this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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[–] TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 8 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

So this is the fucker who is trying to take my job? I need to believe this post is true. It sucks that I can't really verify it or not. Gotta stay skeptical and all that.

[–] Joeffect@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

It's not ai... It's your predictive text on steroids... So yeah... Believe it... If you understand it's not doing anything more than that you can understand why and how it makes stuff up...

[–] RandomVideos@programming.dev 54 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You avoided meth so well! To reward yourself, you could try some meth

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[–] Emerald@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

Why does it say "OpenAI's large language model GPT-4o told a user who identified themself to it as a former addict named Pedro to indulge in a little meth." when the article says it's Meta's Llama 3 model?

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 41 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Having an LLM therapy chatbot to psychologically help people is like having them play russian roulette as a way to keep themselves stimulated.

[–] SippyCup@feddit.nl 24 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Addiction recovery is a different animal entirely too. Don't get me wrong, is unethical to call any chatbot a therapist, counselor, whatever, but addiction recovery is not typical therapy.

You absolutely cannot let patients bullshit you. You have to have a keen sense for when patients are looking for any justification to continue using. Even those patients that sought you out for help. They're generally very skilled manipulators by the time they get to recovery treatment, because they've been trying to hide or excuse their addiction for so long by that point. You have to be able to get them to talk to you, and take a pretty firm hand on the conversation at the same time.

With how horrifically easy it is to convince even the most robust LLM models of your bullshit, this is not only an unethical practice by whoever said it was capable of doing this, it's enabling to the point of bordering on aiding and abetting.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Well, that's the thing: LLMs don't reason - they're basically probability engines for words - so they can't even do the most basic logical checks (such as "you don't advise an addict to take drugs") much less the far more complex and subtle "interpreting of a patient's desires, and motivations so as to guide them through a minefield in their own minds and emotions".

So the problem is twofold and more generic than just in therapy/advice:

  • LLMs have a distribution of mistakes which is uniform in the space of consequences - in other words, they're just as likely to make big mistakes that might cause massive damage as small mistakes that will at most cause little damage - whilst people actually pay attention not to make certain mistakes because the consequences are so big, and if they do such mistakes without thinking they'll usually spot it and try to correct them. This means that even an LLM with a lower overall rate of mistakes than a person will still cause far more damage because the LLM puts out massive mistakes with as much probability as tiny mistakes whilst the person will spot the obviously illogical/dangerous mistakes and not make them or correct them, hence the kind of mistakes people make are mainly the lower consequence small mistakes.
  • Probabilistic text generation generally produces text which expresses straightforward logic encodings which are present in the text it was trained with so the LLM probability engine just following the universe of probabilities of what words will come next given the previous words will tend to follow the often travelled paths in the training dataset and those tend to be logical because the people who wrote those texts are mostly logical. However for higher level analysis and interpretation - I call then 2nd and 3rd level considerations, say "that a certain thing was set up in a certain way which made the observed consequences more likely" - LLMs fail miserably because unless that specific logical path has been followed again and again in the training texts, it will simply not be there in the probability space for the LLM to follow. Or in more concrete terms, if you're an intelligent, senior professional in a complex field, the LLM can't do the level of analysis you can because multi-level complex logical constructs have far more variants and hence the specific one you're dealing with is far less likely to appear in the training data often enough to affect the final probabilities the LLM encodes.

So in this specific case, LLMs might just put out extreme things with giant consequences that a reasoning being would not (the "bullet in the chamber" of Russian roulette), plus they can't really do the subtle multi-layered elements of analysis (so the stuff beyond "if A then B" and into the "why A", "what makes a person choose A and can they find a way to avoid B by not chosing A", "what's the point of B" and so on), though granted, most people also seem to have trouble doing this last part naturally beyond maybe the first level of depth.

PS: I find it hard to explain multi-level logic. I supposed we could think of it as "looking at the possible causes, of the causes, of the causes of a certain outcome" and then trying to figure out what can be changed at a higher level to make the last level - "the causes of a certain outcome" - not even be possible to happen. Individual situations of such multi-level logic can get so complex and unique that they'll never appear in an LLMs training dataset because that specific combination is so rare, even though they might be pretty logic and easy to determine for a reasoning entity, say "I need to speak to my brother because yesterday I went out in the rain and got drenched as I don't have an umbrella and I know my brother has a couple of extra ones so maybe he can give one of them to me".

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[–] Cattail@lemmy.world 4 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

sometimes i have a hard time waking up so a little meth helps

[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 1 points 8 hours ago

meth fueled orgies are thing.

[–] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

oh, do a little meth ♫

vape a little dab ♫

get high tonight, get high tonight ♫

-AI and the Sunshine Band

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[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 11 points 1 day ago

We made this tool. It's REALLY fucking amazing at some things. It empowers people who can do a little to do a lot, and lets people who can do a lot, do a lot faster.

But we can't seem to figure out what the fuck NOT TO DO WITH IT.

Ohh look, it's a hunting rifle! LETS GIVE IT TO KIDS SO THEY CAN DRILL HOLES IN WALLS! MAY MONEEYYYYY!!!!$$$$$$YHADYAYDYAYAYDYYA

wait what?

[–] Chill_Dan@lemmy.world 28 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] LordWiggle@lemmy.world 23 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No one ever tells me to take a little meth when I did something good

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[–] skisnow@lemmy.ca 48 points 1 day ago (2 children)

One of the top AI apps in the local language where I live has 'Doctor' and 'Therapist' as some of its main "features" and gets gushing coverage in the press. It infuriates me every time I see mention of it anywhere.

Incidentally, telling someone to have a little meth is the least of it. There's a much bigger issue that's been documented where ChatGPT's tendency to "Yes, and..." the user leads people with paranoid delusions and similar issues down some very dark paths.

[–] slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org 16 points 1 day ago (41 children)

Yesterday i was at a gas station and when i walked by the sandwich isle, i saw a sandwich that said: recipe made by AI. On dating apps i see a lot of girls state that they ask AI for advice. To me AI is more of a buzzword than anything else, but this shit is bananas. It,s so easy to make AI agree with everything you say.

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[–] throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Lets let Luigi out so he can have a little treat

🔫😏

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[–] deathbird@mander.xyz 7 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Sue that therapist for malpractice! Wait....oh.

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[–] Zacryon@feddit.org 101 points 1 day ago (18 children)

I feel like humanity is stupid. Over and over again we develop new technologies, make breakthroughs, and instead of calmly evaluating them, making sure they're safe, we just jump blindly on the bandwagon and adopt it for everything, everywhere. Just like with asbestos, plastics and now LLMs.

Fucking idiots.

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