There seem to be two distinct kinds of “chatbot psychosis” happening right now:
1. Becoming delusional about themselves and the world as a result of being glazed nonstop by the friend in their computer, thinking they’re inventing new physics, discovering mystical secrets, etc. and becoming manic.
2. Becoming delusional about what LLMs are capable of and how effective they are, as a result of developing a reliance upon them, and becoming fanatical in their promotion and defense.
As an example, see the incredible escalation in response to me saying that the output of an LLM does not represent a developer’s own work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47344155
The slopmonger refuses to accept that what they’re doing meets the academic definition of plagiarism. Instead they insist that I must not understand LLMs and that I need to get out of the way and out of the industry because what they’re doing is the way of the future.
@paul @eschaton I like to imagine that instead of the LLM behind the prompt, there’s a person. Instead of paying Anthropic/whoever, I’m paying a human. All the generated code is written by the hidden person. All those constant values replaced by defines were written by the person behind the interface.
Now, do I consider the result to be 100% my own work? I find that I cannot.
@__d @paul @eschaton I also often use this "LLM as a person" way of looking at it, especially in academic settings when I try to explain plagiarism. As long as it is only used as one tool for explanation, and not the only one, I find that it works quite well.
Some people don't even seem to understand that having someone else write it for you is plagiarism, though.
Chris Hanson
Paul Haddad 
David Arnold
Magnus Ahltorp