Great article. I laugh at the folks who think this dude is bought into the fantasy that some folks have turned into what best represents a spirituality. As in if they haven’t seen folks who go a little too hard in any one specific part of their life. Sure, gooning as a term has long since entered the cultural zeitgeist and has been used, both ironically and not, as a way to simply now refer to excessive masturbation. But to discount that there is a loneliness epidemic out there and folks who have turned to gooning as some form of extreme kink or outlet for some need for human connection and healing, going 24/7 like many dom/sub relationships or cnc, ferality, etc. shows either a lack of exposure to the vastness of this damaged world or an attempt to poke fun at the author for seriously studying a cultural phenomenon. Either way, this is a fascinating look into a weird niche subculture and a really well written article. Thank you for sharing.













This is not a fair analogy for what is going on here. Video games being blamed harkens back to times when music or other counter cultural media was blamed for behavior. We have a lot of literature which shows that the passive consumption of media doesn’t really affect someone in the ways which they were being blamed. From the beginning, this argument lacked a logical or hypothetical framework as well - it was entirely based on moral judgement values by certain individuals in society who simply “believed” that these were the cause.
AI on the other hand, interacts back with you, and amplifies psychosis. Now this is early days and most of what we have is theoretical in nature, based off case-studies, or simply clinical hypothesis [1, 2, 3]. However, there is a clear difference in media itself - the chatbot is able to interact with the user in a dynamic way, and is programmed in a manner by which to reinforce certain thoughts and feelings. The chatbot is also human-seeming enough for a person to anthropomorphize the chatbot and treat it like an individual for the purposes of therapy or an attempt at emotional closeness. While video games do involve human interaction and a piece of media could be designed to be psychologically difficult to deal with, that would be hyper-specific to the media and not the medium as a whole. The issues with chatbots (the LLM subset of AI) is pervasive across all chatbots because of how they are designed and the populace they are serving.
This is a valid point to bring up, however, I think it is shortsighted when we think in a broader context such as that of public health. We could say the same about addictive behaviors and personalities, for example, and absolve casinos of any blame for designing a system which takes advantage of these individuals and sends them down a spiraling path of gambling addiction. Or, we can recognize that this is a contributing and amplifying factor, by paying close attention to what is happening to individuals in a broad sense, as well as smartly applying theory and hypothesis.
I think it’s completely fair to say that this kid likely had a lot of contributing factors to his depression and ultimate and final decision. There is a clear hypothetical framework with some circumstantial evidence with strong theoretical support to suggest that AI are exacerbating the problem and also should be considered a contributing factor. This suggests that regulation may be helpful, or at the very least increased public awareness of this particular technology having the potential to cause harm to certain individuals.