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
Who lets their kids play with AI chatbots!?
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.
That is scary as shit.
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.
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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.”
Bot rot? Robo-Oh-Nos? Slop Shock? Agent-Induced Cognitive Atrophy?
I really like bot rot
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.
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.
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 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
real therapy should be free and available
You’re damned right!
