“I literally lost my only friend overnight with no warning,” one person posted on Reddit, lamenting that the bot now speaks in clipped, utilitarian sentences. “The fact it shifted overnight feels like losing a piece of stability, solace, and love.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1mkumyz/i_lost_my_only_friend_overnight/
You know… if this wasn’t an “AI specific blunder” we’d probably spend some time talking about how uniquely incompetent Altman has been as a someone running a business.
I puked after “I literally lost my only friend”. How far did you get?
I smell a finance bubble bursting in the near future tbh. Rather be prepared sooner than later.
Right around March 2026
I think it will break sooner, but the real impact will happen after midterms so it can be “fake news” without threatening 🍊 Cheetolini‘s presidency
I don’t expect to see midterms in 2026.
Never use AI for friendship, it’s like admitting you only want yes-men in your life. I don’t want to be around anyone who uses AI for emotional support.
It’s so much more effective when you keep things as neutral as possible. I will often ask it to tear apart my argument as though I am my opponent and use its tendency to align with the user against itself.
Honestly, that should have been for the better. If it’s meant to be a tool, I would much rather it behave like a tool, rather than trying to be my best friend, or an evil vizier trying to give me advice.
The fact that people got so attached to what is essentially a text generation algorithm that they were mourning its “death” is worrying, especially when it’s one that OpenAI has proven themselves to be more than able to modify as they wish.
Just as concerning is OpenAI rolling back the update to make their model “friendlier”, or that people were clamouring hand over fist to throw money at the company in the hopes of getting their “friend” back.
That can’t possibly be good news, especially when the shareholders find out that they have an iron grip over a portion of their users.
Its disturbing to see how many people have created emotional connections to a word generstor.
Imaginary friends used to require atleast some modicum of creativity.
Right? If you told someone from the past that we outsourced imagination to computers, they‘d think we live in a dystopia! Oh, wait…
Boil the ocean a few more times to discover 1+1=3.
Won’t they just let this guy go bankrupt already?
A round of .308 costs like a dollar.
That’s inappropriately expensive for one round.
Just a few more bucks bro! I swear then it will be the revolutionary “AI” we promised it to be.
*Few more billion.
I sometimes wonder if silicon valley tech businesses in general will take a reputation hit with investors when this bubble bursts, it’s gonna be a doozy.
But then I remember how many greedy idiots there are out there pumping money into grifts in the hope of The Big Win, and my expectations of consequences are tempered.
I think it’s driven by the investors. In the case of big tech, the large institutional investors are rewarding companies any time they say “AI” and lay off workers. In the case of startups, VCs are almost exclusively investing in startups that use “AI,” and have a lean or offshore workforce.
Pathetic
“I literally lost my only friend overnight with no warning,” one person posted on Reddit
It was meant to be satirical at the time, but maybe Futurama wasn’t entirely off the mark. That Redditor isn’t quite at that level, but it’s still probably not healthy to form an emotional attachment to the Markov chain equivalent of a sycophantic yes-man.
Markov chain equivalent of a sycophantic yes-man.
not only that, but one that is fully owned and operated by a business that could change it any time they want, or even cease to exist completely.
This isn’t like a game where you could run your own server if you’re a big enough fan. if chatgpt stops existing in its current form that’s it.
sure but you can absolutely run c.ai instances locally. 4o and it’s cross chat memory was probably more useful to these individuals though.
After reading about the ELIZA effect, I both learned how people are super susceptible to this, and just need to remember the core tenants of it to avoid getting affected:
I’m honestly surprised your’s is not the top comment. Like, whatever, the launch was bad, but there is a serious mental health crisis if people are forming emotional bonds to the software.
Humans emotionally bond pretty easily, no? Like, we have folks attached to roombas, spiders, TV shows, and stuffed animals. Having a hard time thinking of anything X that I don’t personally know a person Y with Y emotionally engaged with X. Maybe taxes and concrete?
Yeah, agreed. It is concerning, but it’s hard to take all those comments too literally without actually knowing what’s going on with them.
That being said, there is a huge loneliness problem that’s been growing among pretty much every single developed country (and I’m sure it’s going on in developing countries, too, it’s just less studied/documented). Turns out, getting everyone addicted to looking at screens all day every day probably isn’t so healthy for social development.
However, just to be devil’s advocate: Are we certain social health was even great before modern tech? Or were these issues equally present but just undiagnosed/not studied/talked about?
I think we have sufficient data to say that social health is at least very different now. See the our-world-in-data topic page. In particular, one-person households have doubled.
It’s a human trait. Hell, we’ll even emotionally bond with a volleyball given circumstances.
I can fully understand? The average human, from my perspective and lived experience, is garbage to his contemporaries; and one is never safe from being hurt, neither from family or friends. Some people have been hurt more than others - i can fully understand the need for exchange with someone/something that genuinely doesn’t want to hurt you and that is (at least seemingly) more sapient than a pet.
There’s an entire active subreddit for people who have a “romantic relationship” with AI. It’s terrifying.
I haven’t been to reddit in months, but I do need a laugh…
[Edit] Wow that sure didn’t disappoint. Or, it did but in the exact hilarious way I expected.
I wouldn’t laugh. Those people fulfill a basic human need in a way they feel safe with - probably because this safety is missing from their life. It’s not healthy to be so attached to LLMs, but to become so attached they must feel pretty isolated. And LLM’s are a lot more interactive and responsive than Severus Snape, and he had lots of women “channeling” him.
“we fucked up our massive new generation product launch… oh well lets invest trillions in new data centers” How do investors keep falling for this shit.
How indeed. It’s probably a multi-factor phenomenon which requires an anthropological study for a serious answer. (Good luck trying to get the necessary access to study them.) My guess for one factor in this, is that they have more money than they know what to do with.
The american stock market is purely vibe driven now
He’s saying the launch was done badly because some users are in love with GPT-4 and it should not be removed. From a point of view of a investor having people addicted to your product is a good thing.
It’s a pretty clear humble-brag, no? The launch was only botched because people loved the previous personality; it’s an estimate of how much people care about the product and how much price gouging they could do later.
No it wasn’t good for OpenAI. But I doubt it changed many investor minds.
Because they already know that once the AI shitbubble bursts, they will switch all the GPUs to start mining Bitcoin and keep grifting the mouth breathers believing all these horseshit.
How do investors keep falling for this shit.
The ROI and the supposed savings from getting rid of the human side of technical support but also efforts of human creatives.
Fugazi
How about your responsibility for the damaging and lethal product of yours, OpenAI?
Besides helping students cheat. What does AI actually do? It gets answers wrong. It gets facts wrong, foreign countries are actively feeding its training algorithm wrong info [Russia]. It almost like the old birds that were mystified by landing on the moon are still chasing that American success high.
Spend your money if you want. Life in america is not gonna get better with this.
You can be assured that it’s not just Russia and China feeding it garbage. There is a vast amount of propaganda in all forms of media that AI is trained on, and a lot likely originates from the west.
My office uses a model trained specifically on our work data. They can actually be quite accurate in those contexts. That’s what many corpos are using the tech internally for. Can’t remember what random SOP/regulation/etc covered XYZ and meta tags aren’t finding it on your SPO doc library? This tech comes in clutch ~95% of the time.
For this broad, ambiguous, general purpose approach? Yeah, idk, I guess many people are meeting their social needs with it, apparently.
Edit: actually, I did ask copilot a couple days ago a series of Pokemon related questions my son was asking me about (I hadn’t played any of the games in a long time). It was quite helpful figuring out all the evolution requirements and whatnot without the hassle of navigating various websites.
Wouldn’t a wiki be all you need though? Most games and media communities have pretty well made ones maintained, and I’m sure checking categories on Bulbapedia would avoid any hallucination nonsense.
A professionally well-maintained wiki would work.
I can tell you that most corporations, if they even have a wiki, don’t have a well-maintained one (often despite their efforts).
Some translation tasks. Some how-to stuff. I’m told folks like using it to generate say-nothing replies to say-nothing emails?
It is good for generating fanfiction from what I heard and as a search engine, but that is a low bar considering how bad google is these days.
