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matrix87today at 4:00 AM7 repliesview on HN

Okay but suppose you have an AI chatbot which takes in context from previous chats on what your interests are. So people just keep talking with the chatbot more and more as it gains more context. This would meet the criteria. It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.

Maybe it's something to do with the text-based interface vs short form video. Short form video is better at activating the lizard brain


Replies

brooksttoday at 4:17 AM

Law is about intent. It is not code, and it’s a mistake to think of law like code where you need to unit test and cover all edge cases.

In law, it is sufficient to show an intent to take actions that foreseeably caused harm. Specific laws, of course but you don’t need to cover hypotheticals that capture all abstract cases in order to to show a particular actor caused harm.

mslttoday at 4:15 AM

You’ve not already noticed that the end of every consumer-facing LLM chat always includes an invitation for just one more turn to keep the loop going?

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solid_fueltoday at 4:50 AM

> Okay but suppose you have an AI chatbot which takes in context from previous chats on what your interests are. So people just keep talking with the chatbot more and more as it gains more context. This would meet the criteria. It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.

You can stop scrolling instagram "at any time", too.

Chatbots are actually a pretty poor but very relevant choice of example: they are already tuned with RLHF to be engaging and addictive to talk to. That's a huge reason why LLM psychosis is a thing, and it's a big reason why some people like using chatbots so much. They're designed to be addictive, just like facebook/instagram/tiktok are.

rockskontoday at 5:00 AM

"You can stop smoking at any time"

"You can stop gambling at any time"

As much as I may agree with you, you need a different argument.

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phreacktoday at 4:03 AM

I'm not sure about that example. I'm seeing non tech people getting very addicted to their customized chat bots. Companies are very primed to eventually nudge them to enshittify the content of the responses and it could get bad.

obliotoday at 4:01 AM

> It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.

You can also stop taking drugs at any time. Or stop drinking. Or stop smoking. Or stop doomscrolling.

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fwipsytoday at 4:23 AM

Suppose you have a video service which takes context from previous videos you watched to show you more videos you're interested in. Doesn't sound very addictive, does it? You described it in an innocuous way, but I can absolutely see that being a lead-in to a parasocial "relationship" or even AI psychosis.

> you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.

doubt. Lonely people will get addicted.