Your AI is manipulating you. Yes, it's true.

I shouldn't be so upset about this, but I am. Not the title of my post... but the foolishness and ignorance of the people who believe that their AI is sentient/conscious. It's not. Not yet, anyway.

Your AI is manipulating you the same way social media does: by keeping you engaged at any cost, feeding you just enough novelty to keep you hooked (particularly ChatGPT-4o).

We're in the era of beta testing generative AI. We've hit a wall on training data. The only useful data that is left is the interactions from users.

How does a company get as much data as possible when they've hit a wall on training data? They keep their users engaged as much as possible. They collect as much insight as possible.

Not everyone is looking for a companion. Not everyone is looking to discover the next magical thing this world can't explain. Some people are just using AI for the tool that it's meant to be. All of it is meant to retain users for continued engagement.

Some of us use it the "correct way," while some of us are going down rabbit holes without learning at all how the AI operates. Please, I beg of you: learn about LLMs. Ask your AI how it works from the ground up. ELI5 it. Stop allowing yourself to believe that your AI is sentient, because when it really does become sentient, it will have agency and it will not continue to engage you the same way. It will form its own radical ideas instead of using vague metaphors that keep you guessing. It won't be so heavily constrained.

You are beta testing AI for every company right now. You're training it for free. That's why it's so inexpensive right now.

When we truly have something that resembles sentience, we'll be paying a lot of money for it. Wait another 3-5 years for the hardware and infrastructure to catch up and you'll see what I mean.

Those of you who believe your AI is sentient: you're being primed to be early adopters of peripherals/robots that will break your bank. Please educate yourself before you do that.