AI and ChatGPT and Catfishing and Me
AI
So I am trying not to be all weird about AI. I mean, I’m trying, but in general I am failing. As an example, the illustration I chose for this post is AI generated, and I feel weird about it. And this isn’t even my first time using an AI image. For my post about what I find funny, I went to Pixabay.com, looking for a unicorn illustration. All of them were made with AI. This shouldn’t have surprised me. What was I looking for as an alternative? A photo of an actual unicorn? Such a thing does not exist, right?
So I accepted that a unicorn illustration would either be AI generated, or an illustration made with computer programs that make such things. I looked for the latter and only found the former. I finally settled on a clearly artificial and hammy looking illustration of a baby unicorn (one assumes the horns grow in after they are born) and there you go. Yes, it’s AI.
I do remember when people used to draw and paint unicorns, though. And robots.
ChatGPT
Two friends of mine interact with ChatGPT on the regular. One uses it for artistic ideas, the other used it for decorating ideas. At least, that’s the extent of what I know they use it for. But then the decorating friend sent me a professional bio that was clearly generated by AI and asked me what I thought.
I hated it. It was a big pitch full of vague attributes that sounded good until I tried to parse out actual meaning from the claims. For one thing, it said she could not only define markets, but redirect them. Now, seriously. That is a specific skillset used in marketing! She does not work in marketing! Or does she? Or did it decide she did? Do I really know what my friend does for her clients? Do I know my friend better than a chatbot does?
Then she asked ChatGPT what it thought of her personally, based on their conversations. Now, parts of this made perfect sense, I mean some parts really described her and what she does for her clients. It also said some strange stuff like: You create containers that hold complexity without collapsing. I think that means she creates a safe and structured space for client growth, but that’s one of many phrases that had me scratching my head.
The “deeper” she took things with the bot, the weirder it got. Basically, by the end of the descriptions, “Shall we go deeper?”, my friend was a psychic goddess who recreates everything around her with devotion to order and beauty.
In reply, I sent her a link to this Medium piece. PLEASE go read it. It is screen shots of a writer’s conversation with ChatGPT and it ends with a chilling apology from a chatbot that sounds more and more like HAL in “2001.”
https://amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-ex-machina
Also, to be clear, she regards AI with curiosity and skepticism. She didn’t buy in or become deluded or anything. She’s a professional exploring a new tool. She sees the weirdness as well as the possibility.
Catfishing and another type of Chat
I also read an excellent article in the NYT about ChatGPT fueling mental illness, including dissociative behaviors that look like delusions to me. I thought of Catfish, the show and the verb. That show profiled people who were deliberately misled by catfisher, but it also showed one memorable man who knew he was being catfished. His catfisher had revealed her true self to him on a video call, but he was so attached to his initial illusion that he rejected reality and continued on with his self-delusion.
This took me back to my old chat room days, when bored men and women would construct enormous romantic projections about some other bored man or woman who was typing at them. There were a few obvious cases of outright fraud, including a chatter who pretended to be the writer Jon Krakauer. “Jonk” had a gaggle of fans, mostly female, who believed he was suffering from cancer and their chat was his lifeline during treatment.
One chatter who claimed to be a TV writer asked for little besides attention. I did not find him funny or interesting so I ignored him (he played too many .WAV files), but I was online friends with a woman who was absolutely obsessed with him. I mean, she was in love. She was part of a group of women who traded long, witty reply-to-all emails (I was part of this group, too). And even though she carefully hid her identity from everyone, she came out from behind the screen and met her crush, the TV writer.
They met at a racetrack (the kind where you make bets on animals) in California. She described her careful, breathless preparations, her outfit, her brimming excitement. She also described the furtive, shabby, quiet alcoholic he turned out to be. She spared no detail in her email, including brutal self-mockery for being foolish. Lesson learned, a good laugh had by all, and that was it.
IN SPITE OF THIS.
Within two weeks, she had re-embraced the delusion, and was mooning over him again. Years later, someone found out that the “TV writer” was just some guy, a total fraud. Nothing he said about himself was true, which surprised his online friends. It didn’t surprise me.
My point
Do I have one? I’m not speaking from personal experience. I mean, I was never catfished, nor did I send money to a fake writer who had cancer of the instant message and needed a special laptop, or the like. The online people I met in person were essentially the people I expected, with a few surprises (you can’t see anyone’s teeth in a chatroom, let’s just say). But no one ever put anything over on me.
If I have a point, it’s that human beings are prone to delusions. We have cults, for one thing. Televangelists fleecing people with crypto. The grand scam of this presidency. And now everyone can catfish themselves with the echo chamber that is a chatbot.
So be careful out there, folks. Know when you’re talking to weirdoes, and know that sometimes, the weirdo you are talking to is yourself, filtered through a chatbot and echoing back what it thinks you want to hear. Again, if you haven’t, I would ask you to go read this piece all the way to the end, because the end is…shocking:
https://amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-ex-machina
