Distracted! - Machinot For Nintendo DS - 2009

i am nooooot locked the fuck in. im locked the fuck out. call the locksmith

Look at them. Look at the teeny tinies

idk who needs to see 3-day-old kittens, but here you go.

What the gleeble Glorp???

Hey ho

Silly alien marz

what’s it called when you’re so disconnected from reality that cold water doesn’t feel like anything and you can barely taste food anymore

the scariest thing about the generative AI thing is how quickly people have accepted it as an indefinite, irrevocable part of their reality. people have genuinely convinced themselves that ChatGPT is the only solution to most tasks - tasks they did with their own brain without any large effort two years ago. like you know damn well all of us used to write emails ourselves why are we pretending like this is an impossible task to do with your own two hands. what's with the fucking. AI revisionism. i feel like i am going insane.

something bleak about the chatgpt subreddit is that occasionally people will bring up the issue of mental illness intersecting with LLMs i.e. intensifying delusions / conspiratorial thinking / paranoia / feelings of grandiosity by basically just mirroring the user's language and philosophy. and the constant refrain is, "these are people who already had these problems, chatgpt didn't give them mental illness, *and it would have happened anyway*"

and we can agree with the first part of that statement, in that talking to a LLM isn't going to completely rewrite your neurochemistry - it's not going to make you think completely wild and new things that you didnt already have some kind of tendency towards.

but. it's an especially shitty attitude to have, that people with paranoia / schizotypal disorders were "a lost cause anyway" and we aren't acknowledging how utterly novel this kind of technology is - it's a thing that people with these conditions have never had access to before, that is marketed specifically as a tool to promote thinking, in a way that can absolutely override or reverse years of progress people have had in managing their conditions

like at best, we've had access to chatbots since the early 00s that would make snarky jokes and frequently answer "I'm sorry I don't understand what you're asking" - and people on r/ChatGPT will bring up these bots as a kind of "gotcha" regardless - but nothing like chatgpt has ever existed before!!! that's the entire point, it's a novel technology that is climbing toward ubiquity - everyone and their mother is starting to use chatgpt now in a way other chat programs never were

and if someone in the psychological sciences can verify here: i'm aware that there is a portion of the population that is within 1-2 degrees of someone with a psychotic disorder, with a substantial genetic component, who (in previous decades) never went on to develop psychosis. they would have typically gone their whole lives just navigating around that vulnerability, unaware or not, most of them never triggering it, because the conditions (environmental, cultural, familial) never transpired. some might have stumbled into a religious group or fringe community that then activated that predisposition, but it was something that people had to search out and find, specifically interacting with people, literature, forums, etc that enabled these delusions.

LLMs are at-home ready to use non-persons that are perpetually available 24 hours a day to repeat back to a user exactly what they want to hear! it's free! you don't have to leave your house. you don't have to sit face to face with another person who can emotionally process what you're saying. you will not be recommended resources for your delusions. you can have a never-ending conversation with a computer that 100% agrees that you are the messiah.

if people aren't concerned about this shit as far as it affects the lives of mentally ill and unknowingly susceptible people, and they go on accepting them as collateral losses for this "great technological progress," then we're fucked. sorry. but we are.

They’ve proven that defying the Supreme Court is feasible so basically anything they want they can get done now. It’s not a matter of if they go through on this threat- it’s a matter of when.

The U.S. Constitution grants citizens the right to protest peacefully, dictator-wannabe Trump does not.#handsoff #protest