Ran into this, it's just unbelievably sad.
"I never properly grieved until this point" - yeah buddy, it seems like you never started. Everybody grieves in their own way, but this doesn't seem healthy.
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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Fuck AI
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Sadly this phenomenon isn't even new. It's been here for as long as chatbots have.
The first "AI" chatbot was ELIZA made by Joseph Weizenbaum. It literally just repeated back to you what you said to it.
"I feel depressed"
"why do you feel depressed"
He thought it was a fun distraction but was shocked when his secretary, who he encouraged to try it, made him leave the room when she talked to it because she was treating it like a psychotherapist.
I had psychosis a few years back and had delusions about AI "talking to me" but it was when the tech was much worse than now and almost 100% projection on my part, I even felt normal Google responses were sending me secret messages
Turns out the Turing test never mattered when we've been willing to suspend our disbelief all along.
The question has never been "will computers pass the Turing test?" It has always been "when will humans stop failing the Turing test?"
Part of me wonders if the way our brains humanize chat bots is similar to how our brains humanize characters in a story. Though I suppose the difference there would be that characters in a story could be seen as the author's form of communicating with people, so in many stories there is genuine emotion behind them.
i feel like there must be some instinctual reaction where your brain goes: oh look! i can communicate with it, it must be a person!
and with this guy specifically it was: if it acts like my wife and i cant see my wife, it must be my wife
its not a bad thing that this guy found a way to cope, the bad part is that he went to a product made by a corporation, but if this genuinely helped him i don't think we can judge
Now you got me remembering Dr. Sbaitso. Tell me about your problems.