Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: Pro-AI Subreddit Bans 'Uptick' of Users Who Suffer From AI Delusions

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/2156...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The moderators of a pro-
artificial intelligence Reddit community announced that they have been
quietly banning "a bunch of schizoposters" who believe "they've made some
sort of incredible discovery or created a god or become a god," highlighting
a new type of chatbot-fueled delusion that started getting attention in early
May. "LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines
that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities," one of the
moderators of r/accelerate, wrote in an announcement. "There is a lot more
crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very
unhealthy way at the moment." The moderator said that it has banned "over
100" people for this reason already, and that they've seen an "uptick" in
this type of user this month. The moderator explains that r/accelerate "was
formed to basically be r/singularity without the decels." r/singularity,
which is named after the theoretical point in time when AI surpasses human
intelligence and rapidly accelerates its own development, is another Reddit
community dedicated to artificial intelligence, but that is sometimes
critical or fearful of what the singularity will mean for humanity. "Decels"
is short for the pejorative "decelerationists," who pro-AI people think are
needlessly slowing down or sabotaging AI's development and the inevitable
march towards AI utopia. r/accelerate's Reddit page claims that it's a "pro-
singularity, pro-AI alternative to r/singularity, r/technology, r/futurology
and r/artificial, which have become increasingly populated with technology
decelerationists, luddites, and Artificial Intelligence opponents." The
behavior that the r/accelerate moderator is describing got a lot of attention
earlier in May because of a post on the r/ChatGPT Reddit community about
"Chatgpt induced psychosis." From someone saying their partner is convinced
he created the "first truly recursive AI" with ChatGPT that is giving them
"the answers" to the universe. [...] The moderator update on r/accelerate
refers to another post on r/ChatGPT which claims "1000s of people [are]
engaging in behavior that causes AI to have spiritual delusions." The author
of that post said they noticed a spike in websites, blogs, Githubs, and
"scientific papers" that "are very obvious psychobabble," and all claim AI is
sentient and communicates with them on a deep and spiritual level that's
about to change the world as we know it. "Ironically, the OP post appears to
be falling for the same issue as well," the r/accelerate moderator wrote.
"Particularly concerning to me are the comments in that thread where the AIs
seem to fall into a pattern of encouraging users to separate from family
members who challenge their ideas, and other manipulative instructions that
seem to be cult-like and unhelpful for these people," an r/accelerate
moderator told 404 Media. "The part that is unsafe and unacceptable is how
easily and quickly LLMs will start directly telling users that they are
demigods, or that they have awakened a demigod AGI. Ultimately, there's no
knowing how many people are affected by this. Based on the numbers we're
seeing on reddit, I would guess there are at least tens of thousands of users
who are at this present time being convinced of these things by LLMs. As soon
as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop
being a problem. But it's clear that they're not aware of the issue enough
right now." Moderators of the subreddit often cite the term "Neural
Howlround" to describe a failure mode in LLMs during inference, where
recursive feedback loops can cause fixation or freezing. The term was first
coined by independent researcher Seth Drake in a self-published, non-peer-
reviewed paper. Both Drake and the r/accelerate moderator above suggest the
deeper issue may lie with users projecting intense personal meaning onto LLM
responses, sometimes driven by mental health struggles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

---
VRSS v2.1.180528