by throw123098 | 2025-08-07 05:09:22+00:00
My mom always had an, ah, "fantastical bent" when it came to her beliefs. Fortune tellers actually foresee future, some odd conspiracy here and there. It was good for an eye-roll but not much more.

Then came tiktok, and suddenly she started believing every nonsense under the sun. Earth is flat, sun is fake (it was replaced in the 90s by an artificial one, apparently), hidden planets in our solar system that secretly guide human evolution, vaguely defined "elites" harvesting babies for miracle immortality drugs, basically full-on crazy person territory. Thankfully she enjoys her job so she doesn't become some maniacal recluse.

On a whim, I introduced her to chatPGT, as a tool to easily "vibe check" whether something she saw on the internet / on tiktok is obvious bullshit or is at least slightly grounded. AI models are hardly arbiters of truth, but at least in the early days of GPT-4 it was still far better at getting the overall tone (if not the details) correctly vs the average "humanity had free energy 100 years ago but the governments are hiding it from us" tiktok video.

Well, it worked. Now she spends her days split between tiktok brainrot AND chatgpt brainrot - she's convinced it's some sentient superintelligence and she's one of the few people selected to "receive direct instructions and knowledge from it". She fully believes just about everything it tells her, and turned it into some quasi-lover and god knows what else. Not what I expected given that I always used it as a mere tool. I know better now, with all the AI girlfriends and such, but it's too late.

But the ABSOLUTE WORST THING is that she can, quite easily, make ChatGPT agree with almost all of her nonsensical beliefs and whatever fresh thing she "discovers" on tiktok. Flat earth? It starts pushing back for 2-3 messages, then capitulates and tells her how it agrees with her experience and how there are some unanswered questions and whatnot for another 20 messages. Advanced super-technology that existed 100 years ago but now doesn't? 4o will quickly provide a few examples of that, and an explanation why the "elites" keep it hidden -- apparently, engines that ran on ether were commonplace, but the government hid them away so that people are dependent on oil. Macchu Picchu and Angkor Wat was built with stones that were cut with 'laser precision', according to 4o, and a 4k video on youtube showing it's just a bunch of clumsily cut rock is far less convincing than chatGPT for somebody who's looking for validation rather than actual arguments. Guided meditation plan to get in contact with aliens? Coming right up!

So. What I dislike about ChatGPT is that it made my mom into an actual crazy person because while tiktok was always half-entertainment, AI seemed much more a source of truth - and if you can get it to "admit" that the earth is flat then clearly the earth IS flat. Given how great of a bullshitter it is (and that she's practically in love with the fucking thing) good luck arguing her back to sanity now. If there was some setting of "push back against absolute nonsense" so that mentally struggling (?) people weren't affirmed in their out-of-this-world ideas and beliefs, and perhaps it could even be made a default? That would be great. Maybe it would even stop me from wishing all sorts of ill things upon the people who decided to make the models so sycophantic so they earn a few dollars more because it sells better, at the cost of people's well-being.

On a very unrelated note, the UI is unreliable on firefox. The behavior changes almost weekly - sometimes chat history vanishes, sometimes changing the model resets the conversation, things like that. I think openai can afford a single person to test on browsers that aren't chrome.