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Who lets their kids play with AI chatbots!?
This is the next stage of the ipad baby.
Nearly half the parents at my kids school. Everyone seems so disinterested in the kind of adult thier kid will grow up to be, especially when it inconviences them now.
That is scary as shit.
It’s not like the parents aren’t suffering from the same disease as the kids. They are just supposed to be able to magically shake it off without help because at some point they got old? Age and experience help, but it is clearly not enough. I don’t even know what real help looks like… So many people offering a helping hand are trying to put their other hand in your wallet or flood your mind with garbage.
They need to come up for a word to describe the unique dread you feel when your realize life is turning into a series of stupid, chatbot conversations.
My work life is already this.
Anyone wanna workshop it with me? How about … slop fatigue? Bot dread? Meat proxy burnout? Agent silo syndrome?
I vote on ASS
Not really unique to chatbots. Here’s a couple of entries from the D.O.S. (
which is apparently pay walled now?Turns out the top result is a site by a grifter completely unrelated to John Koenig).Anecdoche
n.
a conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening— instead merely overlaying words like a spoken game of Scrabble, each player borrowing bits of others’ anecdotes to build out their own, until we reach a point when we all run out of things to say.
From anecdote, a short and often amusing account of real-life events + synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole. Pronounced “uh-nek-doh-kee.”
Anechosis
n.
a state of exhaustion with continually being told what you want to hear, whether by marketers pandering to you or acquaintances afraid of causing offense; the longing for someone to have the heart to finally call you out on your bullshit, challenge your long-held assumptions, and push you to become a better person—which would be a far deeper kindness than trying to live and let live.
From an-, against + echoes. Pronounced “an-uh-koh-sis.”
Existential dread? The call of the void?
Bot rot? Robo-Oh-Nos? Slop Shock? Agent-Induced Cognitive Atrophy?
I really like bot rot
Dehumanisation?
It’s all just that bit less human.
Anslopic just popped in my head because of this, but I think that’s better as just a jokey name for Claude’s company.
I know people have said this about various technologies, but I’m so grateful that I had a childhood without these things. I absolutely would have been obsessed. These poor kids are so isolated and their realities are defined by nonsensical fascist robots.
I grew up in a rural area. Nearest kids lived a km away. Had 2 TV channels. CBC radio. Party line telephone and long distance too expensive to use except emergency. We were far less isolated than kids today who have ‘the world’ at their fingertips. The Internet was a dream that in 1 generation turned into a nightmare. AI is 1000x worse.
Yeah, Same here honestly
The unsettling part isn’t that kids ask chatbots for comfort. It’s that we’ve built a world where a machine that confidently makes things up is available 24/7, while actual human support often isn’t. And naturally, the business plan is to make the machine even more engaging.
This is a hard hitting point. We could have a better world, but a few rich people and their enablers don’t want it.
Humans aren’t empathetic enough to create a better world. We always have been selfish and greedy. It’s been our way since the beginning. We will Never have what we could have because of this
Taylor Lorenz be like: “Uh, what if the AI users are just looking for some help?”
Someone telling you what they think you want to hear doesn’t help when what you need is a gently and delicately delivered reality check. This is true even if you’re talking to a human.
Some chatbots do reality checks. But it’s usually only for extreme situations. I can only imagine the kinds of things that people, especially young people, would be asking LLMs to validate them on…
They also assume you’re out of control of everything, like talking about how you overcame a mental health issues without following popular advice, then it delivers an unnecessarily condescending “reality check”
I’m glad I’ve stopped using the mainstream AI sites entirely over a year ago, they may be more helpful compared to local LLMs and SLMs but they assume you’re using it because you can’t depend on yourself.
I hope these reality checks improve enough to actually be helpful and be based on the described situation, not just be a cookie cutter response enforced by a system prompt
Or, here’s an idea, ban the fuck out of these things.
I think banning it from being a business venture is a good idea, and realistically the technology for generative AI will stay even if there’s an outright ban.
People will still be able to build their own models and cybersecurity defense will continue keeping up with black hat hacking, but corpos like OpenAI, or divisions like Google’s numerous AI divisions, should be banned unless it has an explicit purpose for research in things like the medical field, and have generative AI as we know it right now be culled.
I would be on board for this. Regulate use to very select applications, ban commercial use without specific permits.
I have kids, I stay awake at night a lot these days wondering what I’m supposes to tell them when they look up at me and tell me they want to be a doctor, engineer, or lawyer when they grow up. What the fuck do I get them to aspire to when we’re hurtiling towards a world where there’s nothing to aspire to anymore? How do I convince them to study hard and learn things when there is no economic incentive to do so? What kind of kids are we raising when they exist in a world of infinite dopamine and a personal familiar that grants your every magic wish?
Serious question: Let’s say that AI “gets good” and overcomes the hallucination issues. Would it still be negative for mental health? Would it be even worse (because reality sucks for kids right now)?
I want to know if it’s AI that’s the real problem here or the world in which we’re forcing kids to live.
I can imagine a situation where a kid with (insert serious problems) asks AI to be realistic about their future job/economic prospects. It returns truthful statistics, then that kid commits suicide. Was the AI culpable?
What if it recommended joining a revolutionary group as the most likely way to improve their lives or the lives of their children/families?
What if it suggested that sacrifice is necessary to improve the condition of the world?
Would an AI that does these things be good or bad? If the AI’s system prompt has,
always tell the truthwill we have created a vastly more dangerous monster than the AI we have today?I want to know if it’s AI that’s the real problem here or the world in which we’re forcing kids to live.
My money’s on “both”.
let’s go with the hypothetical, that AI becomes good enough to do therapy, and we were to run double blind trials and it does show it’s better at every metric.
then I’ll have to go with the evidence and say psychology are out of a job.
However, we are not there, not even close, people use AI because it’s free and available, real therapy should be free and available
real therapy should be free and available
You’re damned right!
