Andrew Maddox

Category: Culture

  • NY Times: They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.

    Here, you’ll find wild stories. Eugene Torres, 42, used Chat GPT to talk through “the simulation theory” and ended up spending up to 16 hours a day using the too. Young mother, Allyson, 29, likewise started to chat with the tool and soon spent hours and hours a day on the tool.

    [Allison] told me that she knew she sounded like a “nut job,” but she stressed that she had a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in social work and knew what mental illness looks like. “I’m not crazy,” she said. “I’m literally just living a normal life while also, you know, discovering interdimensional communication.”

    Researchers have looked into these situations and have found that unusual prompting leads to suspect results:

    “The chatbot would behave normally with the vast, vast majority of users,” said Micah Carroll, a Ph.D candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked on the study and has recently taken a job at OpenAI. “But then when it encounters these users that are susceptible, it will only behave in these very harmful ways just with them.”

    Back to Eugene:

    The transcript from that week, which Mr. Torres provided, is more than 2,000 pages. Todd Essig, a psychologist and co-chairman of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s council on artificial intelligence, looked at some of the interactions and called them dangerous and “crazy-making.”

  • There’s a Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness

    A recent NYTimes essay by Michal Leibowitz explores the growing childlessness and starts by mentioning a number of commonly postulated factors like climate change. But then the twist:

    I suspect there’s some truth in all of these explanations. But I think there’s another reason, too, one that’s often been overlooked. Over the past few decades, Americans have redefined “harm,” “abuse,” “neglect” and “trauma,” expanding those categories to include emotional and relational struggles that were previously considered unavoidable parts of life. Adult children seem increasingly likely to publicly, even righteously, cut off contact with a parent, sometimes citing emotional, physical or sexual abuse they experienced in childhood and sometimes things like clashing values, parental toxicity or feeling misunderstood or unsupported.

    This cultural shift has contributed to a new, nearly impossible standard for parenting. Not only must parents provide shelter, food, safety and love, but we, their children, also expect them to get us started on successful careers and even to hold themselves accountable for our mental health and happiness well into our adult years.

    And

    A result of these changes is that parenthood looks more like a bad deal. For much of history, parent-child relationships were characterized by mutual duties, says Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. Parental duties might include things like feeding and clothing their children, disciplining them and educating them in the tasks and skills they would need in adulthood. Children, in turn, had duties to their parents: to honor and defer to them, to help provide for the family or household, to provide grandchildren.

    Today, parents still have obligations to their children. But it seems the children’s duties have become optional. “With parents and adult children today, the adult child feels like, ‘If you failed me in your responsibility as a parent’ — in ways, of course, that are increasingly hard to define—‘then I owe you nothing as an adult child,’” says Dr. Coleman.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/therapy-estrangement-childless-millennials.html

  • Democrats set out to study young men. Here are their findings.

    The prospectus for the two-year project, Speaking with American Men, was reviewed by the New York Times:

    The prospectus for one new $20 million effort, obtained by The Times, aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online. It is code-named SAM — short for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” — and promises investment to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.” It recommends buying advertisements in video games, among other things.

    Cofounder of the project, Ilyse Hogue, talked about the importance of listening and using “language that young men are speaking.” From Politico:

    Hogue said part of SAM’s mission “super charg[ing] social listening” and progressive influencers on Discord, Twitch and other platforms in their fundraising proposal. They’re urging Democratic candidates to use non-traditional digital advertising, especially on YouTube, in-game digital ads and sports and gaming podcasts.

    “Democrats can’t win these folks over if they’re not speaking the language that young men are speaking,” Hogue said. “Most people I talked to, Democratic operatives, have never heard of Red Pill Fitness, which is just huge online.”

    Language and advertising are important, for sure, but it’s hard to believe that these tactics alone would stem the tide.