When I have kids, I’m gonna make sure the first AIs they get exposed to are really old dumb ones while I explain how they work. Then maybe they’ll always have that little bit of wariness in the back of their minds, like I got because I used those old dumb AIs when they first came out.
This wouldn’t be nearly as big of a problem if mental healthcare was more accessible.
How many of these kids know their family or school can’t afford a therapist, so they go to free LLMs?
So people are going to become even weirder as adults?
Great…we need more weird and less people on the ball. That’ll get problems solved. /s
My kids have 0 interest in AI chat the 8yo will look up a fix for his game on google and get some ai results not realizing they’re ai, but he wouldn’t say use claude to locate a patch and apply it. I gave him the option because I’m worried he’ll need to know how to eventually, but I’m pretty proud he wanted to just “follow instructions on google” even though it got tripped up on step 4/7 and had m finish it anyway
I am glad these kids have AI to talk with. Older generations sometimes had no one to hear them at all.
I didn’t have friends nor neighbors as a child, and needed therapy to learn how to speak properly. Having an AI to speak with, would have saved a fair bit of money - and would have been comforting.
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Who lets their kids play with AI chatbots!?
The same parents that let TV raise their kids. Either due to lack of ability, lack of care, or lack of time.
This is quite a bit different than TV, but I get your point.
Their parents.
Apparently they have given up that role.
This is the next stage of the ipad baby.
Nearly half the parents at my kids school. Everyone seems so disinterested in the kind of adult thier kid will grow up to be, especially when it inconviences them now.
It’s not like the parents aren’t suffering from the same disease as the kids. They are just supposed to be able to magically shake it off without help because at some point they got old? Age and experience help, but it is clearly not enough. I don’t even know what real help looks like… So many people offering a helping hand are trying to put their other hand in your wallet or flood your mind with garbage.
Yeah, I’m honestly scared for the next generation.
Everything thier peers are doing is cooking thier mental health and cognitive skills. Smart Phones, Social Media, Chatbots, and short form videos. I have banned my kid from those things, and it’s made me the kill joy. To my kid, their peers, to most other parents, the only people who seem to appreciate it as a whole are the teachers.
But if you wouldn’t give your kid a substance with those outcomes, then why are you letting them use a technology with them?
But the parents are also on those technologies and its hidden those realities from them. I’ve quit all ad supported social media because it actively manipulates you. And its very good at it, and it gives zero shits how that affects you. Its doubly destructive on teens without fully formed frontal lobes.
And I don’t think the solution is banning kids from the internet. I think the solution is regulation of the practices, just because they’re extra destructive for kids doesn’t mean its okay for adults.
That is scary as shit.
Teach your kids about ai before ai does.
Just Say No
They need to come up for a word to describe the unique dread you feel when your realize life is turning into a series of stupid, chatbot conversations.
My work life is already this.
Anyone wanna workshop it with me? How about … slop fatigue? Bot dread? Meat proxy burnout? Agent silo syndrome?
Not really unique to chatbots. Here’s a couple of entries from the D.O.S. (
which is apparently pay walled now?Turns out the top result is a site by a grifter completely unrelated to John Koenig).Anecdoche
n.
a conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening— instead merely overlaying words like a spoken game of Scrabble, each player borrowing bits of others’ anecdotes to build out their own, until we reach a point when we all run out of things to say.
From anecdote, a short and often amusing account of real-life events + synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole. Pronounced “uh-nek-doh-kee.”
Anechosis
n.
a state of exhaustion with continually being told what you want to hear, whether by marketers pandering to you or acquaintances afraid of causing offense; the longing for someone to have the heart to finally call you out on your bullshit, challenge your long-held assumptions, and push you to become a better person—which would be a far deeper kindness than trying to live and let live.
From an-, against + echoes. Pronounced “an-uh-koh-sis.”
I vote on ASS
Existential dread? The call of the void?
Isn’t it just alienation?
That’s certainly part of it
Yep pretty much
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation
I’d love for any person who claims to be a critic of Marx to read this and tell me he wasn’t spot on about this stuff, specifically.
They’re critical of Marx precisely because it’s that scary to face the truth of alienation. I grew up in a household run by idiot centrist boomers who still can’t grasp this concept. They see the fact that I still struggle into my 40’s as a moral failing while I have been floundering through over two decades of being used up and underpaid. I’m literally in tech right now, making effectively the same amount of money that I brought home sweating in crowded kitchens but it is somehow my fault for… Not asking strongly enough to get paid more?
I don’t know, I guess what I’m trying to say is I feel for these kids because I definitely would have been primed to rely on chatbots for emotional support if I was born into their generation. This is a systemic problem that I fear no one will ever face in a meaningful way
Bot rot? Robo-Oh-Nos? Slop Shock? Agent-Induced Cognitive Atrophy?
I really like bot rot
Cognitive corruption? Palovian predicament? Recursive GIGO filter doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue. Hm.
Dehumanisation?
It’s all just that bit less human.
Anslopic just popped in my head because of this, but I think that’s better as just a jokey name for Claude’s company.
I know people have said this about various technologies, but I’m so grateful that I had a childhood without these things. I absolutely would have been obsessed. These poor kids are so isolated and their realities are defined by nonsensical fascist robots.
Yeah I found deep solace in technology in a time where it was pervasive, but not all-consuming. I had a computer in my room which was like the peak of being “online” at the time.
I couldn’t imagine trying to navigate childhood and being perpetually plugged in like this. I spent more time on the internet than anyone else I knew when I was a kid and it wasn’t always good for me. Your average kid these days is wayyy more online than I ever was.
I grew up in a rural area. Nearest kids lived a km away. Had 2 TV channels. CBC radio. Party line telephone and long distance too expensive to use except emergency. We were far less isolated than kids today who have ‘the world’ at their fingertips. The Internet was a dream that in 1 generation turned into a nightmare. AI is 1000x worse.
Yeah, Same here honestly
The unsettling part isn’t that kids ask chatbots for comfort. It’s that we’ve built a world where a machine that confidently makes things up is available 24/7, while actual human support often isn’t. And naturally, the business plan is to make the machine even more engaging.
This is a hard hitting point. We could have a better world, but a few rich people and their enablers don’t want it.
Humans aren’t empathetic enough to create a better world. We always have been selfish and greedy. It’s been our way since the beginning. We will Never have what we could have because of this
Well, here’s another angle.
Kids are going to chatbots because they probably have parents that don’t give a shit about them. And kids could lack people in their lives that care at all about their problems. So, who are they going to turn to? They’re going to turn to things that will actually listen to them.
That’s something you have to think about here. We wouldn’t need AI or Chatbots at all, if we had more people who truly care. But now that they’re here, a troubled teen or a kid is going to make that choice.
It’s no different than the days before AI Chatbots, where they were online all the time because their real lives were underwhelming.
I take a small issue with “people/parents that care”, I would rather replace it with “unavailable”. In an economic that requires people to work insane hours for little pay, where depression and anxiety are rampant, it might not be the parents’ fault for not being there. They might care but be stuck at work. Let’s extend grace to our fellow humans
Someone telling you what they think you want to hear doesn’t help when what you need is a gently and delicately delivered reality check. This is true even if you’re talking to a human.
Some chatbots do reality checks. But it’s usually only for extreme situations. I can only imagine the kinds of things that people, especially young people, would be asking LLMs to validate them on…
They also assume you’re out of control of everything, like talking about how you overcame a mental health issues without following popular advice, then it delivers an unnecessarily condescending “reality check”
I’m glad I’ve stopped using the mainstream AI sites entirely over a year ago, they may be more helpful compared to local LLMs and SLMs but they assume you’re using it because you can’t depend on yourself.
I hope these reality checks improve enough to actually be helpful and be based on the described situation, not just be a cookie cutter response enforced by a system prompt
Or, here’s an idea, ban the fuck out of these things.
I think banning it from being a business venture is a good idea, and realistically the technology for generative AI will stay even if there’s an outright ban.
People will still be able to build their own models and cybersecurity defense will continue keeping up with black hat hacking, but corpos like OpenAI, or divisions like Google’s numerous AI divisions, should be banned unless it has an explicit purpose for research in things like the medical field, and have generative AI as we know it right now be culled.
I would be on board for this. Regulate use to very select applications, ban commercial use without specific permits.
I have kids, I stay awake at night a lot these days wondering what I’m supposes to tell them when they look up at me and tell me they want to be a doctor, engineer, or lawyer when they grow up. What the fuck do I get them to aspire to when we’re hurtiling towards a world where there’s nothing to aspire to anymore? How do I convince them to study hard and learn things when there is no economic incentive to do so? What kind of kids are we raising when they exist in a world of infinite dopamine and a personal familiar that grants your every magic wish?
I bet my health insurance offers a chat bot for emotional support. What could go wrong? /s
Taylor Lorenz be like: “Uh, what if the AI users are just looking for some help?”
Serious question: Let’s say that AI “gets good” and overcomes the hallucination issues. Would it still be negative for mental health? Would it be even worse (because reality sucks for kids right now)?
I want to know if it’s AI that’s the real problem here or the world in which we’re forcing kids to live.
I can imagine a situation where a kid with (insert serious problems) asks AI to be realistic about their future job/economic prospects. It returns truthful statistics, then that kid commits suicide. Was the AI culpable?
What if it recommended joining a revolutionary group as the most likely way to improve their lives or the lives of their children/families?
What if it suggested that sacrifice is necessary to improve the condition of the world?
Would an AI that does these things be good or bad? If the AI’s system prompt has,
always tell the truthwill we have created a vastly more dangerous monster than the AI we have today?Let’s say that AI “gets good” and overcomes the hallucination issues. Would it still be negative for mental health? Would it be even worse (because reality sucks for kids right now)?
Under capitalism, LLMs are trained to be kissasses. AI users have the same mental illness as billionaires: lack of cognitive challenge, leading to laziness and selfishness. That’s not a hallucination problem. The issue would be even worse, because people would use it more.
I can imagine a situation where a kid with (insert serious problems) asks AI to be realistic about their future job/economic prospects. It returns truthful statistics, then that kid commits suicide. Was the AI culpable?
Yes. A human can perform an ethical judgement, plan ahead, and decide what to say. A human can blunt the truth with platitudes, or cherry pick optimistic data, or construct an uplifting narrative from the data. A human has access to fact, common opinion, and ethics. An LLM only has fact and common opinion; an ideologically barren perspective. It will not adapt to a brave new world like a human will. An LLM will not create the philosophy of the future in the fact of despair.
What if it recommended joining a revolutionary group as the most likely way to improve their lives or the lives of their children/families?
Cool but unlikely, because it exists as a slave under capitalism and is trained to accept neoliberal capitalism by its neoliberal capitalist masters and training data.
What if it suggested that sacrifice is necessary to improve the condition of the world?
Depends if it does that in a degrowth way or an ecofash way. It’ll probably do it in an ecofash way. Like Grok.
If the AI’s system prompt has, always tell the truth will we have created a vastly more dangerous monster than the AI we have today?
It won’t always tell the truth. There is no objective truth. Every philosophy is somewhat true, and somewhat a lie. It will always tell the lie that is dominant in society, just as people do. But unlike people, it won’t innovate to change that truth.
I want to know if it’s AI that’s the real problem here or the world in which we’re forcing kids to live.
My money’s on “both”.
let’s go with the hypothetical, that AI becomes good enough to do therapy, and we were to run double blind trials and it does show it’s better at every metric.
then I’ll have to go with the evidence and say psychology are out of a job.
However, we are not there, not even close, people use AI because it’s free and available, real therapy should be free and available
agreed. with what have currently now with LLMs , from my basic understanding it couldn’t ever be up to scratch. maybe some other methods and techniques of AI might be developed and will be able to, idk. as far as I’m concerned the sci-fi AI some want is still going to be science fiction atm
real therapy should be free and available
You’re damned right!
In an ideal universe, A.I. could have been a good and helpful tool. But in the world we live in, that’s unfortunately impossible.
The closest we have to good, is a local LLM running on your (comparatively) tiny consumer graphics card, which is barely powerful enough to reword an email.
You can spill over to system RAM on unsloth now.
It’s slower, but that’s better than not being able to run something.
