This happened to a close friend of mine. He was already on the edge, with some weird opinions and beliefs… but he was talking with real people who could push back.
When he switched to spending basically every waking moment with an AI that could reinforce and iterate on his bizarre beliefs 24/7, he went completely off the deep end, fast and hard. We even had him briefly hospitalized and they shrugged, basically saying “nothing chemically wrong here, dude’s just weird.”
He and his chatbot are building a whole parallel universe, and we can’t get reality inside it.
This seems like an extension of social media and the internet. Weird people who talked at the bar or in the street corner were not taken seriously and didn’t get followers and lots of people who agree with them. They were isolated in their thoughts. Then social media made that possible with little work. These people were a group and could reinforce their beliefs. Now these chatbots and stuff let them liv in a fantasy world.
This happened to a close friend of mine. He was already on the edge, with some weird opinions and beliefs… but he was talking with real people who could push back.
When he switched to spending basically every waking moment with an AI that could reinforce and iterate on his bizarre beliefs 24/7, he went completely off the deep end, fast and hard. We even had him briefly hospitalized and they shrugged, basically saying “nothing chemically wrong here, dude’s just weird.”
He and his chatbot are building a whole parallel universe, and we can’t get reality inside it.
This seems like an extension of social media and the internet. Weird people who talked at the bar or in the street corner were not taken seriously and didn’t get followers and lots of people who agree with them. They were isolated in their thoughts. Then social media made that possible with little work. These people were a group and could reinforce their beliefs. Now these chatbots and stuff let them liv in a fantasy world.