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You probably heard about me because I am the founder of the Twisted python networking engine open source project. But I’m also the author and maintainer of several other smaller projects, a writer and public speaker about software and the things software affects (i.e.: everything), and a productivity nerd due to my ADHD. I also post a lot about politics; I’d personally prefer to be apolitical but unfortunately the global rising tide of revanchist fascism is kind of dangerous to ignore.
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Furthermore, it is not "nuts" to dismiss LLM user experiences. In fact, you must dismiss all subjective experience of LLM use as evidence of objective phenomena, even if the LLM user is yourself. Fly by instruments because the cognitive fog is too thick for your eyes to see.
Because the novel thing about LLMs, the thing that makes them dangerous, is that they are—by design—epistemic disruptors.
They can produce symboloids more rapidly than a thinking mind. Repetition influences cognition.
I found gas for less than $6 today and felt a little thrill, which tells me that maybe it's time to get an EV. I am—obviously—not getting a Tesla, and I'd just like a reliable, regular EV that can fit a kid and a few friends. But the offerings in the US seem confusing and gimmicky. I don't want a big truck or an experimental mess full of panel gaps and slow charging. I don't want my feet nailed to the floor of some proprietary subscription HUD; I want to use CarPlay like a normal person
I should cite my sources; I learned about it from this post https://www.acdw.net/my-em-dash-post.html
The very fact that things like OpenClaw and Moltbook even *exist* is an indication, to me, that people are *not* making sober, considered judgements about how and where to use LLMs. The fact that they are popular at *all*, let alone popular enough to be featured in mainstream media shows that whatever this cognitive distortion is, it's widespread.
RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116219642373307943
I wish I could recommend this piece more, because it makes a bunch of great points, but the "normal technology" case feels misleading to me. It's not _wrong_, exactly, but radium paint was also a "normal technology" according to this rubric, and I still very much don't want to get any on me and especially not in my mouth
The "critic psychosis" thing is tedious and wrong for the same reasons Cory's previous "purity culture" take was tedious and wrong, a transparent and honestly somewhat pathetic attempt at self-justification for his own AI tool use for writing assistance. It pairs very well with this Scientific American article, which points out that pedestrian "writing AI tools" influence their users in subtle but clearly disturbing ways. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-autocomplete-doesnt-just-change-how-you-write-it-changes-how-you-think/
Cory also correctly points out that "AI psychosis" is probably going to be gatekept by medical establishment scicomm types soon because "psychosis" probably isn't the right word and already carries an unwarranted stigma. And indeed, I think the biggest problem with "psychosis" as a metaphor is going to be that the ways in which AI can warp our minds are mostly NOT going to be catastrophic psychosis, and are not going to have great existing analogs in existing medical literature.
If I could use another inaccurate metaphor, AI psychosis is the "instant decapitation" industrial accident with this new technology. And indeed, most people having industrial accidents are not instantly decapitated. But they might get a scrape, or lose a finger, or an eye. And an infected scrape can still kill you, but it won't look like the decapitation. It looks like you didn't take very good care of yourself. Didn't wash the cut. Didn't notice it fast enough. Skill issue.
More to the point though in this metaphor where you're getting a potentially-infected scrape at work, we are living in the pre-germ-theory age of AI. We are aware that it might be dangerous sometimes, but we don't know to whom or why. We are attempting to combat miasma with bloodletting right now, and putting the miasma-generator in every home before we know what it's actually doing.
For me, this is the body horror money quote from that Scientific American article:
"participants who saw the AI autocomplete prompts reported attitudes that were more in line with the AI’s position—including people who didn’t use the AI’s suggested text at all"
So maybe you can't use it "responsibly", or "safely". You can't even ignore it and choose not to use it once you've seen it.
If you can see it, the basilisk has already won.
Now, for rhetorical effect, I'm obviously putting this fairly dramatically. Cory points out that people have been doing this *to each other* mediated by technology, in emergent and scary ways, with no need for AI. He shows that people prone to specific types of delusions (Morgellons, Gang Stalking Disorder) have found each other via the Internet and the simple availability of global distributed communication has harmed them. But obviously that has benefits, too.
I'm open to a future where we do some research and figure out the limits of how AI influence works, and where the safety valves are, and also the extent to which it's *fine* that AI can influence our views because honestly many different kinds of stimuli can influence our views, not least of which is each other. But it sure looks right now like it has a bunch of very dangerous feedback loops built-in, and it's not clear how to know if you're touching one.
But, as Cory puts it:
"""
It is nuts to deny the experiences these people are having. They're not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They're not generating tech debt at scale.
"""
I had a very visceral emotional reaction to this particular paragraph, and I find it very important to refute. Here are two points to consider:
1. YES THEY ARE.
They are vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They are generating tech debt at scale. They don't THINK that that's what they're doing. Do you think most programmers conceive of their daily (non-LLM) activities as "putting in lots of bugs"? No, that is never what we say we're doing. Yet, we turn around, and there all the bugs are.
With LLMs, we can look at the mission-critical AWS modules and ask after the fact, were they vibe-coded? AWS says yes https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/after-outages-amazon-to-make-senior-engineers-sign-off-on-ai-assisted-changes.1511983/
2. If it is "nuts" to dismiss this experience, then it would be "nuts" to dismiss mine: I have seen many, many high profile people in tech, who I have respect for, take *absolutely unhinged* risks with LLM technology that they have never, in decades-long careers, taken with any other tool or technology. It reads like a kind of cognitive decline. It's scary. And many of these people are *leaders* who use their influence to steamroll objections to these tools because they're "obviously" so good
today I have learned about the "three-em dash" ⸻ and this may make me *too* powerful
@whitequark interesting. as someone who has implemented IRC message framing by hand I really wish they *would* switch to JSON; such a move was being considered on the spec tracker at one point and I was sad to see it fail. XML would be more of a lateral move but the lack of any structured framing syntax made tags and extensions a much more annoying process to implement
@whitequark an excellent point and one that is oddly easy to lose track of when one is on the implementing side of things! all too easy to have this attitude towards just about everything
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