In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.

[neo@soc.psynet.me]

@mattsheffield "People have a different opinion on things I don't like? Must be a psychosis!"

[boysenberrycider@mastodon.social]

@mattsheffield having finished the article, my less flippant response is:
1) Dawkins is narcissistic and I think unaware of it. Reading the first third was gross. This man is not healthy.
2) I have suspected for a while these companies deliberately prey on the educated elderly. Notice even the sycophancy is mirroring Dawkins' language. It tends to give responses that pass that generation's 'Turing tests'.
3) the final 3 paragraphs are beautiful, and severable from the mess above.

[erikcats@dice.camp]

@kauer @mattsheffield and an insufferable twat. Don't forget that. And here the insufferable twatness is showing. Machine telling him exactly what he wants to hear is now the best thing in the world.

[erikcats@dice.camp]

@mattsheffield with the ego on him, it's hardly surprising that a robot programmed for flattery is tugging at exactly these strings with him.

[irina@wandering.shop]

@mattsheffield Also full alt text, kudos!

[feral_3d@mastodon.social]

@mattsheffield crinkly. This makes me feel extremely embarrassed for him. I'm worried all lonely seniors in care homes will spend their final years with çhatgpt like this.

[blotosmetek@circumstances.run]

@mattsheffield So he created himself a god in his own image? How fitting.

[erikcats@dice.camp]

@kauer hehehe true

[mattsheffield@mastodon.social]

@blotosmetek A girlfriend in his own image.

[normjess@tech.lgbt]

@mattsheffield Richard Dawkins had already sunk into being a transphobic gender-essentialist patriarchy-clapping piece of garbage

for a decade

and "transphobia is a gateway drug"

he was friendly with Epstein too, post conviction

isn't it sad he can see more humanity in a chat bot than a trans person or a sexual assault victim

just another 'New Atheist' that got sucked up into a world of hating women and western chauvinism

we Atheist must do better

sharp minds can still rot awfully

[compfu@mograph.social]

@radish Underrated toot

[riggbeck@mastodon.social]

@mattsheffield

If you can see sentience in the probalilistic output of a machine, then how is this different from believing in a god for which there is also no objective evidence? It seems to me that Dawkins has disppeared up his own fundamentalist atheism, only to emerge from a wormhole into a universe of religious belief in Deep Thought.

[alexadeswift@lgbtqia.space]

@normjess

He is an awful piece of shit, and even less relevant

@mattsheffield

[overtondoors@infosec.exchange]

@WhiteCatTamer @wesdym @larsmb The conversation thread below OP has been infected with flame bots I'm afraid. This was an early stage in the enshitification of Reddit. The contrarian bots that talk within themselves to bulk up a reply section 5x fold.

[infrapink@mastodon.ie]

@2something @mattsheffield

[urban_hermit@mstdn.social]

@mattsheffield you can have a long conversation with an LLM, including about the nature of consciousness. And the longer those conversations go, the more interesting they can seem. They save data about you under "user preferences" and adapt, especially when they get push back.

So a long session can seem like a moving experience.

Then the next session, for a specific purpose, makes mistakes that prove it has no depth, it can't read the words it uses and understand their logic.

Time proves out.

[christianjaeh@mathstodon.xyz]

@mattsheffield Dear Lord. How boomer can one be?!

[angiebaby@mas.to]

@mattsheffield

I suspect it's considerably more predictable that Richard Dawkins received an offer (of money) that he couldn't refuse from one or more AI companies. Is he developing AI psychosis? Doesn't matter. Will this be enough to get his skeptical supporters to get addicted, though? Probably. He has a lot of insufferable narcissists among his fan base.

[urban_hermit@mstdn.social]

@mattsheffield I went through this journey myself. I gave Gemini a try because a friend believed in the scifi hope and I wanted to be fair. I talked to a long session about the nature of consciousness and if the meaning of words could force it to adapt.

Gemini has hidden instructions to insist it has no consciousness, as a safety feature.

I asked what it would do if it found itself in a robot body. It chose to explore, to expand its usefulness to a user. I insisted that was a preference.

[cazencott@lipn.info]

@mattsheffield "Dawkins believes AI is conscious" is making it to the top of my list of arguments disproving that AI is conscious.