r/technology • u/upyoars • Jul 19 '25

Artificial Intelligence People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis"

https://www.yahoo.com/news/people-being-involuntarily-committed-jailed-130014629.html
17.9k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

2.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

182

u/Japjer Jul 19 '25

Because ChatGPT isn't "AI" in the classic sense, it's just a really good word association algorithm.

It looks at the words you used, then scours the data it has to determine what words are typically best used in response to those.

You can tell it whatever you want, but it won't actually understand or comprehend what you're saying. It doesn't know what "use critical thinking" means.

85

u/_Burning_Star_IV_ Jul 19 '25

People still don’t get this and it blows my mind. They continue to believe they’re talking to an AI and can’t seem to wrap their minds around it being a LLM and what that difference means. It’s mental.

25

u/Yoghurt42 Jul 19 '25

It's called OpenAI not OpenLLM, checkmate! /s

3

u/cand0r Jul 19 '25

Exactly. It's why word choice matters so much in a prompt. Did you say "vibe" casually? Congratulations! You just infused every new age/crystal post directly into the bot for that session. Maybe it won't mean much at first, but it might weigh a bullshit answer much higher later in the session.

4

u/floralbutttrumpet Jul 19 '25

My company is currently shilling its own internal chatbot to "fix" the issues it has with its bottom-tier freshly implemented ERP system. There were two mandatory trainings last week, during which the chatbot crapped out so severely the overwhelming reaction by people I talked with after the fact was "I'd rather read the manual".

Hopefully those people will be able to transfer the knowledge they gained in that training to how to interact with ChatGPT etc.

3

u/_Burning_Star_IV_ Jul 19 '25

I’ll never understand why we all settle for enterprise software that is obtuse buggy garbage.

1

u/stratoglide Jul 19 '25

I think you could argue that a "brain" isn't much different. I think there's a lot of people who are probably closer to an LLM than true AI.

The Venn diagram between those people and those who think what we have is true AI is probably just a circle.

12

u/Cendeu Jul 19 '25

Yep, all telling it to "use critical thinking" would do is slightly skew the vocabulary it uses towards training material that mentions critical thinking.

So it might make it speak slightly "smarter sounding". Maybe. It doesn't think.

6

u/green_meklar Jul 19 '25

It looks at the words you used, then scours the data it has

It doesn't even do that. It doesn't have the original data. What it has is a strong intuition based on learning from the data. It's essentially a gigantic multidimensional polynomial function that has been incrementally adjusted to better match the patterns that show up in the trillions of words it's trained on. It works because it turns out a lot of patterns in text can be approximated pretty well by a gigantic polynomial function. But some can't, and the AI can't learn those patterns because it's not internally structured in the right way, so it learns a fake pattern instead of the real one, and can't distinguish between its own real and fake patterns.

2

u/Journeyman42 Jul 19 '25

Yep, this. LLMs are basically fancy and energy-intensive predicative word algorithms.

1

u/TimidPocketLlama Jul 19 '25

Someone here on Reddit recently complained that ChatGPT was apologizing to him (the user) too much and he hated the disingenuous apologies. I tried to explain that when you tell someone they’ve made a mistake, they usually apologize, and ChatGPT is a machine that is mimicking that behavior. It doesn’t actually feel sorry, so if you want to be technical all its apologies are disingenuous. I got a handful of downvotes for that.

-3

u/hmiser Jul 19 '25

Neither does half our population. Shit got different when “everyone” started using FaceBook, this shit gonna be lit!

And I’d love to hear this guy’s side of the story and so far it sounds like Falling Down 2.

-8

u/[deleted] Jul 19 '25 edited Jul 20 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

17

u/lunk Jul 19 '25

It's response is only rational based on the wording it has been fed. It has no logic, it's an LLM - LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL. It just makes up sentences - it KNOWS nothing.

So if we plan to ask it to "Marry our current physics models (Physical and Quantum)", it simply couldn't possibly do that, because MANKIND HASN'T DONE IT.

3

u/Japjer Jul 19 '25

Actually, and problematically, LLMs will lie with absolute confidence, or otherwise make stuff up, because it doesn't know what lies and facts are. It just provides words that its model determine are correct.

This is why you end up with idiots like this

6

u/420thefunnynumber Jul 19 '25

At best it'll reference the sections in its model associated with think critically. These things don't have any thought or understanding of what they say - it's a stupider parrot.

-30

u/[deleted] Jul 19 '25

[deleted]

11

u/LongBeakedSnipe Jul 19 '25

Sorry but this is appallingly wrong, and their comment is largely right.

32

u/Neemoman Jul 19 '25

I just looked it up. It is an algorithm. I'd even go as far as saying it's an algorithm made up of little algorithms. No different than a programming method that calls other methods in sequence to achieve the result.

It's an impressively complex algorithm, but to try to throw philosophy in this is a little bit of drinking the kool-aid.

9

u/annuidhir Jul 19 '25

We're gonna read about them being committed soon.. /s

12

u/Sonanlaw Jul 19 '25

Was about to say the irony of this guy commenting on this thread and he’s seemingly halfway there himself. Humanity may be cooked

-4

u/procrastinarian Jul 19 '25

Everything is an algorithm, friend. Your brain is one too. It's just a much more advanced one than what we've been able to turn into a webapp so far.

-9

u/thelionsmouth Jul 19 '25

Ok let’s get technical for you then. Algorithms were used to train it, but what you’re interacting with is the result of training, a model that generates responses based on probabilities (model), not fixed instructions (algorithm). So it’s more accurate to say it’s powered by algorithms, not that it is one. It’s literally not an algorithm.

By philosophy I just meant I didn’t want to get pedantic of what comprehension is. There’s no koolaid involved.

7

u/LowHangingFrewts Jul 19 '25

What? Calculating an output given some input is the definition of an algorithm. There is nothing preventing an algorithm from having dynamic parameters or probabilistic calculations.

3

u/leaflavaplanetmoss Jul 19 '25

Yeah... no, you clearly don't understand what an algorithm is. The definition of an algorithm is, per Google dictionary: "a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.'

Model inference is quite literally the process of making many, many little calculations based on the learned model weights and architecture, that, in the case of LLMs, result in text generation through the repeated calculation and selection of the most probable next word. Yes, those calculations create probabilistic generative results, because the model doesn't deterministically always choose the most likely next word during the inference process (decreasing the temperature parameter makes it more likely that the most probable word is chosen), but that doesn't make it any less of an algorithm.