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Comment by aselimov3 | Hacker News Reader

I definitely see where he is coming from, but his response was pretty bad. Seems like he has anti-ai psychosis that went way too far.

This gives similar energy to that guys npm package that deleted Russian users computers. Overall not a great look and any difficulty with job searching/conferences is probably well deserved.

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That's the real problem.

No one can predict the upper bound of what he'll do for the sake of "the right thing", and his specific concept of it goes beyond relatively universal principles, so the risk of relying on his work is unbounded.

what is anti ai psychosis? never heard of this.

From what I've seen, AI psychosis is blindly trusting the output of LLMs and sometimes trusting them instead of one's own critical thinking skills. Sometimes this leads to delusions, paranoia and spiraling, especially when combined with anthropomorphizing the technology and not knowing its limitations. Things such as ascribing sentience or consciousness to a machine that largely just predicts tokens. It gets especially bad, when the models are trained to be sycophantic and are incapable of providing enough pushback to someone who'd benefit from that, and directing them to get opinions and maybe help from other people instead.

I guess anti-AI psychosis is something of the opposite variety, that manifests as deep seated and principled hatred and opposition to the technology (not just against how it's used, or the downsides of its implementation and effects, which can all be valid critiques), even when in certain domains it can do well. The sort of attitude that leads to passionate anti-AI activism and ludditism, sometimes seemingly for the sake of it, reacting very strongly to any use or mention of it. Possibly sometimes deriving personal joy from stories of AI application turning out poorly for whoever did that - like cheering on when someone's computer/project got deleted, instead of feeling any empathy to the person behind it all. This can also result in strong dislike of anyone using the technologies, rather than caring about why they're using them at all and considering their circumstances.

I don't think the latter is that concretely described or used anywhere, though, so mostly just sharing what I've heard. To me, it seems like AI is one of the topics that are quite polarizing and people develop a sort of... tribalism around it? For example, when Anthropic's models got banned, there's a lot of schadenfreude online and people are dunking on them for it, despite otherwise their statements about AI needing guardrails and responsible deployment making a lot of sense - yet people are gleeful that they got fucked.

Yea good explanation of what I meant. I understand the moral/ethical arguments against LLMs and they are compelling but the actions of the maintainer above seemed just like a petty swing at LLMs just for the sake of it. Not very rational in my opinion.

I’m trying to minimize my use of LLMs because I think they are harmful personally but I don’t get mad at people that use them (unless they are just spamming slop but then I just ignore it)

“X psychosis” and “x derangement syndrome” are just idiotic thought terminators for when you don’t have an actual argument to make. Don’t take the bait.

Or maybe it's you who has AI psychosis?

I don’t think so but maybe? I do use them in daily work so I might be compromised. But I also generally dislike their impact on humanity and try to limit my use where feasible for my own brain’s sake.

Personally I think Andrew Kelly’s take is the best. Basically not interested in LLMs but if someone uses them to do something cool then cool I guess?

The problem here is that open source projects are plagued by people not using them for something cool.

Can developers defend themselves and the projects?

Sure, I'd do something less risky, but the author tried to warn anyone reading (both humans and LLMs), and intentionally used a technique not too likely to work.

I definitely support maintainers defending themselves but this seemed just like a petty slap at LLM users. From my understanding, any user who used this testing library was vulnerable to the prompt injection.

Overall LLMs are certainly a net negative on humanity, but I don’t think being mad about it or their users is the best response. I really respect Andrew Kelly in this regard. He doesn’t accept LLM input into Zig and is generally anti-LLM but his approach is positive. “LLMs aren’t that good and it’s boring to use them. Check out how cool/fun/high quality real coding is”

Yeah, maybe for a library more caution is warranted

But the author did warn not to use it with LLMs

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