"For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn't give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms)."Remember that a social media site's entire business model is based on keeping you engaged on their site, not sending you away to follow links to blog posts or magazine articles. Every outgoing link you post on, say, Facebook lowers your hidden internal "social credit score" and causes your posts to be de-prioritized in other people's feeds, even if they specifically follow you because they want to see your stuff.
We’ve identified at least ten cases in which chatbots, primarily ChatGPT, fed a user’s fixation on another real person — fueling the false idea that the two shared a special or even “divine” bond, roping the user into conspiratorial delusions, or insisting to a would-be stalker that they’d been gravely wronged by their target. In some cases, our reporting found, ChatGPT continued to stoke users’ obsessions as they descended into unwanted harassment, abusive stalking behavior, or domestic abuse, traumatizing victims and profoundly altering lives.In other cases, the built-in confirmation bias of LLMs can lead otherwise intelligent people to think they were doing some serious "research" to their own detriment...
Though Dr. Marzbani didn’t know it, Joe was routinely asking questions about his cancer to several generative A.I. tools, which often struggle to give accurate medical advice. He told them to list the early signs of Richter’s, interpret his lab results and explain complicated research about the treatment his doctor recommended. He knew not to trust A.I. unilaterally. He often read the scientific papers the tools cited and — as best he could without medical training — tried to verify that they aligned with what the tools had said.It can be a useful tool for some things, but it's important to get second opinions and reality checks. I know we think we're all way too smart to get trapped in a spiral like that, but...
He came away feeling so confident in his understanding of the science that declining treatment seemed to be the obvious choice.
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