I still find it hard to understand the emotional attachment to LLMs and why people believe their ideas

It’s a conversation you’re having on the internet with an agent that sounds like a human. People get invested for the same reason they get catfished.

It sounds like she is too overworked and stressed to make decisions or even think for herself, so she lets GPT do it for her.

That’s the nut of it. And ChatGPT tends to mix the pastiche of a well-researched argument with the kind of feel-good self-affirmations that win over their audience. So you’re getting what looks - at first glance - to be good advice. And then you’re getting glazed on top of it. And then it’s designed to tell you what you want to hear, so you’re getting affirmation bias.

I hope she gets better soon, and I hope you do too, being overworked and stressed really destroys you and the people around you in many ways.

I mean, that’s why human-to-human interactions are valuable. But it’s also why they’re difficult. Like any good medicine, it can taste bitter up front even if its what you need in the long run.

What kind of person do you have to be to become addicted like them?

Human cognition degrades with stress, exhaustion, and trauma. If you’re in a position where turning to an AI for relationship advice seems like a good idea, you’re probably already suffering from one or more of the above.

Also doesn’t help that AIs are sycophantic precisely because sycophancy is addictive. This isn’t a “type of person” so much as a “tool engineered towards chronic use”. It’s like asking “What kind of person regularly smokes crack?”

Do you need to be very empathetic towards objects? Like seeing faces in everything and get emotionally attached?

I’ll give you a personal example. I have a friend who is currently pregnant and going through a bad breakup with her baby-daddy. She’s a trial lawyer by trade - very smart, very motivated, very well-to-do, but also horribly overworked, living by herself, and suffering from all the biochemical consequences of turning a single celled organism into a human being.

As a result of some poorly conceived remarks, she’s alienated herself from a number of close friends to the point where we doubt there’s going to be a baby shower. Part of the impulse to say these things came from her own drama. But part if it came from her discovering ChatGPT as a tool to analyze other people’s statements. This has created a vicious behavioral spiral, during which she says something regrettable and gets a regrettable response in turn. She plugs the conversation into ChatGPT, because she has nobody else to talk to. And ChatGPT feeds her some self-affirming bullshit that inflates her ego far enough to say another stupid thing.

To complicate matters, her baby daddy is also using ChatGPT to analyze her conversations. And he’s decided she’s cheated on him, the baby isn’t his, and she’s plotting to scam him.

So now you’ve got two people - already stressed and exhausted - getting fed a series of toxic delusions by a machine that is constantly reaffirming in the way none of your friends or family are. It’s compounding your misery, which drives anxiety and sends you back to the machine that offers temporary relief. But the advice from the machine yields more misery down the line, raising your anxiety, and sending you back to the machine.

What’s producing this feedback loop? You could argue it is the individual, foolish enough to engage with the machine to begin with. But that’s far more circumstantial than personality driven. If my friend didn’t have a cell phone, she wouldn’t be reaching for ChatGPT. If she wasn’t pregnant, she wouldn’t be so stressed and anxious. If she wasn’t in a fight with her boyfriend, she wouldn’t be feeding conversations into the prompt engine.

ID-10T

Buuuuulshit

I mean, what are the odds that the statement was composed by an AI?

Kanye No: Red Hat

Kanye Yes: Red Hat Linux

There’s a hierarchy to this sort of thing.

Case in point: We’re All In The Epstein Files, a podcast episode by the worst people you know who only have jobs because they’re brown nosers and yes-men.

There’s an entire courtier class that get paid handsomely to defend billionaires. And then they stand up these big media institutions that hire even more people. Bari Weiss, another classic example of a come-from-nothing lick spittle who never saw a boot shiny enough that it couldn’t be improved by her tongue. Now she’s pulling down nine figures in payout, so she can lay off half the CBS workforce at the command of her failson boss, David Ellison.

Sucking up to these people is its own reward. Whether you’re one of the last few non-indie journalists or managers who still has a job in publishing or an insufferable bowtie campus conservative who coasts through the Ivy League by screaming “Failing me is antisemitic!” at any professor to the left of Ted Cruz, there’s a dividend paid out to the loudest and most annoying hacks. From Riley Gaines to Charlie Kirk, you will be rewarded for your piety.

Meanwhile, disobedience to the billionaire class carries its own perils. Maybe you’re someone at Gawker who lost their job to a Peter Thiel financed lawsuit. Maybe you’re a Palestinian journalist who got a sniper round through the earhole, because you were taking too many pictures of a double-tapped ambulance in Gaza or the West Bank or Lebanon. Maybe you’re a student activist on a visa who just got picked up by ICE. Maybe you’re a union organizer on a dozen different blacklists. Maybe you’re just some senior citizen Black Panther, who has been cooling heels in prison for bogus drug or gun charges since the Reagan Era.

Eric Adams has a real incentive to sell-out. Leqaa Kordia has a real incentive to stay quiet.

OP: Management

Top Comment: Professional

It’s called edging

Ukrainian housewives are not producing 155mm artillery or jets. But when a drone solves the same problem as a 155mm shell, then perhaps they don’t need to. Similarly with jets.

I don’t think anyone can suggest they solve the same problems. I might argue that the conflict is asymmetric. The Americans are trying to invade Iran, not the other way around.

Western militaries (not all of them, but Americans in Iran now) seem to love solving problems with cool expensive tools, even if not that well fit for the goal.

The Western goal is to capture and control territory through terror bombing followed by an occupation.

To that end, they need the kind of surveillance, range, and precision that drones lack.

Iranians/Ukrainians aren’t trying to capture and control territory at a great distance. They’re trying to repel an invasion of territory they already own.

They’re fighting a fundamentally different war.

But this one isn’t on the military in my book.

Not historically. But eventually you purge everyone who tells you “No” and the military you’re left with is Yes-Men.

Incidentally,

Why The U.S. Army Made Four Tech Executives Lieutenant Colonels

Really tells you where the military in this country is headed.

I wonder if the headline was written by an AI

Do not go into that boy’s restroom.

US Lenders: “Hey, you want some money from the infinity free money spigot”

A handful of nerds paying attention: “Well, if they drink from the money fountain, we’re leaving!”

/r/writingprompts strikes again

Who doesn’t love Farscape?

Are you kidding? Can you imagine what a piece of human artifice from 5 million years ago would be worth to the right collector?

I’m going to take a line from Hob Gadling

Look, I’ve seen death. I lost half my village to the Black Death. I fought under Buckingham in Burgundy. It’s not like I don’t know what death is. Death is… stupid.

Nobody has to die. The only reason people die is… is 'cause everyone does it. You all just go along with it. But not me. I’ve made up my mind. I’m not going to die.

A dollar in five million years

Cause then I’ll be around that long

Happiest couple I know was in an arranged marriage by their parents starting at the age of 9.

They grew up together, went to the same schools, shared hobbies, were fully familiar with each other’s extended families, and the future-wife ended up going down the aisle slightly pregnant. They’ve been together for nearly 50 years, have three kids (one of whom was a friend in high school), and are both thoroughly convinced that American romances are dumb, shortsighted, and a big reason for the country’s endemic poverty.

Of course, this family is also stupid rich.

The couples that I see fail are consistently either poor to the point that they can’t afford a basic standard of living or where one parent is traveling all the time while the other is stuck with perpetual child care. Inevitably one (or both) cheat, or just have a series of meltdowns that end in a break up.

The handful of couples I know where one partner was closeted or just slow to recognize their own queerness seem to be some of the happiest. The relationships tend to be open or poly, to accommodate one or the other. But neither seem to mind. I even know one couple that did get divorced (primarily because the wife was constantly traveling), but you’d never know it given how much time they end up spending together when she’s home.

The “I hate my wife” crowd I do know tends to be the ones that are traveling so much they never really see one another except to deal with some financial bullshit, housework, or kids.

Rachel Bloom, banger

Darling Meet Me Under the Cum Tree