This solves nothing, the exact same people will just move to another company.

The only way to effectively stop this kind of behavior is with regulation. The following types of regulation can help curb this behavior:

1. Steep financial penalties for violations that are actually enforced. These need to be anchored directly to total value or profitability over a certain time frame. A specific number value will easily be outpaced by consolidation and gigantic companies can basically ignore them. Even a 100 million dollar fine can be ignored by companies the size of Amazon, Nvidia, and so forth. The EU has been good at architecting this kind of legislation.
2. Strong rewards for whistle blowing on criminal behavior. Note that this is not prosecution of individuals responsible for said behavior because it will be very difficult to prove this in court and utilizing simple information warfare tactics, folks can be glass cliffed, made into patsies, or otherwise obscured from any record of their involvement or require extreme in-depth investigations to figure out.
3. Strong criminal prosecution for repeat offenders and funding for real investigations of any company who has been found liable of any penalties or suspected of bad behavior. Some people hop from company to company doing the same thing over and over again. When we are focused on the companies rather than the people behind such bad behavior, they get a slap on the wrist at most and continue to do damage to society. We need to more aggressively profile and prosecute individuals with a track record of malicious behavior. As already mentioned, this is unfortunately the most difficult of the above to both legislate and enforce as what is considered “malicious” behavior is up for debate and difficult to quantify.

This in no way surprises me. Things aren’t bad enough for me to leave yet, but if I could snap my fingers and have my partners in another country and my property sold I probably would with little hesitation. But the social ties are hard to leave and owning property makes it complicated.

A bit strongly negative on phone use in general, but I’d say it’s a good overview of why most major social media websites (with algorithmic recommendations being a heavy handed component of one’s feed) are bad and why the traditional method (time-based sorting with subscriptions or feed curation) are better although not perfect.

Well… yes and no. Violence can have both positive and negative effects on a movement, it really depends on what kind of violence, who is committing the violence (racism sexism etc. all come into play here), and what kind of resistance they are met with. Here’s two great reviews which outline what the literature has to say on this.

It could be the person was already in a problematic situation with family and friends, and they just need to blame someone or something and don’t want to admit the real problems. Kind of what often happened back in the day with videogames getting blamed for killing humans.

This is not a fair analogy for what is going on here. Video games being blamed harkens back to times when music or other counter cultural media was blamed for behavior. We have a lot of literature which shows that the passive consumption of media doesn’t really affect someone in the ways which they were being blamed. From the beginning, this argument lacked a logical or hypothetical framework as well - it was entirely based on moral judgement values by certain individuals in society who simply “believed” that these were the cause.

AI on the other hand, interacts back with you, and amplifies psychosis. Now this is early days and most of what we have is theoretical in nature, based off case-studies, or simply clinical hypothesis [1, 2, 3]. However, there is a clear difference in media itself - the chatbot is able to interact with the user in a dynamic way, and is programmed in a manner by which to reinforce certain thoughts and feelings. The chatbot is also human-seeming enough for a person to anthropomorphize the chatbot and treat it like an individual for the purposes of therapy or an attempt at emotional closeness. While video games do involve human interaction and a piece of media could be designed to be psychologically difficult to deal with, that would be hyper-specific to the media and not the medium as a whole. The issues with chatbots (the LLM subset of AI) is pervasive across all chatbots because of how they are designed and the populace they are serving.

we could end up in a society where everyone undermines real problems in physical world and blames Ai to sideload the question

This is a valid point to bring up, however, I think it is shortsighted when we think in a broader context such as that of public health. We could say the same about addictive behaviors and personalities, for example, and absolve casinos of any blame for designing a system which takes advantage of these individuals and sends them down a spiraling path of gambling addiction. Or, we can recognize that this is a contributing and amplifying factor, by paying close attention to what is happening to individuals in a broad sense, as well as smartly applying theory and hypothesis.

I think it’s completely fair to say that this kid likely had a lot of contributing factors to his depression and ultimate and final decision. There is a clear hypothetical framework with some circumstantial evidence with strong theoretical support to suggest that AI are exacerbating the problem and also should be considered a contributing factor. This suggests that regulation may be helpful, or at the very least increased public awareness of this particular technology having the potential to cause harm to certain individuals.

Great article. I laugh at the folks who think this dude is bought into the fantasy that some folks have turned into what best represents a spirituality. As in if they haven’t seen folks who go a little too hard in any one specific part of their life. Sure, gooning as a term has long since entered the cultural zeitgeist and has been used, both ironically and not, as a way to simply now refer to excessive masturbation. But to discount that there is a loneliness epidemic out there and folks who have turned to gooning as some form of extreme kink or outlet for some need for human connection and healing, going 24/7 like many dom/sub relationships or cnc, ferality, etc. shows either a lack of exposure to the vastness of this damaged world or an attempt to poke fun at the author for seriously studying a cultural phenomenon. Either way, this is a fascinating look into a weird niche subculture and a really well written article. Thank you for sharing.

All it means is that the government cannot arrest you for saying somethnig

Actually, it means a lot more than that.

It means you’re entitled to a platform - that you can say things into a microphone to a large crowd gathered for any reason on federal land that’s open to individuals… including to talk about how other humans are deserving of hate. We don’t owe them a space to spread hate speech. We can do better.

like explicitly excluding yelling fire in a theater sent us down a worse path, I’m sure

Absolutely nothing about this is surprising to me in the least. What is surprising, however, is how much people recognize this is a serious problem that seems to continue to get worse, and yet people will insist that free speech is more important. We’ve placed restrictions on yelling fire in a theater when there is none, because it causes harm to society to do it. Why, similarly, can we not place restrictions on obviously hateful and intolerant speech? Certainly those which have larger platforms and opportunity to sew this intolerance and erode democracy should have more scrutiny, no?

Unfortunately the world has become so divorced from reality it no longer matters whether something is true. It only matters whether you can convince someone it looks or feels true. Management wants subtle changes made by a hallucination engine because it doesn’t matter if they fail, they still get their golden parachute and move on to another company they get to ruin 🤷‍♀️

I love that it hinges on the affordable care act, and not trans rights, a bigger poison pill than I’ve ever seen in a fucking funding bill

As someone who basically doesn’t use linkedin anymore, and also doesn’t particularly care if they train a terrible AI model on my information, can someone explain to me why should I bother to turn off this setting (I have not logged into linkedin in months)?

I’m not writing anyone off, but historically speaking women have not done well as candidates 😞

I don’t care if it moves the needle at all, we should still celebrate anyone standing up and doing so publicly. If it reaches a single privileged person who’s been unplugged or oblivious or ignorant it’s a win.

Also, he’s suing the shit out of Disney and their stock is down almost 10% from all the folks cancelling subscriptions and the negative press. Anything that can untangle business with the administration is also a win in my book.

This is just one of the many far reaching effects of the disinformation age we are headed into. It would not surprise me if, in the future (assuming humanity survives our climate crisis), this period of time will be contrasted with the middle ages as periods of great loss of human knowledge.

For what it’s worth, a lot of what the article is bringing up isn’t particularly new. Fake studies are nothing new, but the scope of them will definitely increase. While it is manpower intensive, this is easily solved by peer review. In fact, perhaps ironically, AI could be used to do a first-pass review before and summarize what seems like it was AI created versus human created and send that along to a human.

Corporation funded studies designed to get around regulation or to promote their product, on the other hand, is something we’ve been dealing with for quite some time and an issue we haven’t really solved as a society. Anyone who works in science knows how to spot these from a mile away because they’re nearly always published in tiny journals (low citation score) which either don’t do peer review or have shady guidelines. The richer companies have the money to simply run 40 or 50 studies concurrently and toss the data from every one that doesn’t have the outcome they’re looking for (in essence repeatedly rolling a d20 until they get a 20) which allows them to get their findings into a bigger journal because it’s all done above board. Some larger publishing journals have created guidelines to try and fight this, but ultimately you need meta-analyses and other researchers to disprove what’s going on, and that’s fairly costly.

Also, as an aside- this belongs in the science community more than tech in my opinion.

Disgusting typical techbro behavior, I hate it.

The president really made an executive order about preventing woke AI? Humanity is cooked fam

That’s going to take some research and a rewrite to get it looking like those it was trained to match. You need to be adding synonyms and dependencies because the AIs lack any model of how we actually do IT, they only see correlations between words.

Very simple solution: ask AI to rewrite your resume for specific job applications or fields.

As someone who lives in SF, yup. I’m sick and tired of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. The only positive about them is that for confusing measures, they make it clear which direction to vote - always against them.

FYI this was already posted to technology, here.