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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
joshua@emarhavil.com ("Joshua Wise") wrote:

What, if anything, is vibesickness?

On Thursday, @chrisamaphone and @simrob and I were talking at dinner about the concept of “vibesickness” and trying to put our collective fingers on what, exactly, it is. We were settling on the concept of “the thing that happens to someone when they spend too much time interacting with an LLM, and they become like one inasmuch as they forget how to think and analyze in depth on their own”. Or writing that is indistinguishable from an LLM, or people who depend on them for even simple writing tasks that they would otherwise have done without thinking about it. To borrow a phrase from the mechanical purée of text, it’s not psychosis compose-hyphen-hyphen-hyphen it’s subclinical, but it’s just sad.

I was explaining this to someone else recently, and I went back to look at the primary sources for this term – @cwebber ‘s piece on the Vibe Bobsled, which, in turn, cites a @glyph toot. I was surprised at the usage and definitions there! It feels ambiguous, especially in @glyph ‘s original toot: does vibesickness refer to all of the rest of us survivors becoming ill at the sight of what the world around us is turning to (“sick of vibes”)? Or does it refer to the thing where you know it when you see it, and a specific person has become vibesick by prolonged exposure to a neurotoxin (“sick from vibes”)?

Fediverse, please resolve this question for me, in the form of a poll. (And, if it’s the former, what’s the word I want for the latter, especially given that “psychosis” is a defined technical term that does not refer to this?)