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JustisMills

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I think there's a weak moral panic brewing here in terms of LLM usage, leading people to jump to conclusions they otherwise wouldn't, and assume "xyz person's brain is malfunctioning due to LLM use" before considering other likely options. As an example, someone on my recent post implied that the reason I didn't suggest using spellcheck for typo fixes was because my personal usage of LLMs was unhealthy, rather than (the actual reason) that using the browser's inbuilt spellcheck as a first pass seemed so obvious to me that it didn't bear mentioning.

Even if it's true that LLM usage is notably bad for human cognition, it's probably bad to frame specific critique as "ah, another person mind-poisoned" without pretty good evidence for that.

(This is distinct from critiquing text for being probably AI-generated, which I think is a necessary immune reaction around here.)

The relevant class here isn't people with acute psychosis. The relevant class is "their reasoning in general or on a specific issue has degenerated", which a substantial portion of the population has due to various issues (politics being the classical example). Where they are strongly participating in motivated reasoning or other biases to a stronger degree than typical. (So, while it may infact be rare for acute psychosis to occur, more mild versions that are still causing them to make far stronger statements than reasonable is more central to what I believe most people are referring to)

9Kaj_Sotala1y

This post tried making some quick estimates: [...]

22AlphaAndOmega1y

I am a psychiatry resident, so my vibes are slightly better than the norm! In my career so far, I haven't actually met or heard of a single psychotic person being admitted to either hospital in my British city who even my colleagues claimed were triggered by a chafbot. But the actual figures have very wide error bars, one source claims around 50/100k for new episodes of first-time psychosis. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK546579/ But others claim around: >The pooled incidence of all psychotic disorders was 26·6 per 100 000 person-years (95% CI 22·0-31·7). That's from a large meta-analysis in the Lancet https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31054641/ It can vary widely from country to country, and then there's a lot of heterogeneity within each. To sum up: About 1/3800 to 1/5000 people develop new psychosis each year. And about 1 in 250 people have ongoing psychosis at any point in time. I feel quite happy calling that a high base rate. As the first link alludes, episodes of psychosis may be detected by statements along the lines of: >For example, “Flying mutant alien chimpanzees have harvested my kidneys to feed my goldfish.” Non-bizarre delusions are potentially possible, although extraordinarily unlikely. For example: “The CIA is watching me 24 hours a day by satellite surveillance.” The delusional disorder consists of non-bizarre delusions. If a patient of mine were to say such a thing, I think it would be rather unfair of me to pin the blame for their condition on chimpanzees, the practice of organ transplants, Big Aquarium, American intelligence agencies, or Maxar. (While the CIA certainly didn't help my case with the whole MK ULTRA thing, that's sixty years back. I don't think local zoos or pet shops are implicated.) Other reasons for doubt: 1. Case reports ≠ incidence. The handful of papers describing “ChatGPT-induced psychosis” are case studies and at risk of ecological fallacies. 2. People already at ultra-high risk for psychosis ar