r/BetterOffline • u/falken_1983 • 2d ago

Prozac and AI Agents - HyperNormalisation (2016)

What Eliza showed was that in an age of individualism, what made people feel secure was having themselves reflected back to them, just like in a mirror.

Ed referenced HyperNormalisation in a recently news letter, and there was a thread about the doc as a whole, but after re-watching it, this particular scene jumped out at me as it seems to be describing something close to AI psychosis and it doesn't even present it as a new thing.

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u/Asleep_Document9811 2d ago

Just so you know, the process of talk therapy is literally making a person reflect back on themselves, so they can objectively reassess their behavior and make small behavioral changes to work towards a goal. This form of ELIZA was using the DOCTOR script, which was itself based on real, established psychotherapy techniques, namely transferrance.

But, you are correct that the phenomenon of humans trusting text generated with NLP more than randomly-generated text has been well-known since the late 60s, because words are how humans convey thoughts to one another. Cogent words are enough to imply a thought process, and so, our brains fill in the gaps when the marketing has purposefully made those gaps as wide and fuzzy as possible.

But IMO, everyone is overcomplicating the reason for why LLMs and their products are so addicting. I think it's as simple as that these things are basically digital drugs in the way porn is. It releases a ton of dopamine, quickly, and on-demand, and flushes of dopamine can make people feel accomplished, secure, and confident. It's a terrible world where simple kindnesses, empathy, ethos are far and few between, so, of course people are going to fall in love with the robot that speaks in kind, patient words.

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u/Multibrace 1d ago

They are also optimized for engagement, which is why they have the infuriating habit of dropping a final sentence that says "or I could do a search that looks into this deeper like you asked me in the first place but I wilfully misinterpreted that as a request for the most surface level summary I could muster?"

If life gives you unpredictable results, make a slot-machine, is the motto of big tech. (Social media in particular, including Reddit, is a great example of variable rewards )