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Comment by patrickhogan1 | Hacker News Reader

1. It feels like those old Rolling Stone pieces from the late ’90s and early ’00s about kids who couldn’t tear themselves away from their computers. Fear was overblown, but made headlines.

2. OpenAI has admitted that GPT‑4o showed “sycophancy” traits and has since rolled them back (see https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/).

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The societal brain drain damage that infinite scroll has caused is definitely not overblown. These models are about to kick this problem up to the next level, when each clip is dynamically generated to maximise resonance with you.

>’90s and early ’00s about kids who couldn’t tear themselves away from their computers. Fear was overblown, but made headlines.

How was it overblown, we now have a non-trivial amount of completely de-socialized men in particular who live in online cults with real world impact. If there's one lesson from the last few decades it is that the people who were concerned about the impact of mass media on intelligence, physical and mental health and social factors were right about literally everything.

We now live among people who are 40 with the emotional and social maturity of people in their early 20s.

That's fair. You are correct on potential for addiction.

But let's be honest - most of these people, the ones the article is taking about, where they think they are some messiah, would have just latched onto some pre-internet cult regardless. Where sycophancy and love bombing was perfected. Though I do see the problem of AI assistants being much more accessible, so likely many more drawn in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_bombing.

I was mainly referencing my own experience. I remember locking myself in my room on IRC, writing shell scripts, and playing StarCraft for days on end. Meanwhile, parents and news anchors were losing their minds, convinced the internet and Marilyn Manson were turning us all into devil-worshipping zombies.

> where they think they are some messiah, would have just latched onto some pre-internet cult regardless.

You have no way to know that. It's way, way harder to find your way to a cult than to download one of the hottest consumer apps ever created... obviously.

> But let's be honest - most of these people, the ones the article is taking about, where they think they are some messiah, would have just latched onto some pre-internet cult regardless.

Honestly, I believe most people like this would just end up having a few odd beliefs that don't impact their ability to function or socialize, or at most, will get involved with some spiritual woo.

Such beliefs are compatible with American New Age spiritualism, for example. I've met a few spiritual people who have echoed the "I/we/you are god" sentiment, yet never lost their minds over it or joined cults.

I would not be surprised that if they were expertly manipulated by some of the most powerful AI models on this planet, they too, could be driven insane.

> How was it overblown, we now have a non-trivial amount of completely de-socialized men in particular who live in online cults with real world impact

There are way more factors to the the growth of this demographic than just "internet addiction" or "videogame addiction"

Then again, the internet was instrumental in spreading the ideology that is demonizing these men and causing them to turn away from society, so you're not completely wrong

And presidents with the maturity of a 13 year old bully.

You do realize that antisocial young men are on average way less dangerous in front of a computer/phone than when the only thing they could do was joining a street gang?

Problem solved

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