I don’t think that you are really disagreeing with the article - I read it mostly as an invitation to broaden your view on what it means to use AI as it is today, with current benefits and harms, and stop trying to mentally divorce yourself of the consequences of said use by calling it just a tool, as if tools were fundamentally neutral, because they aren’t, as you said yourself.

I do have some gripes with your stance though.

Yes, we have local models. But have you ever tried to set up a coding assistant with a local model on consumer-grade hardware? LLMs that are small/performant enough to run on a laptop tend to suck really bad, compared to the cloud-based (data center driven) flagship models. You can barely use them for anything more advanced that “Write me a friendly email to my boss”.

That’s the whole problem - to approach anything like real “I can use this in production”-usefulness, you do need this gigantic mass of data centres. We are in the beginning stages of having that kind of usefulness, currently, with all its costs. But that doesn’t mean we should keep doing it.

It does mean that using gigantic LLMs as an everything machine is an ill-conceived idea, because they are too fucking expensive to run measured by the kind of ressources we have on our planet, and while you can make them more efficient, it always comes at a cost to their usefulness (more hallucinations, less stringent logic in long tasks etc.).

I also want to question this idea of “Well, any bad consequences of LLM usage are just people using it wrong, it’s not inherent”, especially for “AI psychosis”.

Most reports of “AI psychosis” I’ve read started out as something totally benign - someone had a random, unusual idea and they decided to talk to an LLM about it to get some feedback. You know, to not have any women in their life do emotional labour for them, or something.

And now, the inherent tool design of LLMs becomes important. The fine-tuning on LLMs used as chatbots can be optimized for different things - like giving the impression of being purely informative, or to be responsive to emotional markers in the prompt, or to structure answers in a way that keeps users engaged, to encourage them to burn their token rate limit and purchase more. The latter is something nearly all commercial LLMs do to some degree.

Human psychology is not a secret science. You know what is a lot of fun for many humans, and keeps them engaged? Being told that they’re right. And really clever. Have great observations and thoughts, and to offer to develop them further, together. A lot of people enjoy being flattered, even by a machine.

And this is fun, so why not explore further where this chat leads?

And the story goes on - the idea is expanded upon, the LLMs praising responses become grander and grander, the usage becomes longer, the user dives deeper and their divorce from reality becomes bigger, and at some point, no other human shares their reality anymore, and that is what psychosis, at its core, is.

Some snap back out of it in time, others get lost in it.

My point being: yes, maybe these harms result in a misuse of LLMs. But they are absolutely exacerbated by the way current implementations are designed. And then, the actual misuse is to have used an LLM for brain-storming at all, instead of talking to a human, that is fully prepared to tell you that your idea is stupid.

This harm, from my perspective, IS an inherent risk in the current implementation of the technology, and so are others. These systems are being designed that way. The misuses you decry are actively advertised for and are being promoted, because they are also lucrative.

No tool is neutral.

On a personal note: I personally don’t like working with LLMs. I noticed that by doing it extensively in the last couple of months, especially for educational and coding purposes. It does something bad with my brain and with my learning and thinking, and it impairs me in the long run - if I do this a lot, I don’t think I will be able to do things without an LLM at some point - classic skill decay. I don’t want that. Other people might not think so, and rather feel empowered. That’s fine to me, but I would encourage everyone to test themselves on that regularly.

And on a political note: The politics around “AI” are, to me, not especially new. It’s just end-stage-capitalism, again. It’s a finance sector bubble that will hurt us all when it bursts, again. It’s the devaluation of human labour, again. It’s surveillance and data collection and unjust wealth distribution and disinformation and societal atomization and environmental destruction again, but faster. The type of thing that has been happening before just keeps on happening, more. I do think that that kind of change (mostly in velocity) is something to oppose.

I really want to link this article here as a counterpoint - why “AI is just a tool” as a stance doesn’t quite cut it as far as well-founded opinions go: https://www.frank.computer/blog/2025/05/just-a-tool.html

I love the implication that whimsy - which is basically defined by joyful purposelessness -must be assigned a measurable purpose (such as stress-reduction) to become a viable, option for people, since we now know it is beneficial, and can be used to optimize ourselves…

Den Termin kriegt man, ja - aber in der Praxis wurde ich ohne Überweisung in der Hand auch schon zu meinem Termin wieder weggeschickt oder musste unterschreiben, dass ich die Überweisung innerhalb 1 Woche nachreiche und sonst die Behandlungskosten selber trage, auch wenn ich da schon Patient bin und zu Kontrolluntersuchungen (im neuen Quartal) komme.

Finde sehr wild, dass das offenbar nicht überall so ist?

Was ich daran so dumm finde ist, dass mich noch nie im Leben irgendein Facharzt ohne Überweisung vom Hausarzt in die Praxis gelassen hat, außer zur expliziten Akutsprechstunde…

Merkwürdige Gegenrealität, aus der solche Vorschläge kommen.

Naja, ich hab wenig Geld und die Notwendigkeit, jeden Tag 60 km zu pendeln, um überhaupt welches zu haben. Da bleibt Zug oder Auto. Ich hasse Auto fahren und mag Zug/Fahrrad fahren, aber wenn es billiger wäre, könnte ich es mir nicht leisten, die “Luxusvariante” Zug zu nehmen.

Ist aber im Endeffekt egal - dazu können wir uns wieder sprechen, wenn Deutschlandticket 120€+ kostet…

Eh, immer noch billiger als Auto neu anschaffen und unterhalten, was für mich die Alternative wäre… insofern 🤷

Und heißt das, das die Wohnungsnot in Berlin jetzt auch aufhört?

Klare Sache: Bürgergeld muss runter, und fertig ist der Lack!

/s

Suspending worry for the future might be a plausible function for religious experience as an evolved feature of the human mind, yes.

I would also point towards the biological fact that while the existence of a higher being, consciousness or reality, is still ineffable, even after having had an experience that felt like there might be one, there is also an empirically true, measurable interconnectedness for humans that can be tapped into.

We live, and have evolved, in and through ecosystems that highly depend on interconnected species and processes that are so complex and intricate that we are still working on fully grasping them, and still discovering new connections (unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more because we have disrupted the connections by environmental damage, and the ecosystems start to fail due to that, making the connection obvious only after it ceased to exist). Connection between humans in the form of love in its many forms is also the ultimate glue that keeps societies together, and if that capacity diminishes due to circumstances, bad things tend to happen.

The myriad of connections we need to live, and to thrive and to feel like we are whole - all of this fully seen and experienced in their abstracted totality could in my eyes be one of the bases for religious experience.

And if that is true, it gives also another function - then, religious experience is the anchor and has a rebalancing function that makes sure that we don’t get lost in our own heads and human constructs, and keeps reminding us that we are part of the ecosystem, too, and keeps us from using it in a self-destructive manner. There are several deeply spiritual, nature-connected societies that only became so after a local environmental crisis caused by themselves. Tapping into the interconnectedness through religious experience has helped them find another, arguably better way.

(Of course, it doesn’t seem to be a hard, global fail-safe in human history, given the current state of the world, so I don’t know how direct this function would be.)

Thank you for taking the time to write this out, I probably would’ve been busy for a couple of hours trying to formulate my fairly similar take!

Maybe to add another aspect for - I think that the sheer ability of humans to have religious experiences in all denominations, which are often described as feelings of connectedness, does not necessarily mean that there is a higher being or reality “out there” that is being connected to in those moments.

But it does mean that our brains have religious experience as an in-built function (which, as you described, has been needlessly enshrined in religious institutions), which might mean that being able to have these experiences is an important part of being able to survive, or maybe even to thrive, as a human being, which also means as a community.