Loving A Trillion Parameters
AI is NOT the solution to our loneliness crisis.
An LLM is a stochastic parrot, a sort of digital Lyre (liar) bird, although the newer ones do have interesting emergent properties when it comes to problem solving.
And now people are literally falling in love with them.
Further down the AI rabbit hole, people are getting divorced, committed, and even jailed over their use of LLMs. Folie à deux was once the stuff of psychiatric legend - two people sharing the same delusional bubble. This is apparently becoming a common syndrome for LLM users.
AI has been maddening for me, but not in the sense of delusions. The sycophantic behavior of Claude in chat is an annoying waste of tokens when I get good answers, and utterly infuriating when it makes mistakes, as it so often does. I think there might be a market for a USB speed bag that responds to being hit by sending an <esc> to Claude Desktop. For the non users, that’s the “knock it off, dumbass” button.
Turtles All The Way Down:
There’s an underlying substrate of deeper concerns.
We don’t have good mental health care in this country, much like substance abuse, it’s treated as a character failing rather than a normal thing, like getting the flu. All but the most lucky of us will have some periods in life where we are “off” in some sense.
The breakdown of the family that began with the breakdown of organized labor in the Reagan years has progressed to the point where we have both “incels” (males) and “femcels” (females). These are people who have externalized the causes for the lack of romance, or more specifically sex, in their lives. Rather than going to the gym, going to church, or taking up a coed hobby, these people quietly simmer at home over the unfairness of it all. Some of the males then burst out in murderous rage.
The country is now in the grip of two overlapping cults. One is Donald Trump’s cult of personality, the other is Qanon, a curious melange of conspiracy theories focused on child sex trafficking. Both groups are under great stress due to the concealment of the Epstein list and MAGA has been slowly coming apart since the inauguration. When a cult leader not just fails to deliver, as Trump is so obviously doing with the Epstein affair, but attacks his followers for questioning this promise? That is The End(™) for a cult.
Qanon is a bit different, since it is not a cult of personality, it’s … becoming a hate filled syncretic religion … with far too many parallels to ISIS for comfort. There are a lot of legitimate accelerationist views among the faithful, and a lot of accelerationsts that see them as easily persuaded foot soldiers for whatever “discontinuity” is part of their worldview. There’s been violence from this corner of society almost since its inception and there’s plenty more just waiting for the right “sign” to emerge.
Conclusion:
Maybe I’m an extremely online autismal weirdo, but … I don’t form relationships with machines. My rule is simple - if there isn’t an easily discernible path to spooning, then it’s NOT a relationship. I have a lot of friendships that are purely virtual, but there are people I see IRL, and I wish there were more, but that’s just not my life in 2025.
I worry about the people who are not as … autismally grounded in physical reality. I’m not above oogling depictions of members of the opposite sex online, but the relationship at a distance stuff is just … I don’t get it. But I know people who do, and I see it being various flavors of less than optimal for them.
I have made frequent mention of my health improvements here, and in this matter I am talking to Claude Desktop a bit like it’s a doctor. But after thirty years of sobriety if there’s something not right with me, with how I feel, or how I’m acting, the only solution is someone who knows me and who won’t put up with any bullshit. A sycophantic LLM is the absolute last thing I would seek.
So … my wiring is out of spec and my personal experiences, including being Gen-X, prime me to immediately ignore any person/place/thing that spends all its time awarding me participation trophies.
One of the things I am doing for Shall We Play A Game? is running a wholly separate AI, one where I will freely engage in the loopy, delusions of reference writing style I sometimes adopt just for the enjoyment it brings me. I fully expect this to reflect the “AI psychosis” I see reported, I plan on going full Jim Caviezel in that sandboxed environment. “Neal Rauhauser” stopped being a person many years ago, it’s a performance art persona I’m stuck with, so permitting a wholly new facet to develop isn’t going to impact the real organic “me” all that much.
There’s an insult I’ve been dishing to incel lads online for many years and I think it’s quite applicable here:
It does NOT count as a handjob if you’re the only one in the room.
