A wild story in Rolling Stone: People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies. I use ChatGPT throughout the day and it’s hard to imagine it going off the rails this badly:
…anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.
In the future it will be more common to have AI virtual friends — the “point-five” concept from The Mountain in the Sea. At their best, these will be a mix of friend and counselor. At their most dangerous, maybe priest and fortune teller. It’s worrisome if people are already losing themselves with those kind of personas.
Also a side note after I started watching Andor season 2…
I was thinking of the design of the smaller droids in Star Wars. They are cute and sometimes intelligent, and we personify them to an extent, but probably as little more than an advanced Teddy Ruxpin. We don’t confuse those kind of droids with truly intelligent beings that have free will.
I continue to believe that it’s a terrible idea to build humanoid AI robots. Partly because if they have all our physical attributes, only stronger and smarter, they can overpower us. But also because it blurs the lines of reality if robots are visually too similar to us, messing with our brains and how we interact with others. It would only amplify the problems in that Rolling Stone article.
