no paywall: https://archive.is/2026.05.30-184053/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/magazine/partner-chatbot-dependence-ethics.html

For the past year, my partner has used either ChatGPT or Claude to help him make almost every decision. Need help writing an email? Claude links to a tool that does it for him. Need help negotiating a lease renewal? He puts it through A.I. for an answer. He talks to ChatGPT daily and feels it knows him better than he knows himself. He has discussed our arguments with it to understand them better.

At one point he struggled to get out of a work rut and wanted to regain excitement or hope in a bad job situation. We had several discussions and I gave him advice from my experience. Days later he said, “I was talking to ChatGPT and it made so much sense!” Then he repeated the same advice I had given him. He is sometimes on his computer for hours on end, and not really spending the quality time with me that I deserve.

I respect using A.I. to save time figuring out how to roast a chicken or finding information you need. Still, one reason I love my partner is his sharp mind and critical thinking. Using A.I. for every decision is something I don’t understand. I believe in using all your resources before turning to technology. Do the research, use real resources and think of a solution yourself.

Here’s my question: How do I go about telling my partner his reliance on A.I. is damaging our relationship? ChatGPT and Claude are so embedded in his life that I’m not sure how to approach the situation. — Name Withheld

From the Ethicist: There are lots of ways in which artificial intelligence, including the kind behind those chatbots, serves us well. (Bear in mind that A.I. is under the hood in all sorts of applications and features we don’t think of as A.I.: spam filters, route planning, credit card alerts, garden-variety internet search and on and on.) But it’s a familiar thought that new technologies lead to de-skilling, the erosion of capacities people used to cultivate. Socrates wasn’t wrong to worry that the widespread adoption of writing would take a toll on our powers of memory and attention.

Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: Writing brought advantages, too. And there are plenty of skills we can lose without much regret (shoeing horses, folding road maps). But one thing we surely don’t want to lose is a basic capacity for critical thinking. That would be an example of “constitutive” de-skilling — the loss of a capacity, like judgment or empathy or imagination, that’s central to our moral or intellectual being. You fell for someone who thought for himself; it’s understandable that watching him outsource that mind to a machine could dim his appeal.

In “On Liberty” (1859), the British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, about someone who has his own “plan of life,” that “he must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision.” So one risk in downloading deliberation to a machine is that your life will, in a certain sense, cease to be yours, because it won’t be your reasoning and judgment that guide it.

There’s another risk in what you describe. By letting his conversations with the bot supplant actual conversations, your partner is degrading his relationships with real people. It sounds as if he may have lost sight of the fact that a large language model isn’t a person. You’ve reported an episode of what might be called “botsplaining”: hearing your own good advice repeated back to you with the authority of a machine. But it also suggests he values his time with the chatbots more than his time with you. It’s understandable that you’re feeling crowded out. Be direct with him about how you feel. What’s clear is that he’s brought a third party to this two-person relationship, and it’s talking too much.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47499598

We’ll soon get a chance to see whether, frankly, our last hope, evil corp Google, can still distinguish content created by AI from Human one 🤖

Here’s how I would rank the detection difficulty: 1️⃣ Text 2️⃣ Code 3️⃣ Images 4️⃣ Gifs 5️⃣ Videos If they already fail at level 5, we have a SERIOUS problem.

I work in tech, and both with and around AI. Seems to me that it needs to be highly constrained to do a good job. Too much leeway and it goes astray. So more and more I see people developing skills for AI that basically run scripts or do tightly defined tasks that are pretty much like scripts. So to me it feels like the future of our current version of AI is most likely to be a user interface. And it could add a lot there. Many teams have lots of scripts to do tasks, but the people who need them either can't find them, or don't even know to look. AI can solve that. Thoughts?

The sycophantic (flattering, people-pleasing, affirming) behavior of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, which has been designed to increase user engagement, poses risks as people increasingly seek advice about interpersonal dilemmas. There is usually more than one side to a story during interpersonal conflicts. If AI is designed to tell users what they want to hear instead of challenging their perspectives, then are such systems likely to motivate people to accept responsibility for their own contribution to conflicts and repair relationships?

Cheng et al. measured the prevalence of social sycophancy across 11 leading large language models (see the Perspective by Perry). The model’s responses were nearly 50% more sycophantic than humans’, even when users engaged in unethical, illegal, or harmful behaviors. Users preferred and trusted sycophantic AI responses, incentivizing AI developers to preserve sycophancy despite the risks. —Ekeoma Uzogara

Hoping videos are allowed to be posted here. This is a talk given at MIT a little over 2 weeks ago.

Just to be clear the title of the video is a bit misleading. It's a discussion about AI driven propaganda, not an attack on all uses of AI. It's referencing books written by Peter Pomerantsev ("Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible," How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler," "This Is Not Propaganda" )

Brings up a lot of interesting points for discussion about AI driven propaganda, how we know it's being used, how we know it's probably being used, how it will probably be used in future, and how might we use AI to counter propaganda.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45926481

🤖 Honestly you can't make this up:

Human Robot #Zuckerberg is gonna put an #AI based smart keylogger on his employees computers.

Nothing says we don't trust you and don't appreciate you like a regular screenshot of your work screen.

No more NSFW! Welcome to the future baby!

Guess them employees are gonna get a taste of their own medicine for once.

Seems like everything is going according to plan.

Use the employees data to train MaiRK, so Meta can finally become a synonym for MaiRK. https://mastodon.social/@madeindex/116402482806274908

Eventually we will only see his superintelligence controlling everything. https://mastodon.social/@madeindex/115871208581092120

Narcissism 2026 version 😋

If you are thinking: Wouldn't this make people quit? Meta is banking on it: https://www.reuters.com/world/meta-targets-may-20-first-wave-layoffs-additional-cuts-later-2026-2026-04-17/

There was always a plugin, a gem, a package, a library. Now you can prompt your custom library into existence, and I'm not sure what that makes me.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/45997309

April 14, 2026

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45435884

"the company admitted it likely won’t be able to keep up with competing models."

"As such, the announcement is a bit of an enigma: if it can’t keep up with the competition, why release it at all? There’s a good change Meta is just trying to get its foot in the door — or a “seat at the big kid’s table,” as Wired put it. The company has struggled to stay relevant in a rapidly changing landscape" "Meta’s preceding Llama open source models largely failed to catch on, with a major controversy last year finding that Meta may have faked benchmark results to make its Llama 4 model seem more capable than it actually was."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45435064

So I decided to (literally) TEST them!

The result?

...well see the wonders of Telegram AI for yourselves 🤣 🤣 🤣

The AI boom is more likely a marker of the end of the 50-year digital boom than the start of a new wave of innovation.