> All the spirallers that AFP spoke to said the positive feedback from the chatbot felt similar to dopamine hits from some kind of drug.
> Which is why Lucy Osler, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Exeter, warned that AI companies could be tempted to ramp up the sycophancy of their bots.
> "They are in quite a deep financial hole, and are desperately looking to make sure that their products become viable -- and user engagement is going to be the thing that drives their decisions," she told AFP.
People talk about AI sycophancy, but there are plenty of human sycophants as well. If you're an extremely rich/powerful person, it is very easy to inadvertently surround yourself with sycophants who tell you how amazing and ground-breaking all your ideas are. I wonder if this is the reason people like Musk engage in such bizarre behavior and radical personality shifts over the past decade
> but there are plenty of human sycophants as well
That's besides the point. This is about how AI induces psychosis and mental problems on scale. Also let's stop this constant humans-vs-ai false dichotomy - it will never be the same, no matter how much the ai boosters yearn for it!
This is the most hilarious JS fail I've ever seen. The entire article renders properly, all the text and styling, then the entire screen is replaced by
"Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)."
It's easy enough to fix, just hammer the refresh button to prevent JS from running.
It's such a dream state of JavaScript, that people spent countless of time trying to structure these new web applications in a way so that when one function fails for one button or whatever, it doesn't break the entire client-side view, because that'd be horrible.
So what did the frameworks do? Of course wrap the entire application in one big try/catch, that then changes the entire page as soon as there is any error, instead of presenting users with the information that did load properly. Talk about undoing what the platform and language gives you for free...
Technically, all adult Catholics can become Pope. But realistically it's just one of the cardinals, which means you need to become a bishop first, which means you need to become a priest first, which means you need to be celibate (x). This guy has a wife, according to the article, so he cannot become a Pope.
(x) this is technically not true for some Anglican orders that later became Catholics? Maybe? (I never remember the rules of the ordinariate.) So maybe he could first become a priest in Anglican Church, then switch to Catholicism, then become a bishop, then a Cardinal, then a Pope? It's a long shot though.
edit: ahhh the married priests in Ordinariate cannot become bishops. So he would need to have first his marriage annulled I guess.
While this is for practical purposes true _now_, there actually were a small number of married popes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes#...), and there have been a few popes who were not priests before being elected (if you want to be pedantic, Peter wasn't a priest, and may have been married, but there were later examples).
> all adult Catholics can become Pope
All adult male Catholics, though also see Pope Joan (probably didn't actually exist, but was generally believed to have existed until quite recently). There's also no actual age requirement, though in practice the youngest pope was _probably_ 18.
You just have to apply to be a priest, then work your way up by writing essays defending pedophiles raping children, blaming it on the gays and hippies, then protect pedophile rapist priests, and reassign them all over the world to rape more children without consequences, until they vote you in as Pope and reassign you to the Vatican.
>In a 2019 essay, retired Pope Benedict XVI attributed the Catholic Church's sex abuse crisis primarily to the 1960s sexual revolution and a collapse in moral theology, while acknowledging that past church law provided "undue protection" to accused clergy. Critics condemned the essay as a deflection of blame, ignoring systemic cover-ups, while independent reports later implicated him in mishandling abuse cases in Munich by failing to discipline priests and, in cases such as Peter Hullermann, allowing the transfer of abusers to active parish ministry. Read the full details at PBS NewsHour.
Retired Pope's Essay on Sex Abuse Raises Eyebrows, Contradicts Pope Francis
>Retired Pope Benedict XVI has published an analysis on the Catholic Church's clergy sex abuse scandal, blaming it on the sexual revolution of the 1960s and church laws that protected priests.
Pope Benedict XVI implicated in report on sexual abuse in German diocese
>BERLIN (AP) — A long-awaited report on sexual abuse in Germany's Munich diocese on Thursday faulted retired Pope Benedict XVI's handling of four cases when he was archbishop in the 1970s and 1980s. The law firm that drew up the report said Benedict strongly denies any wrongdoing.
The findings were sure to reignite criticism of Benedict's record more than a decade after the first, and until Thursday only, known case involving him was made public.
The archdiocese commissioned the report from law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl nearly two years ago, with a mandate to look into abuse between 1945 and 2019 and whether church officials handled allegations correctly. The law firm examined church files and spoke to witnesses.
Top church officials weren't informed of the results ahead of publication. The current archbishop — Cardinal Reinhard Marx, a prominent reformist ally of Pope Francis — was faulted in two cases.
Marx's predecessors include the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who served in Munich from 1977 to 1982 before becoming the head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and later being elected pope. Benedict gave extensive written testimony for the report.
"In a total of four cases, we came to the conclusion that the then-archbishop, Cardinal Ratzinger, can be accused of misconduct," said one of the reports' authors, Martin Pusch.
Two of those cases, he said, involved perpetrators who offended while he was in office and were punished by the judicial system but were kept in pastoral work without express limits on what they were allowed to do. No action was ordered under canon law.
In a third case, a cleric who had been convicted by a court outside Germany was put into service in the Munich archdiocese and the circumstances speak for Ratzinger having known of the priest's previous history, Pusch said.
When the church abuse scandal first flared in Germany in 2010, attention swirled around another case: that of a pedophile priest whose transfer to Munich to undergo therapy was approved under Ratzinger in 1980.
The priest was allowed to resume pastoral work, a decision that the church has said was made by a lower-ranking official without consulting the archbishop. In 1986, the priest received a suspended sentence for molesting a boy.
Another of the report's authors, Ulrich Wastl, said Benedict's claim not to have attended a meeting in 1980 in which the priest's transfer to Munich was discussed lacks credibility.
[...the story continues, as does the child rape and pedophile protection, to this day...]
Sure, anyone and everyone can apply, to basically anything. Sometimes you can even get into stuff they didn't think they accepted applicants to. Most of the times you get ignored though.
> correlation does not necessarily imply causation
I feel like you're missing what you're replying to, why are you saying this? The article is about a person who "lost grip on reality", no one is saying LLMs is turning people into pope-wannabees as far as I can tell, you're reacting against something no one claimed.
Explicit accusation that this was caused by chatbots + call for general regulation is right there in the article:
"AFP spoke to several members about their experiences. All warned that the world has to wake up to the threat unregulated AI chatbots pose to mental health.
Questions are also being asked about whether AI companies are doing enough to protect vulnerable people."
This, in time, might be used to nerf the models that we use. Of course, one actor is singled out:
"There has also been a recent rise in people spiralling while using Elon Musk's xAI's Grok chatbot, he said."
I don't think "correlation does not necessarily imply causation" even makes sense to someone saying "Maybe AI chatbots aren't great for people's mental health" or even "Are the AI companies actually trying to prevent AI chatbots being bad for people's mental health?", both statements seem fine and doesn't imply any causation as far as I understand.
This is something new. Delusions were around before, certainly, but LLM offers a round the clock potential for psychological conditioning, which would not normally be possible without sustained attention by a group of people.
Schools don't teach actual basics that make people grounded in reality imo. Of course it gets worse with things like ChatGPT that teachers are not only not trained to explain, but didn't even exist when current adults went to school.
Pan Ophidian.
Studied at Collegium Ad Spiritum Sanctum Soledad.
Can't QUITE say it was unexpected, Simmy, but here you go.
Luxembourg, as a guest of a friend of the Royal Family of Luxembourg, Emile Lefort, who I'd met sometime earlier in a Haight Street cafe in San Francisco.
I'd introduced myself as Jesus Christ, a year or two earlier, and he subsequently wrote stories about me as Jesus Mouse, being that I happened to be in my elegant Mickey Mode at the time, nose, ears, tail. Captivated, you might say. But not almost QUITE a true believer.
Enough so, yes, that before leaving Luxembourg, he did try to connect me to Winona Ryder, being a close friend of her father's, to propose a theatrical world revolution/renaissance bid I'm always been working on. But the closest he could get to saying Guess Who, was to text the Subject of the email, "Regarding JEEZ."
I surmised that I'd have to take it from there, if there turned out to be a there, but good enough!
[Reminded me of my picture in Mouse Regalia, in full color, in the Glastonbury Herald a year earlier, with the caption, "Cheese! --- the Son of God."]
I don't think it's right to involuntarily send someone to a psychiatric ward because he believed that he was chosen by ChatGPT to be the pope.
For the same reason I don't think we should send the pope to a psychiatric ward because he believes that he was chosen for that role by an invisible man in the sky.
At least there's no doubt that ChatGPT exists lol. People should be allowed to be as whacky as they like so long as it's legal.
And who knows, he is getting some attention now so his probability of becoming pope actually went up a tiny bit lol.
> he believes that he was chosen for that role by an invisible man in the sky.
One thing is clear, you should not be sent to the HN gulag simply because you don't understand what you're talking about. Me and others realize you don't know how the pope is chosen, but damn if I'm not willing to die for your right to state something that is utterly wrong.
I hope so, considering he seems to have all mental facilities intact. I hope he believes he was elected by the cardinals, which is what happened in reality. I think they usually say the Holy Spirt guides the process or similar, rather than God directly selecting the new pope.
Does it require faith to rape children and protect child rapists, or is that psychosis? It certainly requires psychosis to put your faith in leaders who do that, be it the Pope or Trump.
> All the spirallers that AFP spoke to said the positive feedback from the chatbot felt similar to dopamine hits from some kind of drug.
> Which is why Lucy Osler, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Exeter, warned that AI companies could be tempted to ramp up the sycophancy of their bots.
> "They are in quite a deep financial hole, and are desperately looking to make sure that their products become viable -- and user engagement is going to be the thing that drives their decisions," she told AFP.
Sounds like the big social media companies.
People talk about AI sycophancy, but there are plenty of human sycophants as well. If you're an extremely rich/powerful person, it is very easy to inadvertently surround yourself with sycophants who tell you how amazing and ground-breaking all your ideas are. I wonder if this is the reason people like Musk engage in such bizarre behavior and radical personality shifts over the past decade
> but there are plenty of human sycophants as well
That's besides the point. This is about how AI induces psychosis and mental problems on scale. Also let's stop this constant humans-vs-ai false dichotomy - it will never be the same, no matter how much the ai boosters yearn for it!
This is the most hilarious JS fail I've ever seen. The entire article renders properly, all the text and styling, then the entire screen is replaced by
"Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)."
It's easy enough to fix, just hammer the refresh button to prevent JS from running.
It's such a dream state of JavaScript, that people spent countless of time trying to structure these new web applications in a way so that when one function fails for one button or whatever, it doesn't break the entire client-side view, because that'd be horrible.
So what did the frameworks do? Of course wrap the entire application in one big try/catch, that then changes the entire page as soon as there is any error, instead of presenting users with the information that did load properly. Talk about undoing what the platform and language gives you for free...
Seems to render perfectly with NoScript blocking all scripts, even with images showing.
I talk to GPT, Claude, and Gemini too much these days, but I still maintain one safety check
If all three agree with me, I assume I am wrong and go outside.
Discordians know they’re popes. What a funny idea to think you would have to apply!
Hail Eris!
No one can apply to be pope of the catholic church.
Technically, all adult Catholics can become Pope. But realistically it's just one of the cardinals, which means you need to become a bishop first, which means you need to become a priest first, which means you need to be celibate (x). This guy has a wife, according to the article, so he cannot become a Pope.
(x) this is technically not true for some Anglican orders that later became Catholics? Maybe? (I never remember the rules of the ordinariate.) So maybe he could first become a priest in Anglican Church, then switch to Catholicism, then become a bishop, then a Cardinal, then a Pope? It's a long shot though.
edit: ahhh the married priests in Ordinariate cannot become bishops. So he would need to have first his marriage annulled I guess.
While this is for practical purposes true _now_, there actually were a small number of married popes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes#...), and there have been a few popes who were not priests before being elected (if you want to be pedantic, Peter wasn't a priest, and may have been married, but there were later examples).
> all adult Catholics can become Pope
All adult male Catholics, though also see Pope Joan (probably didn't actually exist, but was generally believed to have existed until quite recently). There's also no actual age requirement, though in practice the youngest pope was _probably_ 18.
Adult male Catholics, surely?
... Maybe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Joan
(She probably didn't actually exist, but it's interesting that until quite recently she was generally believed to have existed.)
Correct. In fact, even to be a bishop you have to state as part of the ritual that you do not wish to be a bishop. (Many do of course.)
(Am off to read the article now. :) )
You just have to apply to be a priest, then work your way up by writing essays defending pedophiles raping children, blaming it on the gays and hippies, then protect pedophile rapist priests, and reassign them all over the world to rape more children without consequences, until they vote you in as Pope and reassign you to the Vatican.
>In a 2019 essay, retired Pope Benedict XVI attributed the Catholic Church's sex abuse crisis primarily to the 1960s sexual revolution and a collapse in moral theology, while acknowledging that past church law provided "undue protection" to accused clergy. Critics condemned the essay as a deflection of blame, ignoring systemic cover-ups, while independent reports later implicated him in mishandling abuse cases in Munich by failing to discipline priests and, in cases such as Peter Hullermann, allowing the transfer of abusers to active parish ministry. Read the full details at PBS NewsHour.
Retired Pope's Essay on Sex Abuse Raises Eyebrows, Contradicts Pope Francis
https://www.voanews.com/a/retired-popes-essay-on-sex-abuse-r...
>Retired Pope Benedict XVI has published an analysis on the Catholic Church's clergy sex abuse scandal, blaming it on the sexual revolution of the 1960s and church laws that protected priests.
Pope Benedict XVI implicated in report on sexual abuse in German diocese
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/pope-benedict-xvi-implica...
>BERLIN (AP) — A long-awaited report on sexual abuse in Germany's Munich diocese on Thursday faulted retired Pope Benedict XVI's handling of four cases when he was archbishop in the 1970s and 1980s. The law firm that drew up the report said Benedict strongly denies any wrongdoing.
The findings were sure to reignite criticism of Benedict's record more than a decade after the first, and until Thursday only, known case involving him was made public.
The archdiocese commissioned the report from law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl nearly two years ago, with a mandate to look into abuse between 1945 and 2019 and whether church officials handled allegations correctly. The law firm examined church files and spoke to witnesses.
Top church officials weren't informed of the results ahead of publication. The current archbishop — Cardinal Reinhard Marx, a prominent reformist ally of Pope Francis — was faulted in two cases.
Marx's predecessors include the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who served in Munich from 1977 to 1982 before becoming the head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and later being elected pope. Benedict gave extensive written testimony for the report.
"In a total of four cases, we came to the conclusion that the then-archbishop, Cardinal Ratzinger, can be accused of misconduct," said one of the reports' authors, Martin Pusch.
Two of those cases, he said, involved perpetrators who offended while he was in office and were punished by the judicial system but were kept in pastoral work without express limits on what they were allowed to do. No action was ordered under canon law.
In a third case, a cleric who had been convicted by a court outside Germany was put into service in the Munich archdiocese and the circumstances speak for Ratzinger having known of the priest's previous history, Pusch said.
When the church abuse scandal first flared in Germany in 2010, attention swirled around another case: that of a pedophile priest whose transfer to Munich to undergo therapy was approved under Ratzinger in 1980.
The priest was allowed to resume pastoral work, a decision that the church has said was made by a lower-ranking official without consulting the archbishop. In 1986, the priest received a suspended sentence for molesting a boy.
Another of the report's authors, Ulrich Wastl, said Benedict's claim not to have attended a meeting in 1980 in which the priest's transfer to Munich was discussed lacks credibility.
[...the story continues, as does the child rape and pedophile protection, to this day...]
[flagged]
Not the point of the story at all. Read before commenting.
Sure, anyone and everyone can apply, to basically anything. Sometimes you can even get into stuff they didn't think they accepted applicants to. Most of the times you get ignored though.
We had people acting out like this before LLM chatbots, correlation does not necessarily imply causation.
We did...but it was few here and there. The LLMs are making it massive and impacting people on a huge scale.
> correlation does not necessarily imply causation
I feel like you're missing what you're replying to, why are you saying this? The article is about a person who "lost grip on reality", no one is saying LLMs is turning people into pope-wannabees as far as I can tell, you're reacting against something no one claimed.
Explicit accusation that this was caused by chatbots + call for general regulation is right there in the article:
"AFP spoke to several members about their experiences. All warned that the world has to wake up to the threat unregulated AI chatbots pose to mental health.
Questions are also being asked about whether AI companies are doing enough to protect vulnerable people."
This, in time, might be used to nerf the models that we use. Of course, one actor is singled out:
"There has also been a recent rise in people spiralling while using Elon Musk's xAI's Grok chatbot, he said."
I don't think "correlation does not necessarily imply causation" even makes sense to someone saying "Maybe AI chatbots aren't great for people's mental health" or even "Are the AI companies actually trying to prevent AI chatbots being bad for people's mental health?", both statements seem fine and doesn't imply any causation as far as I understand.
This is something new. Delusions were around before, certainly, but LLM offers a round the clock potential for psychological conditioning, which would not normally be possible without sustained attention by a group of people.
Schools don't teach actual basics that make people grounded in reality imo. Of course it gets worse with things like ChatGPT that teachers are not only not trained to explain, but didn't even exist when current adults went to school.
[flagged]
Wow, I just found Jesus Mouse's social networking pages (aka Pan Ophidian)! Definitely him, checks out, I was not tripping.
https://www.facebook.com/panthemystic/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GjcUCQxTHA
https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-most-unexpected-occurrenc...
Pan Ophidian. Studied at Collegium Ad Spiritum Sanctum Soledad. Can't QUITE say it was unexpected, Simmy, but here you go.
Luxembourg, as a guest of a friend of the Royal Family of Luxembourg, Emile Lefort, who I'd met sometime earlier in a Haight Street cafe in San Francisco.
I'd introduced myself as Jesus Christ, a year or two earlier, and he subsequently wrote stories about me as Jesus Mouse, being that I happened to be in my elegant Mickey Mode at the time, nose, ears, tail. Captivated, you might say. But not almost QUITE a true believer.
Enough so, yes, that before leaving Luxembourg, he did try to connect me to Winona Ryder, being a close friend of her father's, to propose a theatrical world revolution/renaissance bid I'm always been working on. But the closest he could get to saying Guess Who, was to text the Subject of the email, "Regarding JEEZ."
I surmised that I'd have to take it from there, if there turned out to be a there, but good enough!
[Reminded me of my picture in Mouse Regalia, in full color, in the Glastonbury Herald a year earlier, with the caption, "Cheese! --- the Son of God."]
[...]
I don't think it's right to involuntarily send someone to a psychiatric ward because he believed that he was chosen by ChatGPT to be the pope.
For the same reason I don't think we should send the pope to a psychiatric ward because he believes that he was chosen for that role by an invisible man in the sky.
At least there's no doubt that ChatGPT exists lol. People should be allowed to be as whacky as they like so long as it's legal.
And who knows, he is getting some attention now so his probability of becoming pope actually went up a tiny bit lol.
This deserves some kind of Vonnegut award.
> he believes that he was chosen for that role by an invisible man in the sky.
One thing is clear, you should not be sent to the HN gulag simply because you don't understand what you're talking about. Me and others realize you don't know how the pope is chosen, but damn if I'm not willing to die for your right to state something that is utterly wrong.
You mean the pope doesn't believe he was chosen by God, just by cardinals and other primates?
I hope so, considering he seems to have all mental facilities intact. I hope he believes he was elected by the cardinals, which is what happened in reality. I think they usually say the Holy Spirt guides the process or similar, rather than God directly selecting the new pope.
Are you saying God is not invisible?
If God created man in his own image, then why can we see each other?
Faith and psychosis are not the same thing.
Right. Faith is the word for holding an irrational set of psychotic beliefs that lots of other people hold too.
Exactly, the difference is literally only based on the number of people who believe the fictitious concept and how much political power their wield.
What’s the difference?
Does it require faith to rape children and protect child rapists, or is that psychosis? It certainly requires psychosis to put your faith in leaders who do that, be it the Pope or Trump.