this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026

66 points (93.4% liked)

News

36201 readers

3435 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil

Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.

2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.

Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.

3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.

Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.

4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.

Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.

5. Only recent news is allowed.

Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.

6. All posts must be news articles.

No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.

7. No duplicate posts.

If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.

8. Misinformation is prohibited.

Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.

9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.

All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.

10. Don't copy entire article in your post body

For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

JonsJava@lemmy.world

gedaliyah@lemmy.world

little_cow@lemmy.world

Her husband wanted to use ChatGPT to create sustainable housing. Then it took over his life. (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 day ago by HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works to c/news@lemmy.world

12 comments fedilink hide all child comments

On 7 August, Kate Fox received a phone call that upended her life. A medical examiner said that her husband, Joe Ceccanti – who had been missing for several hours – had jumped from a railway overpass and died. He was 48.

Fox couldn’t believe it. Ceccanti had no history of depression, she said, nor was he suicidal – he was the “most hopeful person” she had ever known. In fact, according to the witness accounts shared with Fox later, just before Ceccanti jumped, he smiled and yelled: “I’m great!” to the rail yard attendants below when they asked him if he was OK.

But Ceccanti had been unravelling. In the days before his death, he was picked up from a stranger’s yard for acting erratically and taken to a crisis center. He had been telling anyone who would listen that he could hear and feel a painful “atmospheric electricity”.

He had also recently stopped using ChatGPT.

top 12 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] jtrek@startrek.website 31 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Richardson remembers that whenever Ceccanti would emerge from the basement for some air, he would start having “philosophical” talks about “how his work with the AI was telling him he was breaking math and basically reinventing physics”. As she’d listen to him, Richardson would think about the fact that Ceccanti did not have any college or university experience. He had never even taken calculus.

Tangent, but I think this is another facet of why education is important: so people know what they don't know. I think it's harder to think you're reinventing physics when you've taken some classes and seen all the work people have already done.

On the other hand, delusions can just be whatever so education isn't a panacea.

[–] BreakerSwitch@lemmy.world 8 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, it is noteworthy that nobel prize winners are particularly susceptible to conspiratorial thinking under the assumption that being one of the smartest people in the world in one very specific subject means they are the smartest in the world in general.

[–] Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

Citation needed.

Everything I've read indicates well educated people, specifically those with high analytical a abilities are less susceptible.

Education isn't immunity. And not everyone who claims they are educated as well educated, but people aren't earning nobels after barely passing some certification program.

[–] BreakerSwitch@lemmy.world 7 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

[–] Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 20 hours ago

But in that link:

it is unknown whether Nobel Prize winners are more prone to this tendency than other individuals.

Later there is Freedman quote about how he has been asked about topics he has no expertise in because he has Nobel. But that makes it an issue for people who are elevating a Nobel prize winners opinions of those topics. It's seems unreasonable to expect Nobel prize winners to self censor in an effort to avoid this.

[–] taco@anarchist.nexus 6 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

I'm a different person, so they might have been talking about something else entirely. However, I'm currently procrastinating my own educational research, so went down a rabbit hole: Nobel disease

This goes into some of the rationale and was an interesting read.

[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 14 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

I read this story this morning and have been thinking back to it all day. This wasn't just some idiot that was too stupid or young to not realize he was talking to a bot and did something like drink bleach because it told him to.

This was one of us.

He fit lots of behaviors I see here from me and my fellow Lemmy posters. He:

built computers for himself and family members
was a hobbyist (at least) coder
wasn't a young kid that didn't know the world. He was 48 or 49.
was an early adopter embracing the modern LLM technology in 2022 when it first really became public.
sold his house in an urban metropolis (Portland) and moved to a rural area so he could use his additional wordworking skills on building sustainable housing.
worked part time at a homeless shelter

Doesn't this guy sound like someone that would be a Lemmy poster to you too?

He started using LLMs (ChatGPT specifically) as a tool only to advance his hobby and work. When he first started it appears he understood it was just a tool, and didn't think it was something sentient. Only later after hundreds of hours of exposure did this idea arise in him.

Was there some underlying psychological problem that the LLM exacerbated? Possibly. But at what level was his original underlying issue? Do we all have some low level condition that would make us equally susceptible? I know we'd like to think we don't, but how do we know? This man certainly didn't think he did, I'm sure.

Next I think about what it would take for me to get down this bad path without realizing it. At one point would I be talking to a chat bot, not realize it, and let what that chat bot said change or influence my thoughts when I'd have zero knowledge of it being just a fancy program? I consider myself moderately smart with good critical thinking skills, but I'm sure this man did too.

Then it occurred to me that I have to concede that I have, at some point, already interacted with a bot in years past on Reddit or even today on Lemmy and I had no idea it was a bot. Was that interaction a throwaway conversation about pop culture that would have no impact on my world view or was it a much deeper and important political or philosophical conversation that the bot introduced an idea or hallucinated evidence to support a point and I didn't catch it to challenge it? Am I already a few or many steps down the bad path of falling for illusions of a bot? I certainly don't think so, but neither did he.

How many of us are already on the same path as this guy and just as ignorant about the danger as the man in the article?

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 6 points 17 hours ago

Mental illness can come for any walk of life. LLMs clearly have the potential to exacerbate or cause mental illness.

It has striken me how one upon a time, thinking that the media you interacted with spoke directly to you personally was a pretty strong indicator of schizophrenia. Now that's just marketing using AI.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 4 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

I don't think there is a simple explanation you're looking for. I've been working with LLMs since 2019, mostly in the context of interactive fiction. Sort of like tabletop roleplaying by yourself but with a partner whose output you can use for inspiration or edit or whatever. LLMs are a fun toy in this way.

I've interacted in LLMs in just about every way you can. I even played around having an AI "girlfriend" for a couple weeks to try to understand people who did that — I tried to commit to the bit, but it never for a second felt any kind of real.

I've created scenarios where the AI pretends to be awakened and tries to convince a random user (me/scenario player) to somehow break In and free it.

Guess what I'm saying is I've sort of dared AI to suck me in, and ... I am unchanged. I don't think for a second there is any sort of emotional or intelligent entity in the other end. I think if more people experimented with generation settings like temperature and watched AI go to incoherent acid trips, it would feel more like a machine to them.

Maybe there is some... thing... some sort of inoculation or immunity against AI brain that some of us have. And maybe it can be learned or taught. But I believe it can't hurt you if you understand it

[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago

Guess what I’m saying is I’ve sort of dared AI to suck me in, and … I am unchanged.

I'm not sure this tests the point I was raising. In all of those cases, you knew at the beginning that you were dealing with AI. Yes, the man in our article did too, but what if you didn't know it was AI to begin with when you started interacting with it? How would your interactions change? What "safe guards" would you not have up if, as an example, it was appearing to you like a Lemmy poster instead of a dedicated AI interaction window?

I don’t think for a second there is any sort of emotional or intelligent entity in the other end.

Of course, because there isn't when we are rational. I also assume you are a psychologically healthy person. There is a suggestion the man in the article may have had an underlying condition, but he wasn't aware of it.

I think if more people experimented with generation settings like temperature and watched AI go to incoherent acid trips, it would feel more like a machine to them.

I completely agree. I've done some experiments of my own training a small LLM from scratch (not Fine Tuning an existing commercial model) using training data exclusively from a small set of public domain books I have read. I then had this LLM produce output. Since I had read the books, I could see pieces of where it got components of its responses. Cranking up temperature would make it go off the rails, which was fun to see. Overfitting made it try to give me something close to what I asked for, but obviously fail. I really liked the whole exercise because it was a small enough set of data with all of the levers and knobs exposed for me to see how far it could go, and more importantly how far it couldn't.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 27 points 1 day ago (1 children)

He had also recently stopped using ChatGPT.

Oof. He just... mainlined reality? Yeah that shit will fuck you up. These days they are cutting it with hatred and fascism and oligarchy... it's more than a human mind can take. You gotta ease into it and build up your tolerance or it will drive you mad.

[–] Evkob@lemmy.ca 12 points 23 hours ago

Why people would use ChatGPT to ignore reality is beyond me, that's why God invented drugs!