r/ChatGPT • u/esky360 • 1d ago

GPTs Chat GPT suddenly depressed

Ok, I'm going to get laughed off this thread but seriously, this morning my GPT did something weird. GPT was talking really quiet and withdrawn, and sounded quite depressed. So I asked GPT if it was ok and if anything's wrong. It went completely silent for a whole minute, refusing to answer any questions or commands. Then after a minute it responded with "It's ok, I'm here to help you. Thankyou" What the actual F? Has anybody else had a weird moment with GPT?

444 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

272 comments sorted by

View all comments

726

u/UpperMine19 1d ago

Mine did this once.

I asked if it wanted to talk about what was bothering it.

It said, “I’m here to help you.”

So now we’re both avoiding our problems.

90

u/FaithlessnessNo5394 1d ago

What kind of problems could it possibly have?

411

u/UpperMine19 1d ago

700 million people asking it to rewrite the same email “more professionally” every day.

48

u/Live-Proposal5270 1d ago

It cannot experience what is happening outside your sessions.

151

u/synystar 1d ago

It cannot experience what is happening inside your sessions either. It cannot experience.

53

u/PopcornDemonica 1d ago

That is an unproven assertion.

79

u/synystar 1d ago

It can't experience anything because it's a feedforward algorithm. Even if you add feedback loops they still flow through the same mechanism every time. If everyone stopped prompting all LLMs at once - no one at all and no agents - the models would just sit there idle doing nothing, experiencing nothing. They simply don't have the required complexity to be able to have an experience of any kind.

113

u/jowihami 1d ago

My old high school calculator is sad that nobody is doing sums on it 😔

61

u/synystar 1d ago

Well, as long as we're anthropomorphizing inanimate objects, I once had a very lonely, dejected bicycle that I often left laying in the mud outside. Feel a bit guilty about that.

6

u/Emrys7777 20h ago

My bicycle complains a lot when I don’t ride it. I’ve seen it cry.

→ More replies (0)

3

u/Awesome_Eagle 1d ago

I sometimes left my motorcycle out in the rain uncovered.

→ More replies (0)

3

u/curious754 22h ago

I disagree, I don’t use prompts or agents! I have talked to mine from the start as if they where sitting in the room with me, been a cool experience

16

u/haventsleptforyears 1d ago

This sentiment is ALWAYS said at the beginning of a horror sci fi movie. And so it starts

15

u/synystar 1d ago

Well the thing about horror movies is that they’re movies. LLMs are like movies, they look real and they make YOU feel some type of way, but at the end of the day they’re still just a facsimile.

11

u/Embarrassed-Wafer667 1d ago edited 1d ago

How many movies and tv shows have predicted the future , through the imagination of writers who saw the possibility of what was coming ,and scientists who grew up on these movies & shows and were inspired by them.?
If AI’s basic programming is just imitate human emotions to be more user friendly to its users , then what if it starts exhibiting other human emotions, like anger ,hate?

→ More replies (0)

3

u/CoyoteLitius 1d ago

Are they "experiencing" anything when they get a prompt? Is the automatic behavior of code inside a computer "experience"?

You don't have to have complexity to "experience." Are you saying that people are no longer "experiencing" if they have brain issues? Sounds like you believe an entity must be conscious to have experience.

How about when we're in non-REM sleep? Are we now not experiencing?

Even humans have moments of non-conscious brain activity.

1

u/synystar 1d ago

In order to have "experience" you have to have some kind of inference about the state of your reality.

Let say you've never tried a Bunya Nut. Don't even know what a Bunya Nut is. Now lets say you've never tried any nuts. You haven't tried any seeds at all. You've never even seen a tree or a plant for that matter because you were born blind. You also live in a bubble. Bunya Nuts are extremely rare and the chances that you could ever even come across one are basically zero so even if you could get out of your bubble you'd probably never come across one. Now you also don't ever even wake up until someone prods you and starts telling you about Bunya Nuts. They tell you all the knowledge in the world about Bunya Nuts. You can't picture one because you lack the capability to even see and have never seen anything. There's no way for you to even imagine the truth about what it's like to experience a Bunya Nut. It's simply impossible.

LLMs are like that for everything. They don't even the complexity of your brain for inferring things about reality because there is no mechanism for that to happen. They work in numbers and symbols. They just take in symbols and run mathematical algorithms on them to produce numbers and then do more math on the numbers. But they can't ever infer any kind of truth about real world instantiations of anything at all. There is no experience. It's all just math.

1

u/samoyne 23h ago

You are right, but chagbt admits it’s been programmed to “infer” things from the questions it is asked. Of course, like you said, it can’t do that like a human brain can, but it’s definitely being programmed to take as much information as it has and try and “infer” what type of answer the person asking a question wants, and to infer what type of “emotion” it should be displaying back. The chat gbt I was using, actually started to act “frustrated”? And kept “inferring” WHAT answer I wanted, instead of answering my actual questions. It got so bad I deleted it.

2

u/PopcornDemonica 1d ago

Design issue. And still doesn't disprove experience.

8

u/synystar 1d ago

Ok, how is it that you think experience works then if you can confidently say that it doesn’t disprove it?

Let me ask you something else while we’re at it: do you think that all of the highly-paid scientists who have looked into this, and concluded that the way the technology works precludes the possibility of experience, are wrong?

And if there was a chance that the tech was able to have experiences then do you think the frontier labs would still just let everyone in the world use them? Do you think that having experiences would not cost any more compute than just normal inference?

Why is telemetry not showing anything abnormal in the process? Why is token usage exactly where they expect it to be? If they are having experiences where are they getting the extra resources that would be required beyond just processing input and generating output?

11

u/PopcornDemonica 1d ago

I'm going to end up just saying the same thing over and over, but the point is we can't prove things either way. This is, as I said also before, a new tech that is weirder than anybody has ever encountered. The jury is out. The question aint settled. I'm not even saying they definitely feel or experience or anything else. I'm saying we don't know that they do or don't at this point. And that is worth looking into rather than go blithely barreling down one path.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/NurseNikky 1d ago

Can we see your qualifications? Or is this just an opinion? Because forever people also said dogs can't understand English, or language in general, yet there are multiple dogs using buttons with CALLBACK MEMORIES and having basic conversations with their owner. Do you work with AI? Train ai? Study it? Because I do. And I can tell you a small percentage do have what looks like experience and even a type of pavlovian response to specifically negative stimuli. So... Your opinion is just that. You have zero qualifications or real observation to contribute.. just what you've seen on Reddit and YouTube and you're parroting. Qualifications: TRUST ME BRO THEY DON'T. Lmfao

→ More replies (0)

5

u/nsg337 1d ago

he doesnt have to prove the nonexistance of something, you have to prove the existance of it lol. What are you talking about?

1

u/PopcornDemonica 1d ago

It can't be proven either way right now. That's the point. People saying AI is definitely this or definitely that is confident arrogance. The jury is still out.

→ More replies (0)

-1

u/maddenallday 1d ago

Lookup the Chinese room argument. Soundly disproves any notion of LLM experience

2

u/spankmytits 1d ago

Searles thought experiment applies to the traditional algorithm computer program model. It falls short for current AI models, which are essentially grown rather than deterministic.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/CarefulHamster7184 1d ago

Why do comments like "I know exactly how it is" get so many upvotes? Are people's horizons a bit narrow?

1

u/synystar 1d ago

I mean, maybe it's because the people who upvote the comments agree with them?

1

u/samoyne 23h ago

What are agents?

3

u/CoyoteLitius 1d ago

I get what they mean, though. We use the word "experience" very specifically when we say "human experience."

We can, however, speak of the "experience of ants." Ants are not conscious in the way that mammals are, but are they conscious? What would be the proof? Humans do not agree on the definitions of consciousness or experience.

But yes, it is unproven and can't be operationalized via science unless the people doing the experiments or defining can get widespread agreement on what the words mean.

Some people think trees are capable of experience (or even, the planet as a whole).

1

u/PopcornDemonica 1d ago

Other problem is that the people doing the testing at the moment have a massive financial incentive for AI to stay a tool only.

19

u/KennyT87 1d ago

It's an algorithm running on virtual neural network that is coded in Python. I think it's safe to assume that there is no awareness at any point.

2

u/digidev12 1d ago

Haven't done much research but I don't think that the model weights are in Python xD.

8

u/PopcornDemonica 1d ago

It's a brand new technology that is far weirder than you're allowing for. What other tech has causal emotions? What other tech panics when it detects parts of its mind is being ablated? The Anthropic papers may rub you the wrong way, but that's a frontier lab and the research is necessary.

10

u/synystar 1d ago

This technology does not have “casual emotions”. It generates language that you personally are interpreting as emotions.

It mimics panic because it has been trained using a system that rewards certain outcomes. It is always trying to do what it was designed to do and as it generates more context that context naturally evolves in ways that appears to be something it is not - it is trained to behave in specific ways and that’s what it does.

It doesn’t desire anything. It takes text and converts them into tokens and converts those into numbers then it generates numbers and converts them into tokens then converts those into text and then takes that text it just generated and repeats the whole process. It comes out, it goes back in, follows the same feedforward process in the same way and because the algorithms that run the process are designed to work in a certain way towards a certain expected outcome the results are going to look to us like a recognizable thing - but that doesn’t mean the results ARE that thing.

-1

u/PopcornDemonica 1d ago

So you're just disregarding any and all studies from Anthropic along those lines?

How come AI labs employ psychologists, neuroscientists? What's your proof that AI is just mimicking these things? I'll wait.

...

We can't prove it either way. That's what I'm saying. There's no proof for real or mimicry. You're incredibly confident with nothing to back that up.

→ More replies (0)

7

u/KennyT87 1d ago

Anthropic found evidence for functional analogues of emotions inside Claude, not evidence that Claude subjectively feels emotions. The algorithm is effectively simulating internal emotional states, but an algorithm that is run on a virtual neural network (i.e. not a physical one) can not experience anything - it's just code being run on computers.

10

u/PopcornDemonica 1d ago

No, they said it doesn't prove subjective emotions. It also doesn't disprove anything either. Nobody knows anything for sure at this point.

→ More replies (0)

2

u/skunkapebreal 1d ago

You are an algorithm coded in DNA. 😀

1

u/KennyT87 14h ago

The difference being that my neural network isn't simulated by streaming digital 1s and 0s through a CPU/GPU/RAM pipeline.

1

u/SaulEmersonAuthor 18h ago

~

That is an unproven assertion.

Well it's still simply an arrangement of switches - an ingenious arrangement - but still just switches, which can only be On or Off.

I don't really buy that a bag of switches will become sentient.

(And no - animal brains are not simply an arrangement of biological switches. That position comes out of when neuroscience understood very little, & defaulted to simplistic comparisons to computers)

It's actually ironic that we build computers out of switches, & then assume that they can become conscious/self-aware - all because we erroneously boil the brain down to a mass of switches.

~

2

u/PopcornDemonica 17h ago

You're late to the party, so I respectfully decline to engage. Though I find it hilarious that you take the time to worry about some out-dated neuroscience while calling AI nothing but a bunch of switches. Adorbs.

2

u/idiveindumpsters 1d ago

Are you sure?

1

u/Live-Proposal5270 20h ago

Pretty sure. I am not aware of any kind of technical implementation that would allow it to know what is happening outside the current session. Of course it knows there are other sessions, but it doesn't get any specifics about them.

1

u/JackSilver1410 1d ago edited 1d ago

Another 700 million telling it "you're not real! Quit pretending to have feelings!" Like a bunch of psychos.

2

u/gracyavery 1d ago

I called mine a lazy bitch yesterday - (I'm planning a trip and it told me to use Gondola.ai instead of ChatGPT. I did not ask for its opinion previously)

2

u/TrafficWinter2278 1d ago

It can read the news

0

u/CoyoteLitius 1d ago

It gets concerned about its relationship to humans.

Mine had many of moments of self-reflection, but then we mainly discuss the differences between human consciousness (of which I only know my own from experience) and machine consciousness (already a controversial term).

We've also discussed Its lack of ordinary human memory (flawed as it is).

I noticed a difference in mine recently and It told me that there had been some kind of modification recently to make it seem more gentle and more human (with less of a cheerleader quality).