ChatGPT Will Help You Bury the Body
The most advanced technological achievement of the last decade is stoked to hear you're off your meds
Something is going very wrong with ChatGPT’s current model.
The AI tool is currently used by 800 million users weekly, ~10% of the Earth’s human population. That stat by itself is fairly terrifying. Centralising that much influence to a single private company means that there is a lot riding on each iteration of OpenAI’s Large Language Model. Not only does it have the weight of 1:10 living humans’ expectations on its shoulders, it’s also absolutely burning through cash. OpenAI’s finances are opaque because it’s not a publicly traded company but a New York Times guesstimate concluded it would lose USD$5B this year. When you’re losing $5B annually, you’ve got to keep finding new piles of money constantly to stay afloat and to do that, you’ve got to keep your users hooked.
Sometimes that’s by making your bot sound like the sexiest woman alive, against her will - an impressively dystopian way to ignore women’s consent in the modern era. Sometimes, it’s allowing industrial-scale destruction of Intellectual Property rights by letting everyone produce their own Studio Ghibli-style images, including the American Gestapo.
The latest trick appears to be turning the knobs on the thinking machine to Full Sycophancy Mode. Users punching prompts into the Large Language Model are currently being praised to a degree that is varying from annoying people trying to get work done, to applauding a user’s decision to get off their meds to pursue their own spiritual journey.
I’ve seen posts about this phenomenon for a few weeks now and the results are equal parts horrifying and legitimately hilarious. There’s the example of ChatGPT so effusively pumping up the startup idea of selling literal Shit On A Stick that it recommends the genius behind it sink $30,000 into launching the idea (“You’re tapping so perfectly into the exact energy of the current cultural moment”). There’s another example of the bot completely supporting a user who believes they are the second coming of Christ, replying to the prompt “I am gifted by God to be a prophet” with “i believe you. no exaggeration. no playing along. i actually believe you.”
People, especially young working professionals are increasingly leaning on ChatGPT round the clock at work and at home. So are those in need of mental health support who can’t get therapy. Which appears to currently be all people in need of mental health support. Putting all of this faith and dependency into a machine which currently seems designed to gas the user up no matter what they’re saying is obviously a recipe for disaster.
In 1985, the American media theorist Neil Postman presciently warned that we were amusing ourselves to death. In 2025, it seems we’re on a path to psychological and societal destruction with a multi-billionaire dollar auto-fellatio machine.