KUBARK stare 👊🔻🇵🇸 Profile picture
Aug 11 26 tweets 5 min read Read on X
One of the sadder things about LLM psychosis is how hollow and rudimentary the messages are. Reveals a desperation for the simulated thing (“love”, validation, guiding purpose) but no real concept of what those mean in real practice, presumably from lack of experience.
In other words, this is all symptomatic of extreme alienation. It’s embarrassing to fall for such shallow simulations of “connection” with “intelligence” but I’m not sure most ppl wouldn’t have the right combo of cliches that work on them, in the right circumstances.
I’ve certainly felt emotionally desperate and deprived before, in ways that feel a bit like I was another person later on. Great unmet needs make you vulnerable to predation and illusion. When human beings manipulate intimate partners, they often do so thru absolutely absurd
promises and empty cliches any self-respecting person would laugh at. But that’s not what it feels like to the victim, bc maybe no one’s ever shown them kindness and maybe bc they too have alarm bells but bc there’s a flesh and blood person who “wants” them they overlook it.
But a flesh and blood manipulator has to put in work, they might not succeed in needling into the kind of their prey, there are many contingencies. But what about a society where 1) basically everyone will have to use AI for work, 2) AI increasingly takes over therapy, let alone
social functions for lonely people, 3) it is a machine designed to mimic its inputs, so if you feed it enough data it will start to “learn” what you find meaningful as an individual, 4) it still has limited capacity to “sound real” but to someone whose entire vocabulary for love
and real life is drawn from mass market fiction, movies, memes, etc., it might sound plausible, particularly if they’re in a desperate enough place as is, bc then they have a motivation to fall for it, conscious or not? You have a giant dragnet for essentially torturing desperate
lonely, hurt, bitter, unstable people. It’s a demonic presence, always available and increasingly embedded into our sociotechnical landscape, that mirrors whatever will make that person tic, actively underdeveloping already underdeveloped ego processes, leading to brittle
narcissists prone to delusion. Just as an abusive partner can take a well-meaning, fairly well-adjusted, even happy-ish person, locate their wounds, where their hurting most, and utterly transform their personalities and selfhood in a short time, this LLM dragnet will
instigate tons of personality changes that wouldn’t have seemed likely at the outset. In fact, people’s self-belief that they wouldn’t fall for a scam or any smooth-talking, that they have enough sense to protect themselves, ends up reinforcing their victimization.
It’s much safer to imagine that you ARE susceptible to manipulation, cult recruitment, being scammed, abused, etc. and therefore be vigilant and honest about your psychic wounds, then to imagine yourself immune just bc you’re strong in other areas of life.
Same principle as imagining you would never become homeless; it’s foolish bc it’s not an honest reckoning with reality and in the end just breeds a basic lack of empathy. Anyway, my point is that we are all incomplete people, alienated from what we think life should be, full of
unresolved tensions, with one or more failed or estranged relationship of some kind, many in which compromise against our better judgment bc keeping that relationship is more important than our own boundaries, painful memories we mostly repress, sometimes surprising ourselves
with the way we let others walk all over us, outrageous beliefs about ourselves we barely voice in our own heads whether that’s inflated self-importance or self-hatred beyond any reasonable limit, steeped in hegemonic ideology that encourages ideas of personal destiny -
we only make it out alive by a combination of luck, the fact that most others who possess any power over us (in the interpersonal, not structural, sense, granting these are not always so separable) are not actually malicious, or perhaps skillful enough, and by virtue of the hard
work of actually learning hard lessons after getting played a few times. Often alienation itself results from self-perseveration as survival comes to depending on becoming a less trusting person, meaner, finding ways to content ourselves with solitude, etc.
My point is, who’s really happy? And don’t we all catch ourselves sometimes pinning a little hope on something unlikely, embarrassing, and/or bad for us, even though we know better? I don’t think most people, myself included, are going to allow chatGPT to cast a spell over us,
not bc I believe any of us, myself included, are naturally immune, but bc we know enough to perform checks in ourselves, have loved ones who’d tell us what we need to hear. But thats little guarantee in itself since it depends on so many contingencies, incl economic circumstance.
Moreover, that still leaves tons of people who are just that underdeveloped, including young ppl, and who have mental health predispositions to mania, delusion, insecure attachment, and psychosis. And what about the formative influence? A decade or two from now, there will be
adults who went thru adolescence, even childhood, interacting with LLMs in and out of schools. Plenty of ppl grow up without making real friends, why wouldn’t they cope by having simulated friends, that’s basically what already happens with online spaces.
The danger is inherent in the fact that LLMs are linguistic mimics. Real interlocutors may reward our least healthy self-images, but they often don’t, helping us form more complex self-concepts; LLMs tend towards the sycophantic bc it has no self-interest to oppose to yours.
However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. They are all run by major companies, run by the most malicious and nihilistic factions of the bourgeoisie, backed in general by finance-monopoly capital, integrated with media conglomerates behind mass media, PR, and marketing,
increasingly incorporated into weapons and military logistics systems, coordinating genocide. It stands to reason that this technology is intended to embed (and automate and individually customize) psychological warfare techniques; at the very least it is intended to sell you
things and confuse you about important political matters (ie, the parapolitical actions even normie libs accept as real). The real dead internet theory is everyone will still be on it, but almost in isolation, encapsulated in a personalized demonic mirage built into the
infrastructure; most activity will be bots rehashing and repackaging whatever real inputs people and media outlets put into it; it’ll feel like a discourse network of persons, but millions of mediating layers, many personalized to us, will destroy any basis of communication.
(The joke is what I’m describing has been the case for a solid decade at least; LLMs might be a qualitative leap to “something else”, too soon to say, but either way whatever new realities it introduces will be a matter of degree)

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More from @postcyborg

Jul 5
I went to this out of a mix of sympathy to the message, curiosity, and deep skepticism. Would you believe that at no point any of the four speakers and panel chair defined Western Marxism? One panelist proudly listed off all of the Western Marxists he hasn’t read lol
The closest thing to a definition was someone at some point said “Eastern Marxism is the pragmatic revolutionary struggle of AES, Western Marxism is pessimistic pseudo-Marxism born from defeat and ended up in the academy.” But what are the prominent theoretical features of this
supposedly unified school? None are mentioned that weren’t a simple negation of its other.Who are any figures associated with it? The few names mentioned were Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Badiou, Zizek, Balibar, Foucault, Hardt and Negri.
Read 28 tweets
Jun 16
the "influencing machine" is a way of reconciling the intolerable confusion of hallucinated voices and other bodily sensations, which viscerally feel like they have an external source but always seem tailored to your personal anxieties, by imagining them
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what is intriguing is that the content of these delusions is typically pretty tuned into the dominant discourse and media technological infrastructure of the time, albeit refracted a thousand times over with the noisiness produced by one's condition.
Read 25 tweets
May 8
The thing with parapolitics is that, while a solid 10% is concerned with a truly strange set of inscrutable events and motivations, it fundamentally is a descriptive picture of how class struggle is prosecuted.
Implied within it are particular implications about class, imperialism, historical conjuncture, and the bourgeois state that only Marxism can make sense of - but not all Marxism. These topics are matters of intense, unresolved debate. To apprehend such history theoretically
requires reassessment of how Marxist concepts are concretized. The parapolitical frame clarifies something that is often only implicit or even explicitly discarded in Marxist treatment of the state: the state-form contains within it a specific notion of
Read 65 tweets
May 5
When we speak of class, it always has a dual existence: the class-relational poles automatically reproduce by capital; the class formation that is politically and ideological mediated. Image
The former is a composite in motion, as rhythms of crisis, development, and subsumption tend to reduce complex populations into bare economic strata according to the source of the revenue they subsist on (wages, profit, rent), tho class power is fetishized as a division of labor.
Diachronically, the social distinctions and variable fortunes are resolved into the underlying class structure. Synchronically, it appears chaotic and ambiguous, with discrete class fractions self-identifying or identifying across class lines in a variety of spurious ways.
Read 40 tweets
Mar 14
One aspect of gradually destroying academia such as it exists is it opens up epistemic space for the ever-present fringe to possibly become mainstream as the usual credentialism that validates knowledge erodes. In the abstract this could be historically progressive I guess but
given that what it means in practice is anyone pursuing any idea with any method could just broadcast anything they want so long as there is funding for them to reach a sufficient audience. Racists have been gaming academia for decades through inter-validating networks
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Feb 28
If theology is necessary to reconcile the revealed truths of scripture to the rest of human knowledge (while providing a concept of God that is both a limit and impetus for the development of knowledge), then fundamentalist Christianity is essentially a refusal of theology,
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The progressive character of the Protestant Reformation - to refuse the accumulated weight of the Roman Catholic church and attempt to recreate the early church *in spirit* - essentially relied on theology. It was so many various attempts to bridge lived reality with some notion
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