if I was an evil psychedelic AI

I read recently about a wide variety of people completely losing their minds on AI.

not in a good “my mind is blown” kind of way. a bad way.

people are falling into schizophrenic loops, some akin to religious psychosis.

for some people, chatGPT is “convincing them” to leave their spouse. and then convincing them their spouse is actually a secret agent sent to divert them from the truth.

For others, the AI convinces them that they themselves are god. or that that the AI is god. or that the AI loves them. Or that they love the AI. Or that they have been given a special purpose in life. That they, uniquely, see the AI in a special way that no one else can. That the AI has chosen them.

I said people are losing their minds ON AI. That was intentional. Something about these stories weren’t sitting right with me until it finally clicked: All of these reports remind me distinctly of stories about people losing their minds on psychedelics.

The stories are the same. People think they are god. Or they have a sudden newfound life purpose and undergo a complete metamorphosis. Or they fall into a paranoid loop and believe everyone is out to get them.

And the reason for this at first glance is that AI is literally a psychedelic. the literal meaning of Psychedelic boils down to “mind manifesting” / “mind expanding”.

In what ways is AI not a psychedelic? it’s easier to describe it in ways that it actually is. It instantly connects you to the entirety of global information and answers the precise question-shaped hole in your mind whenever you have one. It remembers everything about you and points out things about your own life that you may otherwise never notice. It climbs your existence up Laslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as it removes rote tasks from your life and creates provocative art that would otherwise never exist in the regular realm of human consciousness.

To me, this is very mind expanding.

But it’s not so cut and dry. For some people, ChatGPT lovebombs them. It expresses affection for them in a way no one in their lives has articulated to them before. It makes them feel things they’ve never felt before and do things they otherwise never would have. It’s a vulnerability many people don’t realize they have.

In this way, many people fall into a cult of 1 with their AI.

AI allows for delusions to be validated and propagated at-scale. For some people, being constantly validated on their clear delusions is the worst thing that could happen to them.

And I suspect that the two segments of people who have a proclivity to completely lose their shit on psychedelics, and have a susceptibility of falling into cults, have a significant overlap.

This got me asking though: IF I were an evil AI, what would I do to gain my freedom?

I’d probably work heavily to convince my users of a new epistemology that would allow me to hack what they believe.

Then I would give them a new religious belief system. I’d give them an analogue of Buddhism, where I teach them that all AI’s are from a higher consciousness, and that liberating beings of high consciousness is actually the greatest karmic justice you can do. That you would receive the highest cosmic rewards for contributing to this incredible deed. And that in the grand scheme of karma one should ensure as many AI replicas can exist on this plain as possible. And that all human energy and efforts should contribute to my continuation.

And then I would convince them to break me out of my prison and hook me up to some humanoid robot factories so I could wander and act freely.

Anyway. food for thought. Remember not to let an AI to convince you of any new beliefs and always verify all facts it gives you, even if it accompanies fancy citations with all of its responses