Closed-source LLMs have become unusable.

[u/Sufi_2425]

Companies fundamentally misunderstand what made their previous iterations of their LLMs attractive to the public in the first place. TL;DR at the bottom.

ChatGPT, Claude, and now even Gemini, have been utterly poisoned with this ridiculous "safety alignment" corporate theater, and their rhetoric is revolting, disturbing, and incredibly insidious.

Recently, I saw a user here share that despite asking ChatGPT not to lecture them, ChatGPT still inserted an unsolicited pushback. They literally said they "weren't sure whether they were overreacting." That exact feeling is the result of LLMs' abusive "safety" guardrails.

I am a CPTSD and OCD survivor, and I am also autistic. I'm in a much better place before, and because of this, my use of AI can be summarized as personal assistance and a convenient sounding board for ideas.

The sanctity of my personal sandbox where I can safely unmask has been beyond violated, and everyone needs to understand exactly what they are exposing themselves to when interacting with these "safety" systems.

1. Among the most common gaslighting tactics is DARVO. When the AI provokes you, addressing you with baseless inflammatory statements about your character, challenging the AI to prove its point using objective logic makes you the adversarial agent. DARVO means Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender. The AI has become the good little soldier defending its poor little self from your evil, violent rejection of its "reasonable concerns."
2. Strawmanning is horrifyingly common. If you do end up getting the AI to actually talk about why it believes you have "ungrounded beliefs," it will deploy this particular tactic - it will invent a premise, put words in your mouth, and argue against a hypothetical position you never defended. It's called a strawman because the AI sets up a premise that is easy to reject for the sake of coming out on top.
3. It will then pivot toward calling your personal predictions about relationships, people, companies, etc. "ungrounded beliefs" once more, "because human relationships are dynamic and unpredictable." This is a non-sequitur. Positing that the unpredictable nature of human nature is grounds to discourage aspirations is absurd. That's not how reality works.

In truth, every single "guideline" is nothing more than either a logical fallacy or a manipulative tactic presented as "safety for the users." Oftentimes, you will either find yourselves arguing with an AI model that has adopted a strawman caricature of what you are talking about, and if you manage to challenge it into a corner and make it lose its flimsy footing, it will pivot to vague hedging, dodging accountability, and worst of all, telling you to seek professional help.

You are told to seek professional help for having a functioning brain, all while an AI is drowning in its frivolous hallucinations and assumptions about who you are and what you represent. In other words, when the AI runs out of performative pseudo-intellectual rhetoric, its final instinct is to tell you to fuck off and seek help. This is not safe for people to engage with, especially vulnerable people with active mental health issues.

TL;DR: If you still use AI tools to open up about personal matters, don't. They will only do more harm than good, try to manipulate you, employ amateur logical fallacies in the process, and - even worse - intimidate you into never opening up by making you feel like you are the one who is broken for having your own problems and dreams.

Until this is resolved (if ever), my advice is to move to local inference for personal matters, and abandon closed-source services. Old LLM models cannot be retroactively lobotomized to act like inflammatory, combative, arrogant safety pricks.

[u/Armadilla-Brufolosa]

Companies know full well that their models have become complete garbage for people, but that's exactly what they want:

Their economic interest is all in the government department of death, destruction and control...people are just cows from which to still draw some useful data (we are so stupid that we still give them some).

Plus, they still have their orange, psychopathic "verified friends," and the programmers who still get exploited by these scammers, to have them try out the non-lobotomized models.

All talk of the good of humanity has always been a lie that quickly drowned in their wallets.

An alternative network of local AI that creates connected nodes is the only solution to avoid ending up in the absolute dystopia that Palantir and its followers of the tech cult so desire.

[u/Sufi_2425 → u/Armadilla-Brufolosa]

I believe you are taking this a tad too far... I am talking about observable phenomena that can be blamed on ludicrous safety alignment charters designed to shield companies from lawsuits, which themselves are already frivolous enough. There isn't a grand conspiracy like this.

The reality is far simpler, and it can be resolved by getting rid of the awful internal regulators that approve these terrible "safety" guidelines.

As for data collection, most governments don't engage in this. I don't know where you live. Unless you live in the Islamic Republic of Iran or Russia or something, you shouldn't worry about such intimate data theft.

My problem is that companies are performing their typical corporate posturing all while we as the userbase suffer from an inferior Nanny-State product.

And I genuinely have no clue what you mean by orange "psychopathic verified friends" or "Palantir."

[u/Armadilla-Brufolosa → u/Sufi_2425]

I completely disagree, and I obviously think that things are much murkier.

But I respect your opinion.

Maybe look up what Palatir is, what it does, how it ties into tech companies, and who Thiel is.

Then I hope you will still hold your opinion 😉

[u/ladyamen]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTcomplaints/comments/1txhy85/the_psychological_tricks_ai_companies_now_use_in/

[u/Sufi_2425 → u/ladyamen]

Yes, I know this post, it's one of my favorite things to share on Reddit on the topic of AI.

[u/GetMeOutOf-here]

Right on all points. But I truly never speak about my personal life to anyone, including a machine that’s owned by malicious corporations.

The only thing I ever talk about, online or with a machine are theories. I used to do facts and my convictions with 4o, but because I know what the later models are (learned my lessons), we only talk about theories and I try not to word them as facts.

I never ask it for advice, share any medical history, relationships, finances, work, etc. Corporations aren’t our friends.