John Herrman on AI fans

"A loose community of people with shared intuitions, fears, and hopes for a vaguely defined technology are working themselves into a frenzy in insular online spaces, manifesting their predictions as they fail to materialize (or take longer than expected). 

"But even the very first chatbots, which would today be instantly recognizable as inert programs, were psychologically disorienting and distressing when they first arrived. 

"More recently, in 2022, a Google engineer quit his job in protest after becoming convinced that an internal chatbot was showing signs of life. 

"Since then, millions of people have interacted with more sophisticated tools than he had access to, and for at least some of them, it’s shaken something loose. 

"Pliny, who recently received a grant in bitcoin from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen for his work, wondered if OpenAI’s release schedule had been slowed 'because sufficiently advanced voice AI has the potential to induce psychosis,' and made a prediction of his own: 'Fair to say we’ll see the first medically documented case of AI-induced psychosis by December?' 

His followers were unimpressed: 
  • 'Nah, i was hospitalized back in 2023 after gpt came out, 6 months straight, 7 days a week, little to no sleep,' wrote one. 
  • 'HAHAHA I MADE IT IN AUGUST,' wrote another. Another asked: 
  • 'Have you not been paying attention?'



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