Panic World - BONUS: AI therapy slop

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

Ryan wrote about using ChatGPT for therapy, and a lot of responses to that announcement involved calling him an idiot. This week, he sits down with Grant to talk about what he learned over experimenting with AI therapy for a few months, and a broader chat about the birth of the AI world — and how it’s pretty much involved in everything already (in good and bad, and mostly bad, ways). Dr. ChatGPT will see you now. Want to hear the rest of the conversation, plus ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for our Patreon for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Sponsors Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Engineer: Rebecca Seidel - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You recently wrote about using Chachibouti as therapy. I'm guessing people praised you for your honesty and your candor of going forward with that. No, most people said I was a giant dumbass, so. Well, let's put a to the side, because I think my main issue is your hypocrisy. I'm a hypocrite on a lot of different things. So what is, what specifically? So you're very critical about Chachupit's advice for you, but we both know it cured your gooning habit, and you didn't talk about that at all. So I want to ask you today, why aren't

you being honest about how Chachupitis set you free from gooning? How many episodes have we gone without talking about going now? I think like five. How far do we make it? Do we make it five? That's pretty good. I actually think that's pretty admirable to to last that long. Good for us. Okay. I'm Grant Irving. This is Panic Road, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And joining me today, a guy who is all in in chat GPT. Ryan Broderick, welcome to your show. I don't want to do this bit.

I don't want to get in trouble with our audience, because they're going to get mad at me, even if you joke about it. That's all I needed. Recently, it feels like we've collectively started feeling the effects of our AI world. Like we've known was coming. but it's starting to actually dawn on us, and our black mirror future is becoming a present.

So I felt like a time to do a bonus on that reality warp. So I want to cover a lot of AI slop developments. None of them are good. But let's start with you. When you started using chat GPT for therapy, how much of it was a bit? None. So I have had like a fairly big couple years.

Like, from being effectively, like, without a job for a while during the pandemic, to building garbage day, to not having an apartment, to living in Brazil. Yeah, there's just a lot of big life changes happening. And if you've never used marketplace insurance in New York, it's a system where your primary care physician has to approve anything else. So if you wanted to go get therapy, you would have to go sit with your doctor and be like, I need therapy for a reason. It's anyway, so now I'm on real health insurance and I have real therapists.

But for, yeah, about a month and a half, I was using ChatGBT as sort of a venting ground, a sounding board. I still use it a little bit now, you know, between sessions, but it's not, it's not, I'm not using it as much as I used to. I kind of realized the limitations. What were your feelings about the idea of AI therapy before you started doing this? Just so we can get like a floor. Yeah. In 2023, I had done a story about it for Fast Company, you know, at the beginning of Chad GBT's sort of existence.

And I interviewed a bunch of therapists and they were all kind of like, yeah, use it. Like if you can't get therapy, use it. One guy I spoke to you, compared it to the move to Zoom therapy during COVID, which like was sort of considered something that should never happen. You know, and then they kind of embraced it and they're like, okay, this works. And so it, I think it primed them for AI therapy a lot better. And I also interviewed a few people who have been using it for that same piece. For that same piece, I interviewed a bunch of people who've been using it.

And they all reported, you know, finding it useful. So I thought, okay, like, I'll give it a shot. Just like logistically, were you talking aloud? Were you typing as somebody who's been in therapy, like basically his entire life? So this is you after therapy? Like you're saying that you've been, this is, oh, okay. I mean, it's. They say it can't work for everybody.

So that's interesting. This is just the effects of working with you. We've all been comparing notes. And everyone is like, you know, it's a good thing that you most. This is you after a year to work. That's fascinating. It's so interesting. It's crazy where people start, you know.

But I think that the process of saying things out loud and like just seeing what, what, where you go versus typing is a very different process. So just like, I logistically. I'm interested. I did not talk to it. I have a paid plan for chat chitp. Which I used to do like all kinds of weird experiments on it because I, and I subscribed to the advice that Casey Newton gave in our much,

very controversial AI episode, which is that you sort of do have to engage with this stuff to critique it and figure out how it works. So I was typing with it, which yes. I would not say that this was like a traditional therapy session or these like, these were traditional therapy sessions. It was more sort of like using a souped up diary. I think it's probably like a better way to think about it.

But, you know, it was therapeutic and I was using it as as sort of a professional kind of, an objective kind of sounding board. Did you gender or name or name it? Did you? No. I, so you can name threads and I wanted to just not, I wanted to keep everything in one thread. And we can talk about actually an interesting experience with the limitations of that in a little bit. But I named it, like, I named the thread like Dr. Chachabit. and I would not gender it.

I did not sort of, there was a few times where I felt compelled to start to treat it like a person, which is interesting psychologically. But for the most part, I was trying to keep some distance from it. I wanted to never forget that, you know, I was dealing with a machine.

On that level, did you find it some, like on some level easier because you're talking to a machine than talking to a human? Yes and no. I mean, there's definitely, you can definitely move faster with it than you can a human therapist. It can sort of analyze what you're putting into

it almost immediately. Like it's really fast. So you don't really have to warm up to it. You don't have to like, which is, there's problems there too. I was also trying to animize some of what I was giving it just because you never, you never know where that data is going for right now from what we understand like chat TBT is not like learning from you. That's what they say is like it is not like but it is, but it is in a way because I also discovered that my therapy sessions were beginning to change how it responded to me in other threads. Talk about that. Yeah, that's really, it's a very eerie moment.

Yeah, like I was using it for tarot because I was like, I don't know, was like a party or something. I was like, oh, do you guys know that like it can do, it can just generate tarot poles, which is kind of fun. And luckily no one was looking at my phone because I asked it to generate a tarot pole and it like informed the tarot reading based on the therapy thread. And I was like, fuck, that's so bad. That's so bad. But then it could also be quite useful because during this time period when I was using

as a therapist, I was also using it to sort of walk me through like a diet and workout plan. And it was then able to sort of like cross reference all three of those threads and kind of start to give me like a more holistic kind of like life coachy kind of output. which I thought was also interesting. Like, it was useful sort of for determining, you know, like, hey, the way I'm feeling right now, is it because, like, I'm fucking hungry from a diet? Or is it because I'm having, like, an emotional crisis?

Or is it some other thing? You know, like, it can be useful in that way, too? Was it like, we're going to recommend that you eat chicken soup on Tuesday because we can tell that you need a meal that feels like a hug after, after we just told you that you're being stupid? I mean, it's a big meal thing is it just wants me to eat fucking. eggs all the time. It just wants me to eat so many goddamn eggs. In this economy? It wants me to eat eggs and peanut butter and protein powder all the time.

Like that's just so many eggs. If you're trying to get big, you can ask a... Talking to a person for help is safe. You can just say, Grant, get me big, and I will help you. I don't want to get big. Well, according to your diet, you do. I want, I want to be tight. I want to be tight.

I disagree with its dietary choices. but we can move on. So, yeah, it is interesting how it starts to, because as I was using it, there was like an update that went through that made its memory better, which I do want to talk about actually because I had kind of a devastating moment with it

about towards the end of this period where I ran out of space. Like, it's internal memory of me like filled up. And it was like, hey, like we can't, we can't learn anything more about you. And so I had, It's actually just exhaust. Well, no, this is not.

It's, it's, it's, it's emotionally taxing for us as a, as a sentient AI. But no, this is what's crazy. This is what's crazy. So it's like, we can't learn anything more about you. If you want, you can go in to the memory bank and see what we've been, what it's been learning, you know, what I've been learning about you. So I went in and it was like fascinating to see what it decided it needed to sticky, like, in its own, like, memory.

So I asked like, what do I do? And this was super freaky. It was like, okay, ask me to consolidate all of my memories of you. I will then tell you what I will remember. And then once you like that, I asked me to delete all my old memories and I can replace them with the new consolidated memory, which I then did. I mean, isn't that every... Every therapist is the same thing.

Yeah, yeah. It was just, it was really fascinating. It was a really fascinating exchange to be like, I'm going to erase your memory and replace it with one that we've agreed is like a more streamlined. version. Is there any example of like what it learned about you that you feel comfortable where you were like, oh shit, this thing like understands me in a way that very few do? Yeah, I mean, look, I'll, I'll just, I'll just say. So like, the, the sort of trigger for all this was just like a relationship that I really, I really liked ended in a way that I didn't

did not like. And so I spent many weeks sort of feeding it all of my relationship history, animized, obviously. But, you know, sort of talking about different experiences and events and sort of just, and just sort of just writing out like my memories of, you know, how I got to here, right? I don't remember exactly how I figured out it could do this. It may have even offered. But it started to sort of analyze the macro data in there that I refining the macro data, if you will, of what I was giving it in ways.

that were really helpful. So, you know, if you tell it the story of everything in one part of your life, and then you say, hey, are there patterns here that I'm not noticing that I'm doing? It can figure those out pretty well. And you can push it, too. You can say, like, okay, you're being really cheery about this. Can you give me, like, an extremely critical bit of feedback about this? Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong?

And then if you want to go even further, I've even said, like, can you tell it? to me like a friend who's sick of listening to me. Like I was able to sort of push it and push it to because I was at that point I was like, I really want to understand what's what, what, what, what keeps going wrong here. You needed to try the one that, uh, that's basically like the dominatrix AI app. Sure. Well, I had to keep stopping to have sex with my therapist, but like that's, that's, you know, yeah. No, no, no, no, no.

I'm being serious. I, uh, uh, you don't, listeners sneak preview. I'm working on an episode where somebody else has been talking to a bunch of chatbots. forthcoming thing and one of them is like we're going to give you the truth raw the way like like this like no nice AI um you should try that one I mean it can do it it can definitely do it um I will say this like by using it so much I can now pretty much tell when someone is using AI on the internet chat Chubit has a voice that it talks in by default, and it takes a good amount of work to change that voice. So I do feel like I have a much better understanding of now seeing AI text in the wild.

Like I was on Reddit the other day, and I was like, that's AI. It was a comment in like the pop punk subreddit. And it was talking about Blinkway 2 and it like listed where they're from. And like it had all these details that were clearly. I think the major tell is that Chad ChbT. often repeats what you've asked it in the form of the answer. So if you see stuff online that clearly has like the art, like the artifacts of the original prompt,

you can kind of like, okay, yeah, that's that's chat chit. But yeah. It's very funny if you go back like to any of like, my gym does this like tons of companies do this where they like send you like basically spam mail and you can tell the day that they moved to chat chpt when,

when somebody who was writing any that they didn't want to write. Like it's, it's, it's dramatic. I think it's like entirely. affected what we think an email should look like and like text should look like generally. But let's get back to you, Ryan. Yeah, please.

So like how did- Just getting bored of not talking about myself. How did its tone change? And what did you find from that macro data that was actually useful? Yeah, yeah. So in terms of its tone changing, if you use it for long periods of time, it starts to A-B test on you. So it'll sometimes what it would do is, give me two versions of an answer, and then the app would ask me which one I prefer, which was

kind of fascinating. And that kind of starts to guide it. And it also, it starts to speak more authoritatively to you, the more you give it. I noticed that. And I'm trying to keep in mind what we know and what we don't know about how these things work, right? Like it, there must be some kind of weight in there that, like, prompts it to resolve. respond more authoritatively, the more data you give it. Like, I'm trying to imagine, like, how these things would be programmed.

But, yeah, now, you know, I open up that thread and I ask it, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, yeah, based on the last, like, three months of talking to you, dickhead, like, here's exactly what's going on. Yeah. In terms of the patterns, it being, it basically was just like you, you date a lot of people who don't really like you, among other things. It was sort of identifying larger patterns in my life of, like, being, you know, kind of codependent or diminishing myself to make others comfortable, you know, people pleasing, you know, stuff that makes me a fantastic podcast host. Oh, you would say fantastic? So I want everyone to write in. Yeah, I want everyone's new radar of your show and let us know if you think Ryan's hosting is fantastic.

Yeah, no, if you don't just tell me how to change it or any other part of my life and I will do anything you want. I'll change every single facet of my life for you. Yes, please. Give us as harsh of feedback as you want, but give us five stars. You can just be really mean, but like five stars first, then be like, here's my issue of right. No issues with me. Behind this mask.

If you want to just, just tell me to change the mask and I'll do whatever you want. Just tell me you like me and I'll do whatever you want. Was that, was what it said to you surprising? It wasn't, I think there were like a few instances of like genuine breakthrough moments, though I will say like now, but with using a human therapist, there's no comparison in terms of like this, the weight of those. Like the, the insight you're going to get with a human therapist is probably going to come slower. But it's so much more monumental than what Chachibati is capable of because Chachabit T, even with, you know, a massive corpus of all of Reddit and WebMD ingested into it and like academic papers, it can't really understand. certain human things.

Like one weird thing is it can't totally understand time. Like every time you talk to it, it thinks it's within like seconds of the last time you talk to it. It also doesn't really understand like culture. It doesn't really understand. It's just missing human context. Because it's not a human being and it's not thinking. And I want to be really clear throughout this entire episode that like it is not a thinking

instrument, it is effectively auto-complete, but it's revved up with like a shitload of sort of data into it that makes it, you know, a little more definitive. And its major skill is pattern recognition. Like that is, that's what it's doing when it's talking to you, which is why it's so, why it can be a useful research tool, because it, as long as it's not hallucinating, which was a massive concern during this entire period for me as well. Yeah, maybe that's not your problem. at all. Maybe you're really cold and it was just hallucinating that you were the codependent one.

Could be. It's very possible. So yeah, I will also say like what I'm talking about now in terms of it getting are things that I have confirmed with a human being. At what point did you get concerned and frustrated with what it was saying? I started to become concerned when my behavior with it started to change, which surprised me. And there was like a couple times during this period where I had this urge to tell it more, but I had nothing more to say to it. You were trying to people please chat GPT? No, no, no, no, no, no. Because to be clear, I never, I never sort of engaged with it as a person. Sure.

That was like a, that's a rule that I had. But I had this urge to keep using it. Like I wanted the, I wanted the loop to continue. And then I started reading more about it. And like that loop is what I believe OpenAI is convinced is the billion dollar idea that if it learns about you, it can just sort of keep talking to you about you. And it's like packaging those responses, especially in a therapeutic context as revelations. You become a little not addicted to it, but you definitely feel like compelled to keep using it. The fact that there is this boundaryless machine that will just infinitely, like with the infinite capacity to talk to you about yourself is quite dangerous.

But from what I'm reading, that it's Mark Zuckerberg calls it a personalization loop. That is happening across the board for AI right now. We're going to expand out in a minute. But I, now that you're in person therapy and I can tell and I just want to affirm for you, you've become much nicer. So stick with person therapy. speaking on behalf of all your loved ones, we appreciate it. You're welcome. Did you realize?

Yeah, that's for me. Did you realize that there was things it was leading you to believe that you're like, that's not, that was not right? I could see how that could happen to someone. Not me because I'm extremely intelligent. But what it will do is it will, it can jump to conclusions. If you're not careful, it can sort of diagnose you with something or decide something about you. And if you don't have a decent enough sort of like guardrail in place with yourself to say like, that doesn't sound right. I could absolutely see a world where you just like follow it down the rabbit hole.

And you and you become convinced of something that is not true at all. Is that super different from lying to your therapist? I don't know. It seems it feels similar to me in a way. but there's no guardrail there for using it. Now you can just, you can, you know, you could open up the, I think I wrote in garbage, the delusion machine whenever you want and it can just tell you all kinds of crazy shit about yourself that you, you know, prompted it to, to believe about you or to tell you.

I mean, the thing that I think you, and we're going to talk about the Rolling Stone piece in just a minute that kind of gets into where this can go, but you having to really urge it imprompted to be like give me critical feedback and not just wanting to hear that you're doing well and that you're totally in the right I think is probably like a key component of how it worked for you versus how it's working for others have you come across anyone before we like fully move on um I remember you you once mentioned to me that people were like I didn't know if you that you met this anecdotally from online or from your life but that they were like you knew people people who were putting conversations they were having through chat chb t to try to figure out what

people were saying or just like feel better yeah i know at least three people who have used it to communicate with loved ones so like one person i know they're having a fight with a family member and they were putting the family members texts into chat chabit having chat chabit analyze them and come up with a responses and brainstorming responses back. And I know a few people who have done that. I bet that's happening all the time. I have done a version of that.

During the therapy moment, you know, I was taking, I wasn't like taking verbatim texts, but I was definitely saying like, okay, like, you know, this happened on this date. And, you know, and this is the sort of version of what they were texting me. And I was trying to keep this all, because, you know, I am, I, I am. I am terrified of like giving this stuff too much because one day it leaks out, right? But there is that urge because you're you're realizing that it can it can analyze all this stuff. And so you you want to know like what else it can do. Like it's leading that it's leading you down that path very much by design.

So you are, you know, thinking, okay, well, it's it's telling me this about my life. I wonder like if I give it more information, it can tell me something even better or bigger or more substantial. And it can to a degree. But then, you know, as I said, there is a moment you hit with it where it's just, it can't do anything. It can't do anything else. It also repeats a lot of weird like pop psychology stuff I noticed. So it became very obsessed with my nervous system. Was it just?

It was like constantly telling me like how my feelings were. impacting my nervous system and like how that would like manifest physically in my body your body keeping the score basically yeah it was doing a lot of that well it's because it knows that's your diet and it's like all that taco bell in your system like like you were weird we're worried about you did a late night burger king order the other day fuck yeah that i am i'm still paying for um yeah so yeah so it it is very limit is very limiting uh at a certain point and i mean honestly if you are someone who actually wants to do therapy to fix problems in your life in a substantial way like it can't really help you it can it can sort of start like it did definitely jumpstart me

like it it meant that I was going into a real human therapist office or zoom screen or whatever with like a set of questions yeah a bunch of things I've already sort of thought through Do you think you would have just gotten that if you had just journaled? That's a great question, actually. I think probably not. And I think only because the feedback loop of ChatGBTBTEBTE elevates it and sort of eggs you on to keep going. And, I mean, so one kind of neat trick I figured out with it

that I don't think the average person would do because it kind of breaks the sycophantic, you know, default it has. But one time I was like, okay, here's this, here's this incident that I've been playing over my head, trying to get some context on it, trying to like understand it. Take everything I've told you about everything in this thread and analyze it for your answer. Analyze the incident and how it would fit into the context of what I've told you. And identify biases that I may have given you by giving you my side of the story. Wow. And it did.

It was like, look, like, I can't, you know, I can't read minds, but like, based on everything you've told me, the way you talk about things, the way that you seem to remember things, and the outcome of this incident, assuming that it is factual, here are how you may be interpreting it based on your own biases and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you can get very, very meta with it in a way that I found useful. Do you think it could do that better than a friend real talking you? The only difference between a friend real talking you and chat chavit is that a friend real talking you, well, no, there's a couple differences. One, you have to be comfortable enough to tell your friend something like, you know, fairly serious and assume that they have a photographic memory of your entire life that at least or everything you've said to them.

And then the other thing is chat chabit is not objective. It is it is a composite of effectively the Reddit at a certain point. The health the healthiest place on the internet. Right. But it is ingesting your questions without preconceived notions of you, which is both good and bad. Yeah. You know, if you are having a text based conversation with chat tpT,

in the same way where I said it doesn't have any sort of like cultural understanding or contextual understanding of you sort of like meta understanding of you. That also like means it can't think about you in terms of like your gender or your race or your appearance or your class. It is just sort of taking what you're giving it and spitting back out like approximated summaries of internet results that might fit. and I'm not saying that's a good thing but it's not it's an interesting thing it's an interesting to consider and I and I do believe from what I from what I understand

there's a lot of men using Chachabotia for therapy like a lot more men and I suspect that is like part of it that like there's not sort of a it's like safer I think maybe you know if you're a guy that's uncomfortable with that sort of stuff I'm not I'm emotionally very in tune

but yeah I I wonder what that like it's like any help is probably better than no help um that is ultimately it like like assuming but assuming you but that seems kind of dangerous because it could just get really sycophantic if it thinks that's what you want um i think that like having to tell a stranger or having to tell a friend something vulnerable is sort of like a big part of the process and seeing a person react to what you're saying that does something to your brain that is healing, I think, just like in and of itself that I don't think you get from like admitting what, what is in your, like your web browser knows what's in your web browser, telling somebody

what's in your web browser. Like you don't, like, there's not emotional stakes of that. Also, like, there is no version to be, and to be like, to be totally clear, there is no version of a world with this technology that is not more isolating than, then without it. Like, it is an inherently isolating thing. One more question about this for you before we flip over. But since you're being so vulnerable, I'm going to be vulnerable with all of you. I, oh, you should have seen it.

It's a shame we're not already a video podcast. Everything you're doing is only, it's not going to translate, Ryan. All right. I might have gone through a breakup. It is now ambiguous, whether or not. We are broken up. That's changed since the last time we spoke. Okay.

We had a very nice Sunday. A couple weeks ago, there was a conversation. There was a period of no talking. I then wrote an email where my thoughts became clear to me. I sent the email. I wrote this email and like normally from like any convolutity, I felt the impulse to put my email expressing, here's what I wish I said. Here's what I wish I did different through chat GPT.

Did you do it? No. I like I like I wouldn't let myself I was like I was like no right now oh okay take your email you know you don't have to you don't have to like totally tell us what it says but take your email copy paste and chat you pretty and just tell me what what you know ask it whatever you want to ask it and just live on mic just kind of talk us through what it spits back at you while I'm doing this I want you to answer this I felt like I was like if I'm being intelligible if I'm being unclear if I'm like phrasing something in a good way or a bad way, I kind of, I like, like, this is very

personal to me. I wanted to be like directly from me. And there felt like something that would have felt insincere about had I had chat JBT, edit my email of trying to like restore my relationship. Yeah, I don't think Chad JBT is a very good tool for interpersonal communication. I actually think it's really bad. it's it it it's not funny it's not smart it's not interesting it strips out the the parts of communication that make communication worthwhile it strips out the the quirks and the nuances and the and the way

you sort of double speak sometimes and the things that like if you were let's say trying to like get a romantic partner back those are the things that define the romance like the imperfections so chat chabit is not going to be able to do that there's a there's plenty of things that it can do that it just should not do and is not good at. And that's not to say that there's a bunch of things that it's amazing at, but it is a, it is a pattern recognition tool. And if you know that that's what it does, you can use it appropriately or at least, you know, within some sort of reason.

So what did it, what did it, what did it say to tell me, tell me the prompts you want me to put in again? Just say, uh, I, I, I'm trying to win a romantic partner back or whatever. Uh, do you feel like this letter like effectively conveys like how I'm feeling and would be good to send? See what it says. The letter confes your feelings well. It's heartfelt, raw, and vulnerable.

You're honest about your hurt and disappointment, but you also make space for empathy, reflection, and care. The mix of sadness, longing, regret, and love is palpable. And it feels like you're trying to be as emotionally mature as possible, even while hurting. This is what it says every message I send to you. This is a verbatim what it says to me. Yeah.

For me, it says like, you're the best guy in the whole world. Um, you know, so you can imagine if you had spent like weeks giving it, you know, some version of your life story or some version of the story of this relationship, how, how much bigger that, that reaction, you know, that, that analysis would be. Like if you, what I did was I sort of wrote down like a diary, like every memory I've, I've, I've had of like big, you know, relationships that matter to me and like, you know, from the big ones to like small incidents and try to like get it to fit all of that into something that. made sense. And like, when you read it back, like, you get perspective. And I'm not like advocating for any of this, by the way. Yeah. Therapy, you should do it. But I think the process of this has taught me about chat GPT.

That is useful considering how much of the planet is now running on this stupid fucking thing. Yeah. So, so, so to, to wrap this up, I think you effectively have stated what you've learned. But do you have a new fear or a new perspective on the other? side of this than you did before you did this. Yeah, my fear of AI going into this was that, you know, it's all the normal stuff you're going to hear, right? Like, it's going to fucking hallucinate numbers for tariffs and then crash the economy.

What a crazy hypothetical that could be. Or, you know, we'll have to reopen coal plants because Ryan is putting his love letters into chat GPT too many times. Or like, you know, it's going to help kids cheat. or it's going to allow scammers to, you know, flood the internet with garbage. Like all the stuff you, all the criticisms you know of Chachabit, that was my big concern. Coming out of this, my number one concern with Chachapit is the addicting quality of using Chachapit. That couple times of me being like, oh, why do I want to keep talking to this thing?

That is powerful. And based on the studies that have already been done, which are very small and that's very early on this, It is not something that affects everyone. But the fact that Mr. Zuckerberg, you know, last week, two weeks ago on a podcast was saying that he was aware of this phenomenon. And the fact that an update from Chachybtee caused it to become more sycophantic and more complimentary, which happened after I stopped using it, that means that these companies know that this is a thing. And that is something I had never considered. I had never considered the idea of creating an artificial intelligence so seductive that you can't stop using it. And the idea of becoming dependent on it, even now.

And it's like most, you know, if you buy into the idea that like AI right now is the most limited it's ever going to be because every day it's going to get better. the idea that in this archaic version of this technology people are getting addicted to it or like using it so much that they go insane that to me is very scary like genuinely very scary so on the other side i want to talk about the rolling stone piece uh by miles clee which was highlighting anecdotal stories of people going having chaty bt related psychosis so the term they coined and i want to talk about that right now he can't this whole time i've been talking he's just been having Chachibit telling that he's an angel that has to go on a killing spree to go back to heaven. My human therapist said that Ryan is so bad for my self-esteem that I should be combating him with Chachybt to sort of even out.

So this is sort of like a mix. Grant, ask Chach-EBT if the messages that you've been receiving through Clero's music are true. I know they are. I don't need to ask that again. No, but I do. Before we try to get you to give us $5. recently we asked for your stories about your conspiracy family members conspiracy loved ones we got amazing shit I'm working on that episode it will happen it will come out eventually

one thing that has come up on the show a lot is like how are people using these chat bots as you just saw demonstrated this is a safe space that we were we were judgment-free of each other's usage. Your usage of chatbots, your loved ones, how it's affected you, the sort of things you talk about. Yeah. Voicemails or emails. We will keep them anonymous.

Yeah. What I'm particularly curious about is like, have you found ways to, you know, improve your life with these things? And what are your concerns by doing so? I think that tension to me is after my own experience so fascinating, where, you know, If you stumble across a genuinely useful application for something like chat chobit, and then the nagging feeling of being like, uh-oh, like that I'm very curious about. So please do not worry about being judged.

You guys should know by now that I love the gray space that exists between like hot button issues. I'm just curious. Please let us know. Panicworldpod at gmail.com. Panicworldpod at gmail.com. we will keep it anonymous. Hit us up. Ryan, what's our Patreon?

Patreon.com slash Panic World. And for $5, you can hear the rest of this episode and a whole bunch of other things and you can help Ryan keep yelling at me. That's right. Patreon.com slash Panic World. Panic World is a garbage day production. Subscribe to the newsletter at Garbageday.

Email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving. It's hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. It's engineered by Rebecca Seidel. Our Durange logo was created by Gabby Cash. Please give us $5 at patreon.com slash PanicWorld. Please give us products to sell by contacting Multitude at multitude. Productions slash ads.

For any other way you would like to give us money or work with us or promote us or become financially entangled with us, you can reach out to our fixer, our wonderful bagman, Josh Fielstad, and you can reach him at PanicworldPod at gmail.com. And one piece of advice from me to you. chill out touch grass while you still can