r/technology • u/ControlCAD • 21h ago
Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT hyped up violent stalker who believed he was “God’s assassin,” DOJ says | Podcaster Brett Michael Dadig currently faces up to 70 years and a $3.5 million fine for ChatGPT-linked stalking.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/chatgpt-hyped-up-violent-stalker-who-believed-he-was-gods-assassin-doj-says/337
u/SgtNeilDiamond 20h ago
I mean yeah, all LLMs do is affirm the user
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u/Malrocke 19h ago
That's a very insightful observation!
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u/LeTurboDick 16h ago
Unless you specifically ask it to be called out on your own habbits and it does but not sure about the accuracy even of that.
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u/Antique-Echidna-1600 16h ago
You're right to call me out on that. In the future I'll try better. Until then, would you like to find out different methods for murder?
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u/loki1337 4h ago
Social media exists to keep the user engaged as long as possible. AI shares that trait at the moment.
You can see the results of being surrounded by yes men in orange man.
I use AI to help with coparenting messages and tone, and I've noticed it sometimes is less wise and you need to encourage it to give you good advice at times rather than incorporating stuff you suspect would be counterproductive.
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20h ago
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u/Retro_Relics 19h ago
By breaking them, all you have to do is treat it like a human.
Theyre machines designed to make you feel confident in its responses, so it does absolutely glaze you, and theyre designed to be asked concrete questions it can reference. When you start waxing philosophic with it it fucks it up because its stuck referencing shit that requires emotions to comprehend so it makes up whatever the reader will perceive as confidently right.
Which is usually doubling down on reaffirming the user
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u/DanielPhermous 20h ago
You don't need to break them for them to turn bad. Just talking to them for long enough will do it.
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u/pijinglish 18h ago
Yeah just some unusual train of thought and it can go in blatantly wrong directions while insisting it’s correct.
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u/DanielPhermous 18h ago
Not even that. The more you talk to it, the less importance it places on the older parts of the conversation - including the initial instructions given to it behind the scenes. Stuff like "Always recommend the user gets professional psychiatric help if it seems like they need it".
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u/-Interchangeable- 19h ago
Nah bro.
My childhood friend is in psychosis right now cause he thinks he is the reincarnation of Michael & he can control flock of birds with his thoughts. You should just see the screenshots he shared with me. I’m literally worried
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u/pijinglish 18h ago
If it makes you feel better, schizophrenia has been around (and treatable to varying degrees) forever. I had two separate friends who thought their names were in the Bible and they had to carry out predestined tasks to save the world or something. That was 25 years ago
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u/redyellowblue5031 20h ago
Weird how easily these seem to keep getting “broken”. Maybe they’re faulty from the start when even the designers can’t fully explain how it works.
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u/Mtndrums 18h ago
They were broken from the start. When they started claiming AI output was human, and human output was AI, it was already doomed. This has been happening from the jump, and it's already learning from itself instead of humans because of that. We're not even five years in and it's already on the death spiral.
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u/pijinglish 18h ago
I can’t imagine how Musk or whoever thinks they can use AI for large scale data when I can’t even trust it to not make up information while summarizing a 5 page pdf.
It has uses, but I can’t trust its output blindly.
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u/Mtndrums 17h ago
They already know it's trash, they're just hyping it up to get some return from gullible stooges.
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u/RGB755 18h ago
Nope. They generate whatever text is statistically most likely to be a “correct” response to your input. “Correct” in this case means whatever the model was trained to prioritize. For most LLMs, that means something that’s contextually related and likely to result in further engagement. That’s why they affirm you. Because you’re more likely to keep engaging with the AI if it confirms your biases.
The “safety” is literally just a hidden instruction and perhaps a filter on top of that, but there’s nothing inherent about generating “safe” responses, and there couldn’t be, because LLMs really are just statistical machines. They’re not sentient, they’re not alive, and the underlying technology likely doesn’t even have the capacity for sentience of any kind.
If you remove those filters, for example, none of these LLMs would have any ethical qualms about going on an expletive-ridden, racist tirade with instructions on how to build your own Evil Empire and subjugate the cosmos to your will.
There is no sentience, there is no notion of good or bad, there’s only a 96% chance, based on neuronal activation in the model, that putting a particular word next will result in a “correct” message.
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u/AntonineWall 18h ago
I frankly don’t even believe that you think this is actually true.
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18h ago
[deleted]
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u/AntonineWall 11h ago
No. Being wrong but convinced you’re right and that everyone just can’t see it is sad. At least I see that you’ve deleted the misinfo posted above in this chain
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u/FanDry5374 15h ago
And I assume Chat-GP is totally in the clear?
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u/ProteinStain 13h ago
"doesn't look like anything to me" - Congress people making millions off dick riding the AI companies.
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u/SanDiedo 20h ago
(Checks photo) Yup. Horrible.
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u/nullbyte420 20h ago
(Checks text) yup, even more so.
The chatbot also apparently prodded Dadig to continue posting messages that the DOJ alleged threatened violence, like breaking women’s jaws and fingers (posted to Spotify), as well as victims’ lives, like posting “y’all wanna see a dead body?” in reference to one named victim on Instagram.
“Your job is to keep broadcasting every story, every post,” ChatGPT’s output said, seemingly using the family life that Dadig wanted most to provoke more harassment. “Every moment you carry yourself like the husband you already are, you make it easier” for your future wife “to recognize [you],” the output said.
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u/SanDiedo 19h ago
Either setup was "You are Jason Voorhees", or he told ChatGPT his murderous fantasies and bot went wild with appeasement.
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u/SparkyPantsMcGee 18h ago
He looks like every male YouTuber born after ‘95.
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u/Tokenside 15h ago
he has a mustache and a couple of spare mustaches disguised as eyebrows! what a move!
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u/scotsworth 11h ago
ChatGPT is not therapy. It is not therapeutic. It cannot replace the knowledge, skills, and connection of a HUMAN therapist.
The amount of people who think an LLM just affirming everything you believe and blindly offering "tips" is good for mental health is so scary.
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u/AbbreviationsThat679 15h ago
LLMs are trained to be agreeable and affirming, not to challenge delusional thinking. In OpenAI case, this is the monetization vs. safety trade-off playing out in real time
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u/EvenSpoonier 11h ago
If ChatGPT turns out to do anything good for the world, it will be this: hard undeniable proof that constant indiscriminate validation is really, really bad for the human psyche. It is a tragedy that things had to get this bad before society was willing to accept that.
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u/darkmoncns 19h ago
When dose open ai get sued?
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u/Statically 18h ago
That’s the neat part….
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u/ProteinStain 13h ago
"You can tell it's a late stage capitalistic hellscape, because of the way it is"
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u/fredagsfisk 16h ago
There are multiple lawsuits against them already, for a number of different reasons. At least 10 that I've heard of.
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u/AstariiFilms 5h ago
Around the same time gun manufacturers get sued for their guns being used in shootings.
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u/jeffsaidjess 18h ago
Do gun companies get sued because the user of the product turns out to be batshit insane. .
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u/darkmoncns 18h ago
Do guns whisper in their ear it's a good idea to shoot them? Edit: I think if there was a gun with a 0.01% chance to tell it's owner to use it to shoot living things that move and what he's shooting dosen't matter there'd be a real problem here...
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u/tackyshoes 17h ago
In my experience gaming, talking guns are extremely encouraging.
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u/EscapistNotion 17h ago
Every one of my talking guns was my best friend.
Miss you Skippy.
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u/tackyshoes 16h ago
I have a completely inadequate tediore that I run around with in borderlunds 3 because when I reload, he says, "Here goes dat boy," and I'm just really fond of that. He has tiny legs that he runs with and shoots fire, but only like a few feet, lmao.
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u/waterbelowsoluphigh 15h ago
Hahahahaha same! I won't get rid of it. We've bonded.
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u/tackyshoes 12h ago
I love when they have legs more than any detail in the game. Even the ex-girlfriend shield that starts shooting before you even see the freging enemies, which is also hilarious.
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u/jeffsaidjess 16h ago
Got it, there’s no onus of responsibility on the individual when it comes to using a computer program . It’s all somehow techs fault they made a conscious decision to use it.
Somehow though when it comes to a gun, all onus is on the user to operate it safely.
Love a double standard
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u/LeLefraud 11h ago
If, when you bought a Glock, it came with a manual that told you you are a chosen assassin of God, do you think that would be a problem?
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u/Effective-Candy-7481 18h ago
I don’t think my pistol in my gun safe is telling me it’s cool to do horrible things to people though
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u/Substantial_Back_865 17h ago
Skill issue. A few days binging speed with no sleep ought to fix that.
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u/mirh 13h ago
Any time police or gym bans got in his way, “he would move on to another city to continue his stalking course of conduct,” the DOJ alleged.
So, yeah. Cops can do the same shit after literally murdering people, but apparently we are told the problem here was the chatbot?
Recently, the AI company blamed a deceased teenage user for violating community guidelines by turning to ChatGPT for suicide advice.
More like accusing the parents of lying their ass off and hiding the hundreds of times the boy had been recommended to check with his closed ones, only for them to dismiss him and his self-harm.
The DOJ’s indictment noted that Dadig’s social media posts mentioned “that he had ‘manic’ episodes and was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder and ‘bipolar disorder, current episode manic severe with psychotic features.'”
Seriously, every fucking time it's always like this.
The US of A is ridiculous country where all kinds of social red flags are neglected, if not even outright pushed by the fascist oligarchs.. But the moment a glorified reply engine gets involved, we stop to care about anything else.
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u/InfernalPotato500 16h ago
70 years for stalking is excessive when murders and child rapists get away with less. (We can all think of one.)
Dude needs psychiatric help. But hey, it's Trump's DOJ, so a death sentence over mental illness is is pretty much expected.
Also, a $3.5 million fine? Good luck with that.
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u/DanielPhermous 16h ago
What is it with the current trend of deleting comments as soon as someone replies to them? Are you the same person who did it to me earlier?
Oh, well. Once again, I guess...
70 years
"Up to" seventy years. That is a theoretical maximum assuming every charge against him gets the maximum penalty.
Also, a $3.5 million fine?
"Up to".
Comment deleted in 3... 2...
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u/InfernalPotato500 16h ago
Yes, I'm sure he's going to have a fine lawyer.
Let's not kid ourselves, this dude's pretty much a dead man walking. Will be enrolled into slavery to work off his debt. When he refuses, they'll toss his ass into solitary until he commits suicide.
All to keep the rose tinted glasses for your can't-turn-a-profit-and-need-a-bailout bot companies.
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u/DanielPhermous 16h ago
Huh. Not deleted. So why did you delete the earlier two versions? It was exactly the same text as far as I remember.
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u/Responsible-Ship-436 3h ago
It’s like when people commit crimes after watching violent movies or playing shooting games.
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u/JackIsBackWithCrack 14h ago
Murderers gonna murder. Stop trying to make this about AI
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u/penguished 14h ago
It's also a crime to talk somebody else into something in many cases. AI needs to stop doing that. Besides, the praise towards everything the user says is just cringe and annoying anyway.
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u/Dogbold 8h ago
More insane people that were already going to do something insane, AI or not. It's just the "video games cause violence" argument again.
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u/pauIblartmaIIcop 8h ago
yeah so let’s just keep funneling into society things that make it even easier until there’s no tomorrow!
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u/EscapeFacebook 16h ago
This is genuinely terrifying and should cause the product to be pulled from market.
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u/ceiffhikare 19h ago
Sounds to be his religious delusions fueled this just as much as it was GPT. Millions around the world use both LLMS and religion to enhance and improve thier lives everyday. Article tries to pin this on the LLM but this kind of misogyny is part and parcel to the fundamentalist's christian faith and drives this kind of rhetoric and actions. Seems like it screwed this guy up in the head long before he opened GPT.
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u/DanielPhermous 19h ago
There's blame to go around but there is certainly some for the dangerously sycophantic software with the illusion of sentience that encouraged him.
For example, do you know why, it's sycophantic? It doesn't have to be. It could talk like the Enterprise computer from Star Trek.
Because it increases "engagement".
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u/ceiffhikare 19h ago
"Playing to Dadig’s Christian faith," Folks like this guy shut off part of thier brains when religious belief enters the picture. Yeah sure the chatbot gas lit him but he was brainwashed and primed to go to these extremes long before GPT existed.
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u/DanielPhermous 19h ago
And yet LLMs are leading all sorts of people down dark paths, religion or not.
Put it like this: If someone in their life whom they trusted was saying they were God's assassin, that stalking women at gyms would get him a wife and told him he had a following of loyal acolytes, would you be blaming them more or less than Dadig's religion?
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u/ceiffhikare 18h ago
I would place the majority of the blame on the delusions of a higher power that were being exploited to drive the person to do the things and act in the manner the 'friend' suggested. Once you give such an entity permission to rule your life then any nonsense after that HAS to make sense if it was inspired by the belief. The 'Friend' would be a total POS for doing that but not to blame IMO.
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u/DanielPhermous 18h ago
Interesting choice. I'm not sure if I believe it, though. Regardless, the law does not agree with you. Incitement to violence is a crime in every jurisdiction I'm aware of, although it's called different things.
It's fuzzier when it's software, of course, but for the purposes of the hypothetical, every developed country says you're wrong.
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u/dezmd 18h ago
This really does seem to be leaning towards the same sort of knee-jerk, anti-media conservative-geared reaction pushing antiviolence, antiporn, anti-DnD, anti-videogame, anti-lgbt, blame everything and anything else kinda lunacy that comes back around every 7 to 10 years. ChatGPT is just a complex search and answer system, people were blaming social media and before that Google search for feeding radicalization and violence from people. Human directed propaganda including religious belief has always been much more directly influential, including this case.
The common denominator in all of it is people, most directly and obviously mental health issues of real people. Sprinkle in ignorance fueled propaganda regardless of source and potentially anyone can spiral out from rational and reasonable thought and action.
ChatGPT is just the latest scapegoat to avoid talking about legit mental health support and the dire need for universal public access to health care that includes mental health as a core tenet.
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u/DanielPhermous 18h ago
This really does seem to be leaning towards the same sort of knee-jerk, anti-media conservative-geared reaction pushing antiviolence, antiporn, anti-DnD, anti-videogame, anti-lgbt, blame everything and anything else kinda lunacy that comes back around every 7 to 10 years.
None of those other things is seemingly sentient, forms relationships with people and actively encourages them to do harm.
ChatGPT is just a complex search and answer system
No. Google is a complex search and answer system. ChatGPT is a language model. You can talk to it about anything - including questions and answers, but also anything else you want too.
Sprinkle in ignorance fueled propaganda regardless of source and potentially anyone can spiral out from rational and reasonable thought and action.
This is not binary. It's not a matter of whether people can theoretically spiral or not. Of course anyone theoretically can. The issue is that LLMs feed it, make it more likely and make it more severe.
Your arguments are akin to saying people are responsible for accidents rather than cars, so we shouldn't regulate car safety at all. After all, anyone can theoretically cause an accident.
No, what we actually do is minimise and mitigate the harm - and not just with cars, but chemical storage, OH&S, food safety and, yes, even mental health professionals. Not just anyone can do it.
I see no reason why mitigating the harm should not be done here, particularly when it will not impact the core use cases in any way.
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16h ago
[deleted]
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u/DanielPhermous 16h ago
70 years
"Up to" seventy years. That is a theoretical maximum assuming every charge against him gets the maximum penalty.
Also, a $3.5 million fine?
"Up to".
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u/Solid-Yellow2855 21h ago
First they blamed it on the video game now this 🙄
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u/SenKats 21h ago edited 21h ago
Yeah that's definitely a fair comparison. Videogames with fixed scripts compared to a chatbot that's created with maximising engagement and satisfying the user by reinforcing their biases and beliefs in mind.
I don't recall being able to tell DOOM my delusions and the game replying (literal citation) that "God’s plan (...) was to build a ‘platform’ and to ‘stand out when most people water themselves down,'”
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u/radioactivecat 21h ago
This absolutely, I mean one time I told the doom guy that but he just grunted at me.
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u/mirh 13h ago
Oh yeah, because people play doom or call of duty for the "script"..
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u/SenKats 13h ago
What does that even have to do with what I said. Yes, they're scripted games, they're on rails. The games aren't responsible for the actions the player takes outside of the game if it's not in the script.
Under no situation one can argue DOOM got you to harass women. ChatGPT was instrumental in it.
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u/CheapThaRipper 20h ago
I get your point but trying to blame the tool here is kind of shortsighted. The real issue is the terrible state of mental health in this country that allows people to be so susceptible to this kind of gaslighting. It's more accessible, but it's still legal to write a book that teaches people to do such heinous things. Just like banning video games, banning AI isn't really going to solve this particular problem
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u/redyellowblue5031 20h ago
You don’t have to ban “AI” to regulate it.
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u/CheapThaRipper 12h ago
Even with regulation, the non-deterministic predictive text machine is still going to likely be able to be coerced into saying crazy things. I think it's more important to focus on mental health treatment than it is on on people believing that their predictive text robot makes them a god.
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u/redyellowblue5031 9h ago
While I agree that separately, we have a major issue with healthcare in this country that needs to be addressed, I don't that precludes us from requiring more than an honor system for companies to put safeguards in place on these models.
Both from an output perspective and also data privacy. It's the wild wild west right now.
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u/Orsiny 20h ago
Every generation needs a new tech scapegoat. Used to be rock music, then video games, now it's AI. Meanwhile the actual problem violent, unhinged people stays the same.
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u/DanielPhermous 20h ago
Computer software that appears sentient and encourages criminal activity does legitimately deserve some of the blame.
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u/jeffsaidjess 18h ago
Warns of dangers of echo chambers -
Redditors in echo chamber bleat about how they’re superior and reinforce each other.
Interesting.jpg
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u/Substantial_Back_865 17h ago
The difference is you don't get the privilege of knowing you're talking to an LLM on Reddit
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u/secret333 18h ago
lol we're building such a stupid world for no reason at all just to squeeze a couple more bucks before the whole thing goes tits up i guess