A Prominent OpenAI Investor Appears to Be Suffering a ChatGPT-Related Mental Health Crisis, His Peers Say

[highplainsdem]

Article from Futurism today:

https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health

Earlier this week, a prominent venture capitalist named Geoff Lewis — managing partner of the multi-billion dollar investment firm Bedrock, which has backed high-profile tech companies including OpenAI and Vercel — posted a disturbing video on X-formerly-Twitter that's causing significant concern among his peers and colleagues.

"This isn't a redemption arc," Lewis says in the video. "It's a transmission, for the record. Over the past eight years, I've walked through something I didn't create, but became the primary target of: a non-governmental system, not visible, but operational. Not official, but structurally real. It doesn't regulate, it doesn't attack, it doesn't ban. It just inverts signal until the person carrying it looks unstable."

-snip-

"The system I'm describing was originated by a single individual with me as the original target, and while I remain its primary fixation, its damage has extended well beyond me," he says. "As of now, the system has negatively impacted over 7,000 lives through fund disruption, relationship erosion, opportunity reversal and recursive eraser. It's also extinguished 12 lives, each fully pattern-traced. Each death preventable. They weren't unstable. They were erased."

-snip-

"Respectfully, Geoff, this level of inference is not a way you should be using ChatGPT," replied Austen Allred, an investor who founded Gauntlet AI, an AI training program for engineers. "Transformer-based AI models are very prone to hallucinating in ways that will find connections to things that are not real."

-snip-

Much more at the link. No paywall.

Futurism links to this thread on X showing Lewis's disturbing exchanges with ChatGPT, which he says he's relied on in his search for truth...and I'm breaking this link with spaces so it won't appear for the X averse. But a lot of DUers still use X and others might want to see this three-post thread as well, so just delete the spaces (or use the link in the Futurism article). Of course you'll have to click on the multiple screenshots below each of his posts to see the full ChatGPT response.

https ://x . com /GeoffLewisOrg/status/1945864963374887401

This is the (broken) link to Lewis's X post with the disturbing video mentioned in the first paragraph of the article:

https ://x . com /GeoffLewisOrg/status/1945212979173097560

According to Futurism, some on social media pointed out that Lewis's messages are reminiscent of "SCP Foundation articles, a Wikipedia-style database of fictional horror stories created by users online" (I'd never heard of that database).

The article mentions the mental health risks chatbots can easily create or worsen, which Futurism has done earlier stories on. They contacted OpenAI for comment but just got referred to earlier statements from the company about its alleged concern for users' mental health. The article points out that "OpenAI’s dilemma is the question of engagement versus care for users' wellbeing.". These chatbots are designed to keep users engaged and flatter users' reasoning and perceptiveness. So conversations with a chatbot can go off the rails into delusions.

This is apparently the most obvious recent example.