greed_exe Social media saw very rapid rise in popularity about 15 years ago. Before that social media was fringe, no reason to study it, and after that everyone used it, but no research had been done about possible negative consequences, including negative health consequences, of social media use. Today we know just how bad that is, and in which ways. Some believed the companies behind major social media networks were specifically tuning their algorithms to maximize engagement, and that this contributed to the poor mental health and exploitative behavior among social media users, and to a certain degree they did, but then people created free and open source social medias like Mastodon and friends, where anyone could see there is nothing nefarious in the algorithms, and yet, they were just as bad, and in the same ways, sometimes even worse. It is simply that kind of algorithms and platforms to begin with that has negative health effects.
Now we are seeing a rapid rise in the popularity of LLMs. No one has cared about LLMs before for the 20 years or so they have existed, and then suddenly a few years ago, and now everyone uses them. There hasn't been any reason to study what negative consequences there could be of LLM use before this, it was just a fringe community of role players who used them before. And here we are, and everyone uses them, and we barely understands what negative consequences LLM use may have, including negative health effects.
Maybe in 10 years we will know, and know well, I just find it a bit unfortunate that new technologies gets hyped and adopted this quickly. But I do believe that even if some commercial vendors of LLMs will manipulate responses in a way that is unacceptable, like social media companies did, most negative health effects and societal effects of LLM usage will be just as bad from open weight ones. And it is unclear right now whether it is an inherent flaw in the technology itself, like it seems to be with social medias, or whether the behavior can be "trained away". Only time will tell.