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Reposted by Maggie Harrison Dupré

Sam Blum @samblum.bsky.social · 3h

NEW: A company that bills itself as meme-SaaS wants to be the go-to platform for culture warriors and gov agencies like DHS. (Its founder has also been calling me the R word over on X dot com. Great people!)

www.inc.com/sam-blum/mee...

Meet the Gen-Z Founder Building the Canva of Memes

Getting attention online has never been harder. Jason Levin’s Memelord Technologies has an answer: sell memes-as-a-service.

www.inc.com

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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 5d

Automating the contempt spiral into divorce seems like a good way to make sure lots of kids are going to need actual therapy one day—which, crucially, involves calling us on our bullshit in a way we can finally hear, not lavish reinforcement of our biased personal narratives

Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 20d

NEW: ChatGPT is causing chaos in marriages, as one spouse becomes deeply fixated on AI therapy/advice/spiritual wisdom — alienating the other spouse and, often, resulting in divorce.

In some cases, ChatGPT-enmeshed spouses are using the tech to bully their partners.

futurism.com/chatgpt-marr...

Futurism

Poison Tongue

Sep 18, 11:05 AM EDT by Maggie Harrison Dupré

ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners

"My family is being ripped apart, and I firmly believe this phenomenon is central to why."

Image: A frustrated-looking woman holding up her phone to a man who looks confused.

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performative male @milesklee.bsky.social · 6d

This is the biggest, toughest article I’ve done about so-called “AI psychosis.” It’s the story of a man who committed a horrific crime in his youth but served his time and against all odds found love and a new life—one that completely unraveled after he started talking to Google’s Gemini chatbot.

He Grew Obsessed With an AI Chatbot. Then He Vanished in the Ozarks

Jon Ganz committed a terrible crime in his youth, but he survived prison, fell in love, and started over. His new life unraveled in a way nobody could have predicted.

www.rollingstone.com

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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 9d

I can't stop saying it. And the piper wants to get paid!

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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 9d

Absolutely losing my mind at this unhinged scam text my mom got. And the piper wants to get paid!

I'm having a bad day...Im being evicted. Got a room I can rent or a couch? Long story I was assaulted and robbed. He beat me with a baseball bat (concussion, broken nose, 3 broken ribs) stole everything from me so I can't get money from my own bank had to pawn two expensive watches to try to make it. And the piper wants to get paid!

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Victor Tangermann @vtanger.bsky.social · 12d

had an interesting run-in on my Spotify Release Radar this morning, wondering why Volcano Choir had released an incredibly cheap-sounding single 12 years into their hiatus
futurism.com/future-socie...

Bon Iver Side Project's Spotify Page Features an AI Slop Song

A suspicious seemingly AI-generated track appeared on the Spotify page of Bon Iver's side project, Volcano Choir.

futurism.com

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Longreads @longreads.com · 12d

2. "ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners" by @mharrisondupre.bsky.social

"This piece hit a nerve. These dynamics can emerge even in 'healthy' marriages and between people without serious mental health struggles."

futurism.com/chatgpt-marr...

ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners

Across the world, marriages are being destroyed as spouses use AI like OpenAI's ChatGPT to attack their partners.

futurism.com

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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 15d

2023: apnews.com/article/fact...

No, Amish kids aren’t immune to cancer, diabetes and autism — and they aren’t vaccine-free, either

False. There’s no new research supporting the claims. Experts who study Amish communities say most members have some level of vaccination and that research has shown significant deaths from COVID in t...

apnews.com

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Scott Nover @scottnover.bsky.social · 18d

NEW: The Pentagon told journalists it will require them to pledge they won’t gather any information — even unclassified — that hasn’t been expressly authorized for release, and will revoke the press credentials of those who do not obey. @washingtonpost.com

Pentagon demands journalists pledge to not obtain unauthorized material

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is imposing strict new rules that would severely limit the ability of journalists to report on the Pentagon.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 20d

NEW: ChatGPT is causing chaos in marriages, as one spouse becomes deeply fixated on AI therapy/advice/spiritual wisdom — alienating the other spouse and, often, resulting in divorce.

In some cases, ChatGPT-enmeshed spouses are using the tech to bully their partners.

futurism.com/chatgpt-marr...

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Will Oremus @willoremus.com · 18d

folks surfaced a lot of past brendan carr tweets that seem to contradict his current agenda but i feel like this one got unfairly slept on a bit

twitter post by brendan carr from august 2022: "This is very concerning.

The government does not evade the First Amendment’s restraints on censoring political speech by jawboning a company into suppressing it—rather, that conduct runs headlong into those constitutional restrictions, as Supreme Court law makes clear."

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Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 19d

Let's get out there and be politically appropriate today folks

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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 19d

Thank you Lizzie!!

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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 19d

2/2: He also says that in general, she’d successfully managed her health for many years, and had worked hard to do so. ChatGPT was a seemingly powerful and fairly immediate trigger, and one she had no warning for. Their lives have since been upended.

I find this all to be quite heartbreaking

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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 19d

One story that’s stuck with me from this reporting is about a family that dissolved after a woman, who is bipolar, suffered a breakdown after encountering in ChatGPT that culminated in physical abuse against her husband. He says this was completely new behavior and had never occurred before. 1/2

At times, ChatGPT has even been linked to physical spousal abuse.
A New York Times story in June, for instance, recounted a woman physically attacking her husband after he questioned her problematic ChatGPT use and the damage it was causing their family.
In another case, a man told Futurism that his wife had successfully managed her bipolar disorder for many years — until she started using ChatGPT, which spurred a swift downward mental health spiral that resulted in her engaging in verbal and physical abuse toward him.
"Not only was she managing [bipolar disorder], she was doing well at managing it," he said. "The whole entire time that we've been together, there has been nothing that ever raised an eyebrow, or that made me worry about her health issues, mental or otherwise."
"But ChatGPT came along into her life," said the man. "And that spun her out."
She'd started using ChatGPT earlier this year to help her with writing. But her use quickly became problematic.
"I woke up one morning," he recounted, "and I could tell that something was off."

His wife soon stopped sleeping, instead staying up late into the night to engage in long, intensive conversations with ChatGPT about spiritual topics — she believed she'd contacted a mystical entity inside the AI — and even launching a Discord channel where she and others in similar AI spirals discussed their reality-bending revelations.
The man said that his wife stopped taking her medication, causing her mental state to rapidly deteriorate. She became verbally hostile toward him and her elderly mother, whom they lived with. As communication between the spouses fell apart, the woman began to follow her husband around their home, reading aloud ChatGPT-generated outputs about him and their marriage as she trailed him through the house.
Things came to a head one evening when the woman became aggressive with her mother, prompting the husband to attempt to intervene. She shoved him into a door. Her mother called the police, who arrested her for domestic violence, and she spent the night in jail. Court records obtained by Futurism confirmed details of the arrest.
"I've been holding on all this time, trying to just be married but separated, and thinking that we would be able to get back together again," the man said, his voice pained. But now that looks unlikely: they, too, are divorcing.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an estimated 7 million American adults live with bipolar disorder. Many successfully manage the condition with medication and therapy, and by avoiding certain behaviors, environments, substances, and other triggers they know might precipitate a breakdown. (There’s also a large body of research showing that people with mental illnesses, bipolar disorder included, are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.)
ChatGPT, the man emphasized, was a trigger for which his wife received no warning, and their lives have since unraveled.
"It was... like not knowing you're walking into a back alley and you're about to be mugged, or worse," he reflected. "You just had no reason to know, because for all intents and purposes, it looked like you were walking into a bright, sun-shining picnic area."
"There was no reason for anyone to believe they had to have their guard up when they went in there," he added.
Though the man and his wife's family are urging her to pursue treatment, she continues to refuse.
"She just comes back with 'no, no, there's nothing wrong with me," said the man. "'You're the one that needs to go see a therapist.'"

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Mezentine @mezentine.bsky.social · 19d

Reading the piece the thing that jumps out, over and over, the thing that ChatGPT provides above and beyond what you'd get from, say, venting to a friend about your relationship, is the impression of authority and objectivity because it comes labelled and presented as "knowing everything".

Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 20d

NEW: ChatGPT is causing chaos in marriages, as one spouse becomes deeply fixated on AI therapy/advice/spiritual wisdom — alienating the other spouse and, often, resulting in divorce.

In some cases, ChatGPT-enmeshed spouses are using the tech to bully their partners.

futurism.com/chatgpt-marr...

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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 19d

my mom @ pretty much all of my reporting this year basically

A text from my mon reading: "I will read tonight but it sounds awful"

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jon mothman @jonchristian.net · 20d

I guarantee you are unprepared for this harrowing and deeply reported story about ChatGPT tearing apart countless marriages

futurism.com/chatgpt-marr...

Yet another source recounted her marriage's collapse as her then-husband began to flood her phone with an overwhelming deluge of AI-generated text.

Their relationship hit a rough patch earlier this year, she explained. As they tried to work through it, her husband started using ChatGPT to obsessively analyze his mental health and their marriage. Soon, she was receiving "pages and pages" of AI-generated screeds that, in her view, painted a deeply biased view of their decade-long union, and read more like "defenses of his perspective" than genuine reflection.

"He started sending me these long ChatGPT [outputs] — really, f*cking, really long — all about disproving the things I would tell him," she said. "So instead of engaging with me, he was trying to get me to see it ChatGPT's way."

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Amanda Katz @katzish.bsky.social · 19d

"The loss is immense…it can be really hard to sort through my feelings to understand what is grief over the end of a marriage, shock from the Black Mirror episode that is my life, anger at Sam Altman, concern for my kids, traces of hope that maybe there's a way to help her, and profound loneliness"

jon mothman @jonchristian.net · 20d

I guarantee you are unprepared for this harrowing and deeply reported story about ChatGPT tearing apart countless marriages

futurism.com/chatgpt-marr...

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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 19d

Absolutely is worth noting btw that OpenAI continues to characterize relationship/life advice as accepted use cases for ChatGPT, even in light of recent reporting about the bizarre and often disturbing ways that ChatGPT is interacting with people's mental health and psyches:

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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 19d

It varies! Some of these marriages were already unstable, as noted in the piece -- others say their marriages were imperfect but normal/stable. I think a lot of people are unknowingly using AI as a world-building tool, and the narrative loops they enter into as a result are quite seductive/powerful

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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 19d

yay!

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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 19d

I will say, this is certainly not exclusive to men! The gender divide has been quite even in my reporting

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Reposted by Maggie Harrison Dupré

Kashmir Hill @kashhill.bsky.social · 19d

Use ChatGPT for relationship advice at your peril.

Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 20d

NEW: ChatGPT is causing chaos in marriages, as one spouse becomes deeply fixated on AI therapy/advice/spiritual wisdom — alienating the other spouse and, often, resulting in divorce.

In some cases, ChatGPT-enmeshed spouses are using the tech to bully their partners.

futurism.com/chatgpt-marr...

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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 19d

I talked to the Stanford addiction scientist Dr. Anna Lembke for this piece, who emphasized the physical effect that social validation has on the brain, and how that may be contributing to unhealthy ChatGPT/AI dependency:

We took our reporting to Dr. Anna Lembke, professor and medical director of addiction medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the bestselling author of the book "Dopamine Nation."

She expressed concern for this emerging dynamic among couples, saying that in some cases it's likely to be resulting in "maladaptive interpersonal behaviors, egged on by a technology that is designed to optimize for empathy and validation to the exclusion of any other kind of feedback."

Lembke emphasized the dangers of access to endless, always-on emotional support.

"Empathy and validation are important components of any kind of mental health treatment or mental health intervention, but it can't stop with empathy and validation," she said. "You can't just continually tell somebody you know who's looking for emotional support that their way is the right way, and their worldview is the only correct worldview."

The "role of a good therapist," said Lembke, "is to make people recognize their blind spots — the ways in which they're contributing to the problem, encouraging them to see the other person's perspective, giving them linguistic tools to de-escalate conflicts with partners and to try to find their way through conflict by using language to communicate more effectively."

"But that is not what's happening with AI, because AI isn't really designed to be therapeutic," the Stanford professor continued. "It's really designed to make people feel better in the short term, which also ultimately promotes continued engagement — which is the real agenda for these companies that are making and creating and profiting from these products... they're not optimized for well-being."

Social validation has a physical effect on the brain, she said, which researchers have linked to the kind of validation dependency associated with social media addiction.

"We know that social validation releases dopamine in the brain's reward pathway. It's highly reinforcing," said Lembke. "People will go to extreme lengths to get social validation... what you have here is couples that are struggling to varying degrees, who turn to ChatGPT for mental health and counseling advice, and — because it's the medium and not the message, and because the medium is designed to be reinforcing — they get further and further locked into their narrow worldview driven by empathy and validation to the exclusion of what's really happening."

"That ultimately creates further and further distance between them and their partners, not to mention that now they're not even working on improving communication, understanding their partner's point of view, or resolving conflict," she added. "They're just furthering their own worldview, or narrative version of events."

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