This is what ChatGPT is actually for

The Delusion Machine

Back in February, I started using ChatGPT for therapy. I had interviewed a handful of therapists in 2023 for a story and the consensus from most I spoke to was, “if you don’t have access to a human therapist, it’s better than nothing.” I figured I fit the criteria there, I had found myself in that very American predicament of being between health insurance plans and really needed to talk some stuff out with someone — or something, I guess.

Before you panic, I am now sorting through ChatGPT’s advice with a human therapist, which has been interesting in its own right. (It was mostly fine, but pretty shallow.) I’ll also try and spare you the extremely mortifying details about what I spent a few weeks talking to ChatGPT about, but my experience with Dr. ChatGPT did teach me a few things about what it’s actually “good” at. It also convinced me that AI therapy — and maybe AI in general — is quite possibly one of the most dangerous things to ever exist and needs to be outlawed completely. But we’ll get there in a sec.

Even though the marketing loves to advertise it as one, ChatGPT is not a particularly good search engine or research assistant. We already knew this. It still hallucinates and, more generally, just sucks at writing. And using it for any kind of actual knowledge work is, frankly, not worth the effort of factchecking it if you give any kind of shit about the quality of said knowledge work. But from my therapy sessions, I did learn that it’s extremely good at pattern recognition. For instance, if you were to use it, as I did, as a diary or a place to vent, it is shockingly adept at identifying recurring behaviors that you might not have noticed. More than a few times, it gave me little breakthroughs that genuinely did help. And if you give it more and more biographical information, that pattern recognition gets even better and it’s capable of giving you some pretty fascinating semi-objective insights. The problem is, however, that you have to ask it for that.

ChatGPT’s default is to agree with you. And in late April, it got even more aggressively agreeable. OpenAI’s Sam Altman admitted that the newest ChatGPT update, GPT-4o, “glazes too much,” going on to write on X, “The last couple of GPT-4o updates have made the personality too sycophant-y and annoying (even though there are some very good parts of it), and we are working on fixes ASAP.”

It seems like most users only noticed ChatGPT’s “glazing” when the volume got turned up so high that it was impossible to ignore, but it’s been a problem for a while. I had, thankfully, stopped using it by the time the new update went out, but during my sessions with it in March, it would breathlessly cheer me on and even when I pushed it to give me critical feedback it still would only do so briefly and then immediately revert back to being a cheery idiot. I’d like to imagine that I was able to keep a level head while I was talking to it, but at a certain level of vulnerability no one is safe from the cognitohazard of the delusion machine. Which is exactly what is happening to many users right now.

Rolling Stone published a horrifying story over the weekend, interviewing the friends and loved ones of people who appear to be having genuine mental health crises thanks to ChatGPT. As Rolling Stone noted, redditors have started calling it “ChatGPT induced psychosis,” and one user in the comment section who has schizophrenia warned that the AI chat bot, as it currently functions, would happily cheerlead a user through a psychotic episode because its only off switch has to come from the user themselves. And that’s a feature, not a bug.

In March, Futurism covered a new study published by OpenAI and MIT Media Lab that found that some users become “addicted” to using ChatGPT. As someone who absolutely, at one point, had a bit of a Twitter problem, I can definitely say that I started to feel somewhat sucked in by ChatGPT. It’s not the same kind of negatively fulfilling feedback loop you get from publicly crashing out on the timeline, but it’s a similar firehose of attention. More than a few times I felt the urge to tell ChatGPT more or ask it more, only to realize I didn’t have anything else to say and felt weirdly frustrated. I was raised Catholic though, so maybe I’m just naturally predisposed to confession, who knows.

But I’ve realized that feeling, of wanting to tell it more so that it can tell you more, is the multi-billion-dollar business that these companies know they’re building. It’s not fascist anime art or excel spreadsheet automation, it’s preying on the lonely and vulnerable for a monthly fee. It’s about solving the final problem of the ad-supported social media age, building up the last wall of the walled garden. How do you get people to pay your company directly to socialize online? And the answer is, of course, to give them a tirelessly friendly voice on the other side of the screen that can tell them how great they are. The impressive pattern recognition that I noticed during my short time using ChatGPT as a therapist was recently described by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the “personalization loop,” which he thinks will be “compelling” for users. “Compelling” here being CEO speak for “lucrative.” Zuckerberg said that he doesn’t think AI will actually replace human connection because, thanks to working on Facebook, he knows that people are so isolated to begin with that it will only just fill the void that’s already there. Which is a fascinating way for the inventor of the loneliness engine to see the world. And the fact he’s not using euphemisms to talk about this stuff anymore means he knows he’s finally built a better one.

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It’s the knot you can’t untangle — a problem so unique, it makes you feel alone. But what if you could talk to someone who’d been through the exact same thing? On Proxy, a new indie podcast from the former host of Invisibilia, Yowei and her team find just the person you were looking for, the person who can help you get unstuck. It’s not therapy - it’s emotional investigative journalism™️.

We take on cases like: the journalist who can’t stop fact-checking his mother-in-law who has Alzheimers, even though he knows she's losing her memory. The band who hasn’t finished their record for years and can’t figure out why. Or the introvert who loves her extroverted friends, but kinda can't stand hanging out with them. 

New cases every other Tuesday. Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts.

A Scouse Girlie Goes On A Cruise

@havealaffwithsaff

Disco night on @Celestyal Cruises it’s not for the weak #fyp #celestyalcruises #cruise ad/gifted

Exactly How Much Should We Worry About The Tariffs?

Well, to immediately answer the question, based on what I’ve read, we should be worrying a lot. The last goods from China not subject to President Donald Trump’s asinine tariffs arrived last week. You should expect shortages for most consumer goods, but especially things like electronics and clothes. Inventories should hold for a few weeks and then we’ll start to see empty shelves. If you’re still not freaked out, the videos circulating of empty American ports last week might do the trick.

Prices on platforms like Shein and Temu skyrocketed last week and now Temu is only showing “local” products to Americans, which is anything that’s already here. Amazon was listing the tariffs in their price breakdowns up until Trump personally complained to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. But make no mistake, as of this week, America has more or less priced itself out of the global consumer goods economy. One shipping company announced they were buying up $20 million in $TRUMP memecoins to give them a way to “advocate for fair, balanced, and free trade between Mexico and the US.” Which, though it sounds like a bribe, is, apparently, not one.

And just in case there’s something you love or care about that hasn’t been flushed down the toilet by Trump’s administration yet, he announced this morning that he wants to impose a 100% tariff on any film made outside the US. Which, if it goes through, would effectively destroy Hollywood almost overnight.

Why Didn’t Australia Turn Right?

Australia’s incumbent party is one of the few in the world to actually perform well at the polls post-COVID. And the fact it was the Labour party is even more surprising. While the country’s conservatives, as an Australian might say, totally chundered it or some shit idk.

From my very brief time reporting in Australia in the 2010s, I can say that the country does have a somewhat similar manosphere ecosystem to what we see in the US, Canada, and the UK, but it’s definitely a lot smaller. So it’s not that the country has totally escaped the global culture war. It’s just not having as much of an impact. The question is why. If you compare Australia’s election to the recent Canadian election that also saw a huge smash success on the left, you might argue that it’s a global response to Trump. Which it very well might be. But what if it reveals something specific about how Australia is dealing with — or has already dealt with — political radicalization? For instance, Australian polls showed that the youth of the country overwhelmingly voted for Labour. So what gives?

I’ve seen users reacting to Australia’s polls offer a bunch of different arguments — urbanization, a high minimum wage, less isolation, better education standards. But I came across one idea, not specifically about Australia, that feels true to me.

“My Grand Theory of 2020s Politics is that countries that had a bad response to the Great Recession (or other stagnations) have fascist movements and that these manifest in gender polarization if there's a labor market gap between skilled (female) and unskilled (male) labor,” X user @maiamindel wrote last week.

And I was curious if it held up with Australia. And, sure enough, according to the Reserve Bank of Australia, yes, the country did experience stagnation after the Great Recession, but nowhere near the levels it was felt in other countries. Something to think about maybe!

The Garbage Day Discord Raises Some Money

—by Adam Bumas

The Garbage Day Discord, which any paid subscriber can access, has everything you’d expect from a community that’s been around long enough, like lore or weird internal structures (this year’s annual Emoji March Madness tournament was won by the Waluigi emoji in a close final round against the Sickos emoji). 

But a community of Garbage Day readers means people who value the kinds of connection and support that are specific to being online, and we want to highlight a recent example. It started a couple weeks ago, when one Discord user who goes by J0 wrote about feeling unfairly pressured to moderate the community. [Ed. note: We’re working on it lol.] Another user, gggggggglitch, jokingly suggested that J0 should be paid reparations for the trouble.

J0 did end up posting her Venmo, mostly to go along with the joke, saying any money sent would be used to help college students of hers dealing with financial issues. Within a few hours, members of the Discord had given hundreds of dollars to those students. Two users got into a bidding war over who could donate more, and the standard joke about non-American users waking up to the chaos led J0 to create a PayPal account for them to donate as well, since Venmo is exclusive to the US.

After a week, the Garbage Day Discord had raised over $4,000 for J0’s students. We think that’s pretty neat.

Hasan Piker And Ethan Klein Finally Debated

You should not feel bad, in any way, for missing this clash of titans over the weekend. But if you want to watch it, here’s a link. It was almost five hours long and featured a lot of yelling. As one commenter underneath the video wrote, “Babe wake up a new circle of hell just dropped.”

If you’re curious about who “won” the debate, fans of Klein think he won and fans of Piker think he won, mostly. Though, it’s best not to think of this has a constructive or even interesting discussion about Israel and Palestine and more of a conversational boxing match for a very specific cohort of xillennial YouTube fans.

But, after all of those caveats, if you’re still curious who “won” the debate, Piker did get Klein to sarcastically call his wife a terrorist for serving in the Israel Defense Forces, which feels like something someone who “won” a debate would not do.

A Good Post

Some Stray Links

• “The Signal Clone the Trump Admin Uses Was Hacked”

• “The new White House influencer briefings are a terrible look”

• “‘He’s Trying to Colonize This Community’: Inside Elon Musk’s Plan to Take Over This Texas Town”

• “Behind Trump’s Deal to Deport Venezuelans to El Salvador’s Most Feared Prison”

P.S. here’s Meatloaf and his little hat.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***