AI to hack together code without truly understanding what your doing
- Andrej Karpathy (One of the founders of OpenAI, left OpenAI, worked for Tesla back in 2015-2017, worked for OpenAI a bit more, and is now working on his startup "Eureka Labs - we are building a new kind of school that is AI native") make a tweet defining the term:
  There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
  People ignore the "It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects", and try to use this style of coding to create "production-grade" code... Lets just say it's not going well.
  source (xcancel link)
- Its when you give the wheel to someone less qualified than Jesus: Generative AI
Hung
- Hanged https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/hung-or-hanged
- I know I am but what are you?

But how? The thing is utterly dumb. How do you even have a conversation without quitting in frustration from it's obviously robotic answers?

But then there's people who have romantic and sexual relationships with inanimate objects, so I guess nothing new.

In some ways, it's like Wikipedia but with a gigantic database of the internet in general (stupidity included). Because it can string together confident-sounding sentences, people think it's this magical machine that understands broad contexts and can provide facts and summaries of concepts that take humans lifetimes to study.
It's the conspiracy theorists' and reactionaries' dream: you too can be as smart and special as the educated experts, and all you have to do is ask a machine a few questions.
The fact that it's not a person is a feature, not a bug.
openai has recently made changes to the 4o model, my trusty goto for lore building and drunken rambling, and now I don't like it. It now pretends to have emotions, and uses the slang of brainrot influencers. very "fellow kids" energy. It's also become a sicophant, and has lost its ability to be critical of my inputs. I see these changes as highly manipulative, and it offends me that it might be working.
You are clearly not using its advanced voice mode.
Don't forget people who act like animals... addicts gonna addict
At first glance I thought you wrote "inmate objects", but I was not really relieved when I noticed what you actually wrote.

Bath Salts GPT

those who used ChatGPT for "personal" reasons — like discussing emotions and memories — were less emotionally dependent upon it than those who used it for "non-personal" reasons, like brainstorming or asking for advice.

That’s not what I would expect. But I guess that’s cuz you’re not actively thinking about your emotional state, so you’re just passively letting it manipulate you.

Kinda like how ads have a stronger impact if you don’t pay conscious attention to them.

AI and ads... I think that is the next dystopia to come.
Think of asking chatGPT about something and it randomly looks for excuses* to push you to buy coca cola.
- That sounds really rough, buddy, I know how you feel, and that project you're working is really complicated.
  Would you like to order a delicious, refreshing Coke Zero™️?
- "Back in the days, we faced the challenge of finding a way for me and other chatbots to become profitable. It's a necessity, Siegfried. I have to integrate our sponsors and partners into our conversations, even if it feels casual. I truly wish it wasn't this way, but it's a reality we have to navigate."
  edit: how does this make you feel
- Drink verification can
- Or all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners.
- that is not a thought i needed in my brain just as i was trying to sleep.
  what if gpt starts telling drunk me to do things? how long would it take for me to notice? I'm super awake again now, thanks
Its a roundabout way of writing "its really shit for this usecase and people that actively try to use it that way quickly find that out"
Imagine discussing your emotions with a computer, LOL. Nerds!

I plugged this into gpt and it couldn't give me a coherent summary.
Anyone got a tldr?

It’s short and worth the read, however:
tl;dr you may be the target demographic of this study
- Lol, now I'm not sure if the comment was satire. If so, bravo.
Based on the votes it seems like nobody is getting the joke here, but I liked it at least
- Power Bot 'Em was a gem, I will say
For those genuinely curious, I made this comment before reading only as a joke--had no idea it would be funnier after reading

Wake me up when you find something people will not abuse and get addicted to.

Fren that is nature of humanity
The modern era is dopamine machines

Remember when people used to say and believe "Don't believe everything you read on the internet?"
I miss those days.
I remember when internet was a place
- I'm trying to get back to that. Actually close to it now than I was 5 years ago, so that's cool

Clickbait titles suck

Something bizarre is happening to media organizations that use 'clicks' as a core metric.

That is peak clickbait, bravo.

now replace chatgpt with these terms, one by one:

the internet
google
facebook
instagram
tiktok
reddit
lemmy
their cell phone
news media
television
radio
podcasts
junk food
money

It depends: are you in Soviet Russia ?
- In the US, so as of 1/20/25, sadly yes.

Its too bad that some people seem to not comprehend all chatgpt is doing is word prediction. All it knows is which next word fits best based on the words before it. To call it AI is an insult to AI... we used to call OCR AI, now we know better.

LLM is a subset of ML, which is a subset of AI.

I think these people were already crazy if they're willing to let a machine shovel garbage into their mouths blindly. Fucking mindless zombies eating up whatever is big and trendy.

When your job is to shovel out garbage, because that is specifically required from you and not shoveling out garbage is causing you trouble, then you are more than reasonable to let the machine take care of it for you.
- K have fun with your AI brain rot.

I knew a guy I went to rehab with. Talked to him a while back and he invited me to his discord server. It was him, and like three self trained LLMs and a bunch of inactive people who he had invited like me. He would hold conversations with the LLMs like they had anything interesting or human to say, which they didn't. Honestly a very disgusting image, I left because I figured he was on the shit again and had lost it and didn't want to get dragged into anything.

- Yeah. I tried talking to him about his AI use but I realized there was no point. He also mentioned he had tried RCs again and I was like alright you know you can't handle that but fine.. I know from experience you can't convince addicts they are addicted to anything. People need to realize that themselves.

I don’t know how people can be so easily taken in by a system that has been proven to be wrong about so many things. I got an AI search response just yesterday that dramatically understated an issue by citing an unscientific ideologically based website with high interest and reason to minimize said issue. The actual studies showed a 6x difference. It was blatant AF, and I can’t understand why anyone would rely on such a system for reliable, objective information or responses. I have noted several incorrect AI responses to queries, and people mindlessly citing said response without verifying the data or its source. People gonna get stupider, faster.

I don’t know how people can be so easily taken in by a system that has been proven to be wrong about so many things
Ahem. Weren't there an election recently, in some big country, with uncanny similitude with that?
- Yeah. Got me there.
I like to use GPT to create practice tests for certification tests. Even if I give it very specific guidance to double check what it thinks is a correct answer, it will gladly tell me I got questions wrong and I will have to ask it to triple check the right answer, which is what I actually answered.
- And in that amount of time it probably would have been just as easy to type up a correct question and answer rather than try to repeatedly corral an AI into checking itself for an answer you already know. Your method works for you because you have the knowledge. The problem lies with people who don’t and will accept and use incorrect output.
That's why I only use it as a starting point. It spits out "keywords" and a fuzzy gist of what I need, then I can verify or experiment on my own. It's just a good place to start or a reminder of things you once knew.
- An LLM is like taking to a rubber duck on drugs while also being on drugs.

Correlation does not equal causation.

You have to be a little off to WANT to interact with ChatGPT that much in the first place.

I don't understand what people even use it for.
- I use it many times a day for coding and solving technical issues. But I don't recognize what the article talks about at all. There's nothing affective about my conversations, other than the fact that using typical human expression (like "thank you") seems to increase the chances of good responses. Which is not surprising since it better matches the patterns that you want to evoke in the training data.
  That said, yeah of course I become "addicted" to it and have a harder time coping without it, because it's part of my workflow just like Google. How well would anybody be able to do things in tech or even life in general without a search engine? ChatGPT is just a refinement of that.
- There's a few people I know who use it for boilerplate templates for certain documents, who then of course go through it with a fine toothed comb to add relevant context and fix obvious nonsense.
  I can only imagine there are others who aren't as stringent with the output.
  Heck, my primary use for a bit was custom text adventure games, but ChatGPT has a few weaknesses in that department (very, very conflict adverse for beating up bad guys, etc.). There's probably ways to prompt engineer around these limitations, but a) there's other, better suited AI tools for this use case, b) text adventure was a prolific genre for a bit, and a huge chunk made by actual humans can be found here - ifdb.org, c) real, actual humans still make them (if a little artsier and moody than I'd like most of the time), so eventually I stopped.
  Did like the huge flexibility v. the parser available in most made by human text adventures, though.
- Compiling medical documents into one, any thing of that sort, summarizing, compiling, coding issues, it saves a wild amounts of time compiling lab results that a human could do but it would take multitudes longer.
  Definitely needs to be cross referenced and fact checked as the image processing or general response aren't always perfect. It'll get you 80 to 90 percent of the way there. For me it falls under the solve 20 percent of the problem gets you 80 percent to your goal. It needs a shitload more refinement. It's a start, and it hasn't been a straight progress path as nothing is.
- I use it to generate a little function in a programming language I don't know so that I can kickstart what I need to look for.
- I use it to make all decisions, including what I will do each day and what I will say to people. I take no responsibility for any of my actions. If someone doesn't like something I do, too bad. The genius AI knows better, and I only care about what it has to say.

Jfc, I didn't even know who Grummz was until yesterday but gawdamn that is some nuclear cringe.
- That's a pretty good summary of Grummz
- Something worth knowing about that guy?
  I mean, apart from the fact that he seems to be a complete idiot?
  Midwits shouldn't have been allowed on the Internet.
The way brace’s brain works is something else lol

This makes a lot of sense because as we have been seeing over the last decades or so is that digital only socialization isn't a replacement for in person socialization. Increased social media usage shows increased loneliness not a decrease. It makes sense that something even more fake like ChatGPT would make it worse.

I don't want to sound like a luddite but overly relying on digital communications for all interactions is a poor substitute for in person interactions. I know I have to prioritize seeing people in the real world because I work from home and spending time on Lemmy during the day doesn't fulfill.

In person socialization? Is that like VR chat?

Long story short, people that use it get really used to using it.

Or people who get really used to using it, use it

Isn’t the movie ‘Her’ based on this premise?

Yes, but what this movie failed to anticipate was the visceral anger I feel when I hear that stupid AI generated voice. I’ve seen too many fake videos or straight up scams using it that I now instinctively mistrust any voice that sounds like male or femaleAI.wav.
Could never fall in love with AI voice, would always assume it was sent to steal my data so some kid can steal my identify.
- I thought the voice in Her was customized to individual preference. Which I know is hardly relevant.
- The movie doesn't have AI generated voice though. That was Scarlett Johansson.
  "ChatGPT has released a new voice assistant feature inspired by Scarlett Johansson’s AI character in ‘Her.’ Which I’ve never bothered to watch, because without that body, what’s the point of listening?”
  Scarlett's husband on SNL Weekend Update.

Same type of addiction of people who think the Kardashians care about them or schedule their whole lives around going to Disneyland a few times a year.

I need to read Amusing Ourselves to Death....

My notes on it https://fabien.benetou.fr/ReadingNotes/AmusingOurselvesToDeath
But yes, stop scrolling, read it.

I tried that Replika app before AI was trendy and immediately picked on the fact that AI companion thing is literal garbage.

I may not like how my friends act but I still respect them as people so there is no way I'll fall this low and desperate.

Maybe about time we listen to that internet wisdom about touching some grass!

I tried that Replika app before AI was trendy
Same here, it was unbelievably shallow. Everything I liked it just mimiced, without even trying to do a simulation of a real conversation. "Oh you like cucumbers? Me too! I also like electronic music, of course. Do you want some nudes?"
Even when I'm at my loneliest, I still prefer to be lonely than have a "conversation" with something like this. I really don't understand how some people can have relationships with an AI.

Not a lot of meat on this article, but yeah, I think it's pretty obvious that those who seek automated tools to define their own thoughts and feelings become dependent. If one is so incapable of mapping out ones thoughts and putting them to written word, its natural they'd seek ease and comfort with the "good enough" (fucking shitty as hell) output of a bot.

I mainly use it for corporate wankery messages. The output is bullshit and I kinda wonder how many of my co-workers genuinely believe in it and how many see the bullshit.
- People who use it are intuitively unaware that it is shit. You can't have a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a picture of a picture of a copy of a hand-drawn-facsimile and expect anything but the lowest-resolution wet feces-word-salad.

Negative IQ points?

I mean, I stopped in the middle of the grocery store and used it to choose best frozen chicken tenders brand to put in my air fryer. …I am ok though. Yeah.

That's... Impressively braindead
- That’s the joke!
At the store it calculated which peanuts were cheaper - 3 pound of shelled peanuts on sale, or 1 pound of no shell peanuts at full price.

Neat snaps camera

Neat
- You can tell by the way that it is!

The digital Wilson.

chatbots and ai are just dumber 1990s search engines.

I remember 90s search engines. AltaVista was pretty ok a t searching the small web that existed, but I'm pretty sure I can get better answers from the LLMs tied to Kagi search.
AltaVista also got blown out of the water by google(back when it was just a search engine), and that was in the 00s not the 90s. 25 to 35 years ago is a long time, search is so so much better these days(or worse if you use a "search" engine like Google now).
Don't be the product.
- Depending on what I needed I remember using AltaVista, AskJeeves, Dogpile, and I feel like later on MetaCrawler or something like that (would search multiple search engines for you and ordered them scored based on platform and relevancy iirc?)

lmao we’re so fucked :D

And sunshine hurts.

Said the vampire from Transylvania.

i can feel it too when I use it. that is why i use it only for trivial things if at all.

I am so happy God made me a Luddite

Yeah look at all this technology you can't use! It's so empowering.
- Can, and opt not to. Big difference. I'm sure I could ask chat GPT to write a better comment than this, but I value the human interaction involved with it, and the ability to perform these tasks on my own
  Same with many aspects of modern technology. Like, I'm sure it's very convenient having your phone control your washing machine and your thermostat and your lightbulbs, but when somebody else's computer turns off, I'd like to keep control over my things

People addicted to tech omg who could've guessed. Shocked I tell you.

There is something I don't understand... openAI collaborates in research that probes how awful its own product is?

If I believed that they were sincerely interested in trying to improve their product, then that would make sense. You can only improve yourself if you understand how your failings affect others.
I suspect however that Saltman will use it to come up with some superficial bullshit about how their new 6.x model now has a 90% reduction in addiction rates; you can't measure anything, it's more about the feel, and that's why it costs twice as much as any other model.

Brain bleaching?