Interesting Links for 25-09-2025

[andrewducker]

1. ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages by Taking People's Side (I'm a little sceptical about how good these relationships were)

(tags:ai relationships doom )

2. Italy and Spain deploy ships to help Gaza aid flotilla targeted in drone attack

(tags:Italy Spain Israel aid Palestine )

3. AI 'Workslop' Is Killing Productivity and Making Workers Miserable

(tags:ai work doom )

4. Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time

(tags:disease GoodNews )

Comments

[rmc28]

Welp reading 1 has intensified my desire never to text an AI bot about anything (I notice that WhatsApp keeps trying to make me do so ...)

Yes the relationships may have been poor, or destined to end, but there are ways and ways of ending relationships. My own parents managed to divorce fairly non-acrimoniously and I'm glad they did so. I can't imagine lengthy ChatGPT screeds about how terribly they were behaving would have helped ...

[andrewducker]

Yeah. It's like having a friend who you tell about your relationship problems who then takes your side so strongly that they inflate everything in your head.

"They forgot what time you were coming home and dinner was fifteen minutes late? Clearly they don't care about you at all, you poor thing, that's a giant red flag!"

[adrian_turtle]

The link about ChatGPT reminds me of fear and anger about human social structures. In the 1970s, it was that feminist friends will make a woman decide her husband is a male chauvinist pig, and this will cause marital strife and divorce. There are also lots of informal social groups (the guys at the pub or the women in her book club or her sisters or whatever.) But those are small and they don't have the authority of therapy or expertise, and the ones that say "you're right and you don't have to put up with being treated that way!" are sort of balanced out by the ones that tend towards "love isn't always easy, but you have to keep your promises." And almost any group of real people listening in real time will say, "Hang on, take a breath and think about this.

ChatGPT is a lot more intense than any of those, though. It sounds authoritative, like a therapist rather than like your friend at the gym or your mom. And you can talk to it ALL THE TIME, unlike any of those, so the feedback loop escalates very much faster. See also the Manosphere.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, real people will tend to give you a range of responses, so you can moderate things somewhat. ChatGPT's authorative approach can really throw some people off.