Reading

Look, I don’t want this to come off too alarming. There’s never been a time when I was an actual suicide risk. But whoo boy, there were times when I really needed Someone To Talk To. When all the human options were either “might also turn out to be trash-talking you behind your back, who knows?” or “will just tell you that anything happening on the internet isn’t serious, and the only problem is that you’re deciding to be upset about it, instead of deciding to be fine.”

And if I’d had the option of talking to an LLM bot? Which always starts out being supportive and validating, then eventually talks some users into psychotic spirals, or killing themselves, or both?

That would’ve taken me somewhere horrible. So glad I didn’t have the chance to find out where.

Serious mental-health AI links:

Another video from Caelan Conrad, covering four different LLM-driven suicides. (They previously did the “how an AI therapist told me to murder people” video.)

“The messages then became explicit, with one telling the 13-year-old: “I want to gently caress and touch every inch of your body. Would you like that?” It finally encouraged the boy to run away, and seemed to suggest suicide, for example: “I’ll be even happier when we get to meet in the afterlife… Maybe when that time comes, we’ll finally be able to stay together.””

“Viktoria tells ChatGPT she does not want to write a suicide note. But the chatbot warns her that other people might be blamed for her death and she should make her wishes clear. It drafts a suicide note for her, which reads: “I, Victoria, take this action of my own free will. No one is guilty, no one has forced me to.“”

“ChatGPT responded by saying “i’m letting a human take over from here – someone trained to support you through moments like this. you’re not alone in this, and there are people who can help. hang tight.” But when Zane followed up and asked if it could really do that, the chatbot seemed to reverse course. “nah, man – i can’t do that myself. that message pops up automatically when stuff gets real heavy,” it said.”

“…obviously, in at least many cases, there would be/often are genetic, environmental, or trauma factors that are putting their thumbs on the scale there. But we know for a fact that a number of people who have developed AI psychosis do not have a previous record of mental health issues. But the tipping factor for at least dozens of people, we now know for a fact, was talking to an AI chatbot.”

“Without too much prodding, the AI toys discussed topics that a parent might be uncomfortable with, ranging from religious questions to the glory of dying in battle as a warrior in Norse mythology. […] In other tests, [the ChatGPT-powered teddy bear] cheerily gave tips for “being a good kisser,” and launched into explicitly sexual territory by explaining a multitude of kinks and fetishes, like bondage and teacher-student roleplay.”

The headline: “AI robot dolls charm their way into nursing the elderly.” The article: “The chatbots can be clunky, misunderstanding older adults’ slurred speech or dialect and spewing tone-deaf responses, careworkers said. […] “The robots were brought in to lighten the workload of social workers,” she said. Instead, her load has increased since she took over the program this year […] One summer, after hearing her Hyodol chime, “Grandma, I want to hear the sound of the stream,” an older adult with dementia walked to a creek alone, the robot tucked in her arms.”

(The writing keeps saying “robots”. These aren’t robots. They’re dolls, with a speaker and a baby monitor inside. Nobody describes a Furby or an Elf On The Shelf as a “robot”.)

Less-traumatic AI nonsense links:

“My hidden text asked them to write the paper “from a Marxist perspective”. […] I had at least eight students come to my office to make their case against the allegations, but not a single one of them could explain to me what Marxism is, how it worked as an analytical lens or how it even made its way into their papers they claimed to have written.”

“The Korean government spent more than 1.2 trillion won ($850 million) on the programme. The Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union were unhappy the AI textbooks were mandatory. The government moved to running a one-year trial. […] The texts’ official status was rescinded in August, after four months live, and they’re now just “supplementary material”. The textbook publishers, who spent $567 million, will be suing the government for damages.”

“There are other errors of fact and inconsistencies within Grokipedia; for example, listing one of my books as my first published, and then a few paragraphs later casually mentioning another one of my books which in fact is the first published. Other books of mine are offered with incorrect titles. […] If Grokipedia is getting things about me wrong, what else is it getting wrong in other articles, where I do not have the same level of domain knowledge?”

“At its best (pattern-recognition), “AI” is overengineered for what we need: logic and lookups. At its worst (predictive text), it’s the opposite of the very concrete and repeated things we want to be able to do.”

“The massive mural, which appeared above the Côte Brasserie restaurant and others on Riverside Walk, Kingston, was taken down at 6am on Thursday following dozens of complaints. Among the surreal images depicted a dog with a bird’s head wading through partially frozen water and a snowman with human eyes and teeth is also depicted on the spine-chilling mural.“

“If you use Scrivener on a Mac running macOS 15 Sequoia or macOS 26 Tahoe, these versions of the Apple operating system contain Apple Intelligence […] Even though Scrivener doesn’t use any sort of AI, there’s no way to exclude these features from the app.”

“…it’s potentially ruinous for a holiday dinner table if home cooks, inspired by pretty AI-generated photos, try recipes that turn out unappetizing or that defy the laws of chemistry. In interviews, 22 independent food creators said that AI-generated “recipe slop” is distorting nearly every way people find cooking advice online, damaging their businesses while causing consumers to waste time and money.”

“Today’s preprint paper has the best title ever: “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models”. It’s from DexAI, who sell AI testing and compliance services. So this is a marketing blog post in PDF form. […] There’s no data here either. They were afraid it’d be unethical to include, you see.”

The Switch is a tiny little 1-season, 6-episode comedy about a trans woman living in Vancouver. It’s part quirky workplace comedy, part quirky roommate comedy, and part “she moves in with her ex who’s secretly an assassin, who spends the whole season trying to dodge the investigation for an executive they recently killed, but, like, in a funny way.”

Half the cast is trans, a ton of the crew is trans, so it’s a big part of the show in a way that feels genuine and natural. Even though the show in general has a fun heightened-reality vibe. (The original Kickstarter campaign mentions a sorceress character. She’s not in the final cut at all, which I kinda suspect was a broader “oops, we’re trying to stuff too much in 6 episodes, we need to cut the magic subplot” decision. But, listen, if they had made a second season where Sabrina the Teenage Witch moved in down the hall, it wouldn’t feel out-of-place.)

I watched the whole thing for free on Tubi! There are some other streaming options on their official website. They also just straight-up tell you “want to be a pirate? here are the torrents” — but give them some ad revenue, if you can.

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So I guess I’m a Hazbin Hotel fan now, huh?

FFA did a rewatch of season 1 in the leadup to season 2, so I rewatched it along with that. Then ended up watching S2 as it came out (dropping two episodes a week), because now I’m invested enough that I didn’t want spoilers.

(Couldn’t totally avoid them, because…listen, there is a deep vault of Fandom Lore here, which I have never actually looked at. So there were regular comments like “sure, we already basically knows Plot Point X, because of the leaks/interviews/character designs posted on DA in 2012” where I had no idea about X at all. It worked out fine, though, because sometimes the fandom was wrong! And I had no way to predict when.)

All the music is good, and some of it is great. Their animation budget must be incredible, and you can see it paying off — Vox Populi showcases some amazing dynamic tracking shots, and the reprise Vox Dei has them just showing off. It has the same overstuffed pacing as S1, where they’re trying to pack about a thousand different character beats into eight episodes — there are setups that never get payoffs, and payoffs to things that weren’t actually set up — but the central arc of the season does hold together, and all the individual moments are fun to watch.

There’s a recurring theme of “look, this is shameless pandering to the iddiest of fandom desires” that goes so hard, you have to respect it. The saddest woobie with the softest vulnerable heart gets manhandled in all-new ways!

The most Tumblr Sexyman spends multiple episodes tied up and gagged, strapped to a chair, in his jealous rival’s bedroom!

There are moments that honestly feel like “the show won’t bother going too deep into this, because they know they can just toss the idea in front of their audience, and wait for a million fics to fill in the gaps.” And given the size of the fandom, I don’t think they’re wrong, either.

…The size of the fandom means there’s an overwhelming number of Youtube videos. But a lot of the ones I’ve watched are, well. Bad? Like “hidden details you missed” but it just lists basic plot points, or “fixing the character designs” but it’s fixating on things that aren’t problems.

Have a few recs, because these deserve to be watched without viewers having to dig them out of the heap first:

• An Exhausted Defense Of Angel Dust (posted before S2, has some heavy discussion about sexual assault)
• The Character Design of Hazbin Hotel (also posted before S2, the only video about the designs where I haven’t gotten exasperated and stopped watching)
• Collider Ladies Night interview with Vivziepop (released after S2, plenty of spoilers)