DLSS 5 gives some unexpected results

The math, as they say, checks out.

According to Heather Cox Richardson, Operation Epstein Fury

Never, never touch the Demon Core.

Definitely a Great Filter contender. No AGI required.

A Prominent OpenAI Investor Appears to Be Suffering a ChatGPT-Related Mental Health Crisis, His Peers Say Bedrock co-founder Geoff Lewis has posted increasingly troubling content on social media, drawing concern from friends in the industry.

The last thing I'll say (he lied,) is that it also accelerates the nominal owners of the technology drinking their own koolaid. There is likely a new cognitive bias of people that make LLMs that think they are immune from being manipulated by LLMs. See: futurism.com/openai-inves...

So, if there is a TLDR; it's this: AI psychosis is exactly the same as the normal function of a ChatGPT or Gemini, but with a bad random seed and a more vulnerable human host. Otherwise: working as intended.

But to get the required verisimilitude, it can't just be trained on Mein Kampf and Ayn Rand and random billionaire tweets. So, eventually people end up doing improv 'yes sessions' with a digital version of Shakespeare's Iago. Seemingly benign, with a sinister foundation.

But unlike TV, radio and print before it, it is stochastic, chaotic. While you can bludgeon it to add "But what about White South African Genocide?" to prompts for sugar-cookie recipes, mostly it does it's own thing, with the median result being the social values of the cultivated training set.

Right now, AI is acting as a parahuman megaphone, amplifying the value systems of people that can afford to train-up AIs. When paired with astroturfing and sock-puppeting, it creates an unparalleled system for hijacking human superorganisms.

I think it's bad when it works 'properly', as well as when it spirals into positive feedback loops, but in these positive feedback loops, which we call AI Psychosis, the damage is most vividly on display.

We have blundered into a situation where we have plugged in, at scale, random number generators into the channels by which the superorganism functions and coheres. My instinct is that this is extraordinarily bad.

Without the company and interaction of other humans, we are just clever monkeys. It is our interactions that have given us a dominant position in the world ecosystem.

I'm currently writing up a review for Nicholas Roeg's 1971 film Walkabout, which I watched last night, and it has veered deeply into the tension between the human, and our place in the superorganism(s) of humanity.

If a parasocial relationship is a social relation that proxies a social relationship, but has an invisible termination (R <-> R, versus R <-| R), then a parahuman relationship is (H <-> H versus H <-| AI).

Layer on top these new parahuman systems (and to be clear, I'm using parahuman as a parallel construct to parasocial, not its pop culture meaning as a synonym for superhuman).

Add to that, many of us now work for, or work in walled gardens owned by people we have never met. Talk about parasocial relationships! The person running your gig-economy platform could have a long history of mental illness, treated or not, and you would likely be unaware, until one day, you are.

If anyone remember Time Cube from the early days of the internet, that was the tip of the iceberg. Looks like it's still around: www.timecube.net.

Before we talk about AI psychosis, there are a couple of things to address. The fact that billions of monkey-brains are now connected to each other instantaneously across the globe means that all of us have much higher exposure to people dealing with mental illness than ever before.

Aliens and Angel Numbers: Creators Worry Porn Platform ManyVids Is Falling Into ‘AI Psychosis’ “Ethical dilemmas about AI aside, the posts are completely disconnected with ManyVids as a site,” one ManyVids content creator told 404 Media.

www.404media.co/manyvids-por...

Let's talk about Parahuman relationships!

To get hit in short secession with parasocial, and now parahuman relationships is a tough draw for humanity. It's like the superorganism version of endocrine disruptors.

My people!

Machado presents Trump with her Nobel award at White House meeting Trump thanked Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, calling it

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Finally! Trump wins the Nobel Irony Prize

OverDrive, Libby and Kanopy are owned by private equity firm KKR, according to Wikipedia. So, stay vigilant.

A good companion piece to "On Bullshit."

It also calls out issues in tech that have been on my mind:

deadsimpletech.com/blog/essay_o...

A bit of an echo of Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Are you frustrated with your elected officials? The good news is we’re heading into a primary season where we get to determine the leaders of the Democratic Party.

leavesubstack.com

Global outcry grows over Israel’s killing of starving civilians in Gaza UN secretary general warns ‘last lifelines’ may soon collapse after Israeli forces attack WHO facilities in Deir al-Balah

Not from the Trump administration or the bipartisan Congressional leadership, however. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

By which I mean LLMs, by which I mean highly tuned personal feedback machines (sweet, sweet dopamine). We are wizards, creating illusions so real we are trapped in them until we die.
So, that's fun.

I also think we can survive it, and maybe the mature version (of the internet? Our media literacy?) is something better. But we seem to be getting hit with a lot of Great Filter events all at once. See also: AI