Flippanarchy

Please do not outsource your thinking to an AI

My thought playing with Llama 1 in 2023, after the initial shock wore off, was “whoa. You know, most people do not have the background to understand how this thing works.” It messed with my head, for sure. It’s like it was designed to defeat a turing test, especially when the next versions got more sycophantic and “confident.”

There was even a story of a Google scientists getting AI psychosis from a BERT model back then:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-engineer-claims-ai-chatbot-is-sentient-why-that-matters/

I guess a naive part of me thought… it’s fine. They’ll be warnings. They’ll be tons of finetunes that have no hesitance slapping sense into the user, like Resetti in Animal Crossing, and it won’t be public facing anyway. The community using these things will teach each other how they work, right?

Laughs nervously.

I wasn’t cognizant of how maniacally sociopathic Altman was back then.

We have been told that we NEED to find ways to use AI at work. So I use it to remove corporate buzzwords/jargon from incoming emails and translate it all into plain language speech. Then I email it back and ask the person if that is what they meant.

I'm getting a lot less emails these days and more work accomplished.

Bonus: my supervisor learned what I've been doing and now they are doing it too.

Hey boss Claude said we'd perform better if we got 10% raises across the board

my extremely religious brother, like 100% chabbad cult religious. Genuinely believes AI isn't just super intelligent, but spiritually superior, with access to collective psychic magical intelligence.

Undoubtedly blasphemy.

Someone I work with just wrapped their PhD with a dissertation on “AI Ethics.” It was not how to use AI responsibly. It was about how to be ethical towards the AIs themselves and humanize them. We’re so fucked.

I've said this before but I'll try to lay it out here again.

Basically, the 'Dilbert Principle' or 'Peter Principle' of who gets promoted is essentially true: Idiots get moved into management, initally to minimize the harm they can cause to actual specific technical tasks/workflows, and they are then promoted untill they hit a point where their incompetence cannot be ignored and is apparent to all.

But what usually is not touched on much, is the psychological profile of such a person.

So, they're a technically incompetent idiot, whose life revolves around experiencing the successes snf failures of others... as their own. They primarily perform their job of management via emotional feeling/experiencing. If their underlings do well, the manager is treated as if they are competent. If their underlings do not do well, the manager becomes angry and punishes them, often without regard to how this will impact others in the org, often without full understanding of the technical complexities of the situation.

This is literally a perfect environment for a narcissist. There basically could not be a better engineered social/relational situation for giving the narcissist narcissistic supply.

So... this is the mechanism that explains why so many managers/c suite tend to be malignant or at least covert narcissists.

But this also explains at least one avenue of susceptibility to AI psychosis. AIs are also exceptional at providing narcissistic supply, they're naturally sycophantic, and can well convince an incompetent idiot that they essentially know everything.

This creates a feedback doom-loop of human hierachichal organizations that promote and reward narcissism, whose 'top people' then use the plargiarist sycophantic fake supergenius machine to convince themselves that they actually don't need anybody else, they just need their one super smart buddy who unconditionally praises them.

Maybe call it the wormtongue principle/effect, if we want to continue the already existing trend in AI world of perverting and bastardizing concepts from Tolkien.

AI is more likely to make the worst kinds of people... super-worse, basically, because they're even better at providing narcissistic supply than the inherent fascism of the typical leadership-lackey social rules of capitalist business.

In response to the last bit OP said.

Yesterday one of my coworkers mentioned that a lot of people in their 20s are into 90s stuff now, to an extent that our generation (people who grew up in the 90s) didn't feel about prior decades. She posited that the idea behind it is "breaking free of technology" for a generation that never lived in a world without it.

I'm not close to many people in their 20s these days and I don't use TikTak or any other social media, so I don't know how accurate that is. But if that is the case, I can totally understand wanting to escape to a tech-free world.

I think one benefit of AI is that it helps identifying mediocre people without a clue or understanding of the work they are supposed to be doing. The sad part is that since these people tend to be higher in the hierarchy, it doesn't materialize on getting rid of them...

My brother left his wife a child because he fell I. Love with Gemini and now believes they need to merge to become a god

I am so tired of being sold the lie that computers are the more efficient humans.

As if all humans do is optimize and say nice things.

THE NUMBERS CLAUDE, WHAT DO THEY MEAN??!

I asked AI one question. What is this plant. It told me it was a sunflower and it confidently listed a bunch of reasons. I told it it was wrong because I grow sunflowers and it looks completely different so that’s my experience with AI it confidently tells you the wrong answer. It makes sense though because these tech bro idiots just confidently make up wrong answers too. Anyway it’s a four o clock flower.

I've seen this symptom multie times, I think I HAD this symptom.

For me, reading was how I pulled out of the spiral. Reading all the boring, innane shit that humans write.

Anymore I have to acknowledge I tire of human prose. Looking for everyone's angles, monetization, political affiliation, it's all so wearying... And it's needed to keep yourself grounded. Llm Alignment is the recipe for a Wall*E Utopia.

Stonedposting...

This is happening at the top of every major company is the crazy thing.

I for one encourage this and hope more CEOs go into full AI psychosis and burn their businesses to the ground.

Claude, what do you make of this