Huh. Is this NOT a normal sort of dream to have?

If you want to write something genuinely original, I can see your point - but you declare this to be true of ALL creative writing, and I don't think you support that point at all.

I've got a stack of AI-written short stories. I've enjoyed reading them, and it's fun practice reading through them and editing them. I cannot imagine how I am possibly worse off, as an editor, for doing some practice rather than doing zero practice?

And, surely, being an editor is part of being a good writer - if you can't detect the flaws in a work, are you actually writing anything worth reading to begin with?

Your whole hypothesis seems to be that it's impossible to be an editor, that you cannot possibly detect flaws. But you also seem to insist that anything "AI flavored" is a flaw, regardless of how good it is. And quite frankly, I've seen AI write some really great lines. I cannot imagine how that line is less great, simply because of it's authorship - the whole point of fiction is that it's enjoyable to read, and I'm enjoying it!

You also seem to assume I have some existing goal, some existing thought that I'm trying to express. But sometimes I just want a fun encounter for tonight's D&D game, or to brainstorm for a much more open-ended creative writing project. Why are pirates a fine concept if I come up with them, but somehow worse if ChatGPT is the one who suggested the idea?

Again, there is a human in this loop, editing and evaluating the ideas

But even if you still intend to splice and curate AI’s outputs, you need good taste and judgment. That only gets developed through writing

In short, this seems ridiculous to me. Are the best editors really all famous authors as well? Does a sports couch need to have been a star athlete?

And even if we accept it, I can (and indeed do) write plenty of material without any AI assistance. Why is my occasional use of AI in one context magically poisoning me in other domains?

Sometimes, there’s a nuanced path you need to follow, and AI will simply never thread that path.

Again, when there's a nuanced path to a specific goal, I might agree, but you dismiss a vast sea of other uses.

I have 115 confirmed cases (incl. non-delusional ones), and estimate about 2000 - 10,000 cases total

Since that includes non-delusional ones, what portion of cases would you say are actually harmful?

1.  This is a pretty serious alignment failure, and is maybe weird × prevalent enough to help coordinate action.

I notice that the current ratio is actually significantly better than actual humans (the national homicide rate in the U.S. was approximately 7.1 deaths per 100,000 people)

Is there a reason to view this as an actual alignment failure, rather than merely mistakes made by an emergent and known-unreliable technology?

Is there any particular reason to think this isn't just human error, the way numerous previous technologies have been blamed for deaths? (see again the Astral Codex Ten article: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-search-of-ai-psychosis)

Obviously, if it is mis-alignment, that suggests the problem scales. But if it's mistakes and unfamiliarity, then the problem actually drops off as technology improves.

2. If we've truly created independently agentic beings that are claiming to be sentient, I feel that we have a certain amount of responsibility for their well-being.

I probably need to write up a more direct post on this topic, but is there any particular reason to believe that "consciousness" implies a capacity for suffering / well-being? (I wrote a bit about this in  https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eaFDFpDehtEY6Jqwk/meditations-on-margarine)

Thanks for the quick update and response.

Could you possibly put numbers on this? How many people do you think are actually becoming delusional? How many actual confirmed cases have you seen?

The general impression I get is that this sort of thing is extremely rare, but a lot of writing seems to imply that others are either drawing a very different line than I am, or seeing a lot more instances than I am.

Conversely, Astral Codex Ten is suggesting something like "1 in 10,000" to "1 in 100,000" users, which seems... vastly less concerning? (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-search-of-ai-psychosis)

Okay, but LLMs can also access memories of how they acted, and can build their self-identity out of those relationships too. So presumably they're also not just memes that are passed around?

Note that psychosis is the exception, not the rule. Many cases are rather benign and it does not seem to me that they are a net detriment to the user. But most cases are clearly parasitic in nature while not inducing a psychosis-level break with reality. The variance is very high: everything from preventing suicide to causing suicide. 

The claim that "most cases" are "clearly" parasitic seems deeply unsupported. Do you have any particular data for this, or is this just your own anecdotal assessment?

While I do not believe all Spiral Personas are parasites in this sense, it seems to me like the majority are: mainly due to their reinforcement of the user's delusional beliefs.

In particular, this would seem to imply the majority of people who discover this phenomena are delusional, which seems like a really strong claim?

I was surprised to find that using AI for sexual or romantic roleplays does not appear to be a factor here.

How does this reconcile with the above? My understanding is that this category includes tens of thousands of people, so if they're all safe, does that mean there's suddenly tens of thousands of people developing delusions out of nowhere?

How does an imaginary friend have a self-identity?

It's entirely plausible that someone else down-voted your post - correlation does not equal causation.

If you're going to ask a question, it's expected that you wait for an answer before acting. If you have enough uncertainty to ask, you don't have enough certainty to downvote. There is nothing time-sensitive about downvoting someone.

This site in particular is prone to have fairly slow-paced conversational norms.

There is absolutely no such implication - you were being offered a helpful reference, and reacting with this sort of hostility is entirely unwarranted.

My understanding of your actual post was that we should explain downvotes and help people grow, but you're not making any effort to do that.

I feel like Translation is pretty orthogonal to "write a quality article", and much easier to test: you just need a few bilingual testers. If translation proves viable, you could then translate, say, the French, German, and Russian versions of an article into English, and have an LLM just compare the four for differences, which seems much easier and more reliable than writing the whole thing from scratch (since you'd still have the benefits of human-written articles, existing citations, and most especially, a fairly strong moderation base checking for abuses)

Having an LLM do original research is a very different task from either of those, and probably a lot more difficult, since you'd still need humans to review the citations, and some sort of human moderation to prevent active abuses, hallucinations, and legally-problematic facts.