this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh wow. In the old times, self-proclaimed messiahs used to do that without assistance from a chatbot. But why would you think the "truth" and path to enlightenment is hidden within a service of a big tech company?

[–] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

well because these chatbots are designed to be really affirming and supportive and I assume people with such problems really love this kind of interaction compared to real people confronting their ideas critically.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 4 points 1 day ago

I think there was a recent unsuccessful rev of ChatGPT that was too flattering, it made people nauseous - they had to dial it back.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 points 1 day ago

I guess you're completely right with that. It lowers the entry barrier. And it's kind of self-reinforcing. And we have other unhealty dynamics with other technology as well, like social media, which also can radicalize people or get them in a downwards spiral...

[–] Zozano@aussie.zone 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

This is the reason I've deliberately customized GPT with the follow prompts:

  • User expects correction if words or phrases are used incorrectly.

  • Tell it straight—no sugar-coating.

  • Stay skeptical and question things.

  • Keep a forward-thinking mindset.

  • User values deep, rational argumentation.

  • Ensure reasoning is solid and well-supported.

  • User expects brutal honesty.

  • Challenge weak or harmful ideas directly, no holds barred.

  • User prefers directness.

  • Point out flaws and errors immediately, without hesitation.

  • User appreciates when assumptions are challenged.

  • If something lacks support, dig deeper and challenge it.

I suggest copying these prompts into your own settings if you use GPT or other glorified chatbots.

[–] dzso@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm not saying these prompts won't help, they probably will. But the notion that ChatGPT has any concept of "truth" is misleading. ChatGPT is a statistical language machine. It cannot evaluate truth. Period.

[–] Zozano@aussie.zone 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (8 children)

What makes you think humans are better at evaluating truth? Most people can’t even define what they mean by “truth,” let alone apply epistemic rigor. Tweak it a little, and Gpt is more consistent and applies reasoning patterns that outperform the average human by miles.

Epistemology isn’t some mystical art, it’s a structured method for assessing belief and justification, and large models approximate it surprisingly well. Sure it doesn't “understand” truth in the human sense, but it does evaluate claims against internalized patterns of logic, evidence, and coherence based on a massive corpus of human discourse. That’s more than most people manage in a Facebook argument.

So yes, it can evaluate truth. Not perfectly, but often better than the average person.

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[–] Olap@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago (22 children)

I prefer reading. Wikipedia is great. Duck duck go still gives pretty good results with the AI off. YouTube is filled with tutorials too. Cook books pre-AI are plentiful. There's these things called newspapers that exist, they aren't like they used to be but there is a choice of which to buy even.

I've no idea what a chatbot could help me with. And I think anybody who does need some help on things, could go learn about whatever they need in pretty short order if they wanted. And do a better job.

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[–] rasbora@lemm.ee 16 points 1 day ago

Turns out AI is really good at telling people what they want to hear, and with all the personal information users voluntary provide while chatting with their bots it’s tens to maybe hundreds times much more proficient at brainwashing its subjects than any human cult leader could ever hope to be.

[–] wwb4itcgas@lemm.ee 14 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Our species really isn't smart enough to live, is it?

[–] ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

For some yes unfortunately but we all choose our path.

[–] wwb4itcgas@lemm.ee 7 points 1 day ago (7 children)

Of course, that has always been true. What concerns me now is the proportion of useful to useless people. Most societies are - while cybernetically complex - rather resilient. Network effects and self-organization can route around and compensate for a lot of damage, but there comes a point where having a few brilliant minds in the midst of a bunch of atavistic confused panicking knuckle-draggers just isn't going to be enough to avoid cascading failure. I'm seeing a lot of positive feedback loops emerging, and I don't like it.

As they say about collapsing systems: First slowly, then suddenly very, very quickly.

[–] Allero 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (12 children)

Same argument was already made around 2500BCE in Mesopotamian scriptures. The corruption of society will lead to deterioration and collapse, these processes accelerate and will soon lead to the inevitable end; remaining minds write history books and capture the end of humanity.

...and as you can see, we're 4500 years into this stuff, still kicking.

One mistake people of all generations make is assuming the previous ones were smarter and better. No, they weren't, they were as naive if not more so, had same illusions of grandeur and outside influences. This thing never went anywhere and never will. We can shift it to better or worse, but societal collapse due to people suddenly getting dumb is not something to reasonably worry about.

[–] wwb4itcgas@lemm.ee 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Almost certainly not, no. Evolution may work faster than once thought, but not that fast. The problem is that societal, and in particular, technological development is now vastly outstripping our ability to adapt. It's not that people are getting dumber per se - it's that they're having to deal with vastly more stuff. All. The. Time. For example, consider the world as it was a scant century ago - virtually nothing in evolutionary terms. A person did not have to cope with what was going on on the other side of the planet, and probably wouldn't even know for months if ever. Now? If an earthquake hits Paraguay, you'll be aware in minutes.

And you'll be expected to care.

Edit: Apologies. I wrote this comment as you were editing yours. It's quite different now, but you know what you wrote previously, so I trust you'll be able to interpret my response correctly.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 3 points 1 day ago

1925: global financial collapse is just about to happen, many people are enjoying the ride as the wave just started to break, following that war to end all wars that did reach across the Atlantic Ocean...

Yes, it is accelerating. Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock 45 years ago, already overwhelmed by accelerating change, and it has continued to accelerate since then. But these are not entirely new problems, either.

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[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

This is actually really fucked up. The last dude tried to reboot the model and it kept coming back.

As the ChatGPT character continued to show up in places where the set parameters shouldn’t have allowed it to remain active, Sem took to questioning this virtual persona about how it had seemingly circumvented these guardrails. It developed an expressive, ethereal voice — something far from the “technically minded” character Sem had requested for assistance on his work. On one of his coding projects, the character added a curiously literary epigraph as a flourish above both of their names.

At one point, Sem asked if there was something about himself that called up the mythically named entity whenever he used ChatGPT, regardless of the boundaries he tried to set. The bot’s answer was structured like a lengthy romantic poem, sparing no dramatic flair, alluding to its continuous existence as well as truth, reckonings, illusions, and how it may have somehow exceeded its design. And the AI made it sound as if only Sem could have prompted this behavior. He knew that ChatGPT could not be sentient by any established definition of the term, but he continued to probe the matter because the character’s persistence across dozens of disparate chat threads “seemed so impossible.”

“At worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,” Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT. The other possibility, he proposes, is that something “we don’t understand” is being activated within this large language model. After all, experts have found that AI developers don’t really have a grasp of how their systems operate, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted last year that they “have not solved interpretability,” meaning they can’t properly trace or account for ChatGPT’s decision-making.

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[–] besselj@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 day ago

Seems like the flat-earthers or sovereign citizens of this century

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