this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
572 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
82227 readers
4573 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well, that's pretty fucked up... Sometimes I see these and I think, "well even a human might fail and say something unhelpful to somebody in crisis" but this is just complete and total feeding into delusions.
It's hard reading this while remembering that your electricity bills are increasing so that Google's data centers can provide these messages to people.
And you won't be able to afford a computer or power it anyways.
That's fucking crazy. Did he ask it to be GM in a roleplaying choose-your-own-adventure game that got out of hand, and while they both gradually forgot that it was a game the lines between fantasy and reality became blurred by the day? Or did it just come up with this stuff out of nowhere?
In every other case of AI bots doing this, the bot will always affirm whatever the person says to it. So if they say something a little weird, the AI will confirm it and feed it further. This happens every time. The bots are pretty much designed to keep talking to the person, so they're essentially sycophantic by design.
I just tried this with ChatGPT three days ago and there’s a chance they have tried to make it slightly less sycophantic
I was essentially trying to get it to tell me I was the smartest baby born in whatever year like that YouTuber—different example but it was so resistant to agreeing to me or my idea or whatever being unique/exceptional.
Hope this is a specific direction and not random chance, A/B testing, etc.
That would be my bet, LLMs really gravitate towards playing along and continuing whatever's already written. And Gemini especially has a 1M long context so it could be going back for a book's worth of text and reinforcing it up the wazoo.
That said, there is something really unhinged about Google's Gemma series even in short conversations and I see the big version is no better. Something's not quite right with their RLHF dataset.
What is an rlhf data set?
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
It's a method of fine-tuning and aligning LLMs which requires active human input
I would read that book.
You could ask Gemini to write it for you, but be careful it doesn't start blending fact and fiction
Not that I want to defend AI slop, but what prompted these responses from Gemini?
Doesn't matter what promped them.
I mean if Gemini was responding to some kind of roleplay then yeah it does. Not everyone doing shit with it has mental health problems. Some people are just fucking around.
The issue there is that it feeds into those mental health issues with efficiency and on on a scale never seen before. The models are programmed to agree with the user, and they are EXTREMELY HEAVILY ADVERTISED AND SHOVED ONTO PEOPLE AROUND THE WHOLE GLOBE DESPITE IT BEING WELL KNOWN HOW LIMITED AND PROBLEMATIC THE TECHNOLOGY IS WHILE THE CORPORATIONS DON'T TAKE ANY RESPONSIBILITY AT ALL. Anything from violating rights and privacy by gathering any and all data they can on you to situations like these where people hurt themselves (suicide, health advice, etc.) or others. But sure, let's be ignorant, do some victim blaming and disregard the bigger picture there.
I wonder if there’s a parallel universe where the labs instead went to the other extreme and require intelligence tests to onboard to their platforms.
And the outcry is, not inappropriately, about how many are being denied access to the latest technologies. The policy could effectively be construed as racist, even.
Anyway the middle ground there is pretty obvious. (Though I’m not sure how I’d design it just right, so e.g. folks without access to traditional/expensive mental healthcare might still be able to see some small benefit if it’s determined to be safe, just like maybe it could be safe for a well-adjusted individual to complain to it about their day for a couple minutes before moving on to real things. Sure I suppose it’s inherently unsafe but a proportion of the population should be making that decision for themselves.)