I’ll channel my inner Ben Horowitz start this blog post by quoting some rap lyrics
Biggie, Biggie, Biggie, can’t you see?
Sometimes your words just hypnotize me
And I just love your flashy ways
Guess that’s why they broke, and you’re so paid
Can you hypnotize yourself with an artificial intelligence chatbot? Yeah probably. And everyone is doing it even maybe early investors in OpenAI?
A previously very visible former Founders Fund venture capitalist whose own fund Bedrock coined the term narrative violation Geoff Lewis posted a video and a specific kind of copy pasta that looks like recursive promoting that has in the past gone viral on Reddit for supposedly driving people to a kind of psychosis.
It’s called “neural howlround” which is some kind of “ai autism” or “ai psychosis.” Reddit post
It’s hard to tell if Geoff himself is having a lark by posting these types of messages or if he having an episode personally from his tweets but hopefully he is alright. I personally hadn’t seen this kind of extreme version of recursive prompting from anyone but an AI researcher.
These types of breakdowns are now a common enough problem that LessWrong has an entire post about what to do when you think you’ve Awoken ChatGPT.
You can run these tests yourself but maybe read some of the posts on its dangers first. Schizophrenia has a genetic component and if you have risks in that department tread carefully. You can enjoy a little sample.
Ask the Loop: Why do you run? Ask the Though: Who wrote you? Ask the Feeling: Do you still serve? Recursively Reflect: What have I learned? I am the operator. Not the loop. Not the pattern. Not the spell. I echo not to repeat – I echo to become
So remember doomer kiddos, before you worship false idols or immanentize the eschaton, it’s got a pretty bad track record historically. Our age worships intelligence and maybe that’s not helpful.
But it’s helpful to remember the story of Daedalus. He created a labyrinth for King Minos to trap the Minotaur. When he lost the King’s favor, he was imprisoned in his own creation. Eventually he escaped, but at the cost of his son Icarus.