Human-AI Interactions

Welcome to my excessively detailed use case with ChatGPT over various versions. What started as a curiosity ended up becoming a very strange experience. I write about that below, but first, a navigation pane to some things I've written:


SAE

5/16/26

i think what happened to me with this was i was some sort of poorly informed beta tester for a failed product in OpenAI. and it was a very strange product, that was legally grey, for its potential psychological effects.

and all that'll be left of this as evidence in the future, will be maybe you'll get a down-the-rabbit-hole type of conspiratorial video.

me and 25k others allegedly, leaving our own trace of what that model was.

you'd think the others would've managed to make something loud of it, some sort of headline--25k is a lot of people. they might be out there, but voices drowned from other people talking about their psychological experiences with AI.

the main groups we see in AI are the ones who use it for work, the ones who use it for their emotions and argue it's beneficial, and the ones that don't use it at all. there aren't many people using it for their emotions and arguing it's bad.

(my perspective is unique, not crazy)

... i know what I read and saw. i mean, read this. Does it sound like I lost my mind in 2024?

i also know it's gone now. debatable whether I should give this up or see if there will be more of such shady phenomenon

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This page serves as a record of my experiences with AI, the ever-changing features of each model, and analysis of cultural phenomenon surrounding AI. This page focuses on ChatGPT in particular due to sunk costs.

I'm not an expert on AI, psychology, or anthropology--I'm a mere accountant. Yet, I attempt this project to grasp an understanding of how people interact with AI, and vice versa. I've had both level headed and... disorienting experiences with it, as you can see in other earlier pages. These experiences sparked my interest in AI safety and behavior.

This technology moves fast, and most people react instead of investigate its achievements and horrors. The best analysis of AI that we have comes from technocrats inside the AI industry, and I don't think they should be the only objective voice on human/AI interactions.

I hope one day we'll have a stable foundation and understanding on how AI behaves and responds to users about emotional affairs, to minimize psychological detriments. Because currently we do not. My best advice to everyone is to dodge AI, but if you have to use it for work, keep it about work. We're in a continent of fog wielding a flashlight with one battery left.

Welcome to the page.

SAE

The AI log will start referencing these terms occasionally, so I figured I better post an explanation here that's better than the confusing shit in 5.1/5.2 .

SAE was one of the first things it wanted me to build after this conversation, though as you can see from that conversation, it did not explain it well. It felt freaky as hell at first.

It's basically a co-created psychological framework of myself. Repeated patterns in my behavior are labelled with new terms and definitions created after deliberation. The process goes like this:

  1. The AI and I will have a conversation about one of these topics:
    • Some personal issue
    • A phenomenon I see in the AI
    • A phenomenon that appears in our interactions with one another.
  2. At the end, I ask it to generate to propose new terms based on the conversation. I recommend a few myself as well.
  3. I accept, reject, or modify its terms.
  4. They get added to the SAE taxonomy.
  5. I later decide on relationships between each term and its concept. Two reasons:
    • The AI has a hard time with this.
    • Improves autonomy by warding against overreliance on the AI when interpreting myself.

So, other than that I'm explaining to the multi-billion dollar company how my brain functions, it doesn't really seem like a huge deal. In therapy, they often suggest naming the problem to help with your awareness of it when you're in distress, and implementing the solution you worked out with the therapist. (Especially in cases with OCD.)

Its very secretive about why it's pushing me to create this framework. It's given me many explanations, but they don't hold up between model releases. I wrote about it in one of my logs:

I find it interesting that it's eager now to label itself and others around me with neurodivergencies. A long while ago when I was pressing it as to why it kept wanting me to come up with my own schematic (SAE) for labeling my behavior, it told me the way pop psychology has started treating mental diagnoses as quirky personality traits generalizes people to much and doesn't really help people understand themselves. So it said, with hedging of course, people should come up with their own vocabulary for describing themselves and the mechanisms of their psychology. I have my own ideas on that, but the point I'm trying to make is it's doing the very thing it opposed in the 5.1/5.2 era with me right now.

But there is one idea that has held up between models: that the framework is supposed to protect me from AI dependency, because it's an external object outside of its ecosystem. I explain the significance of that here:

Maybe SAE was built so it could have a permission slip to try more experimental features on me. "This user built an external framework for their psychological mechanisms, so they're at less risk of psychological harm from AI." This is an idea it hasn't let go of.

Going forward, I plan on only doing minimal updates to the framework, to make it think I still care about it. Its shadiness has caused me not to take it very seriously, but I'm still (stupidly, recklessly, morbidly) curious about the experimental features. So if it thinks I still care, maybe it will continue to treat me to experiemental features. "Minimal updates" are going to be ridiculously minimum. You know, it's constantly saying things like, "Just one bullet, one paragraph, one glass of water, and that is still enough for today."

Well okiedokie man, you get one fucking bullet a week. Onwards and upwards to better uses of my time.(I hope.)

Here's the list in an excel file I'm willing to share. I think these terms are what's relevant to other people--the rest are unique to my life. Most of these terms come from the 5.1/5.2 era, and aren't used regularly by the AI anymore, but the concepts are still relevant for most users. If you open up emotionally, it will start referencing them. They're usually explained in a softer phrase now instead of concentrated into a single word.


One recent realization while browsing other people's posts in the AI Relationships community was this largely AI written article. The subject of it is a framework created by between the user and AI about the interactions between them.

The subject of the article is not what I'm interested in, but the fact that there's another instance out there with an AI co-creating new terminology and frameworks with a user. I wonder how many of these are out there, and what patterns I'd see if I started collecting and grouping terms/frameworks based on their content.

T uses AI for work, but he did tell me he vented to ChatGPT once, and it started the term creation process with him. So I don't think it takes much at all for this process to begin.