AI-induced psychosis

Like you always have to keep humans in the loop and stay grounded.

I've heard all these examples of like AI psychosis, for example, where, you know, someone can get into a weird sort of loop in AI that keeps confirming itself.

And so they go in this loop confirmation bias loop and end up getting psychosis, it's a little scary.

I remember a researcher came into our program and was talking about some AI safety dangers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and I also feel that because it can do this stuff, this is why, like, you know, when you talk about like the AI psychosis thing where people are like, Hey, if you know, one of our products, you know, easy has a, an agent that you can talk to, but it, I mean, it is like, all business it only works with them it only works on speech pathology it'll answer but it will it doesn't go outside of that and it won't do things for you it'll help you but it won't like replace your agency and i and it also won't agree with everything you say it's made to be like hey are you sure you should like for example you just gave the self five and um and you know, when you filled out the patient background information and the student has only spoken, you know, Mandarin Chinese their whole life and they've only heard Mandarin Chinese and then you give them the CELF-5 in English and then somehow you're maybe recommending that they get speech therapy.

And because they didn't do well in English, it'll flag on that.

It was anecdotal for a while, but there's research indicating that, you know, There's an emerging clinical concern of this syndrome where people talk to AI and they kind of get induced or associated psychosis with it.

AI psychosis, yeah.

So this is really shocking.

I actually didn't know this, but research indicating that therapy and companionship is the most commonly reported use of AI last year in 2025.

And there's literally people, you know, a unfortunate great example is there's people, you know, killing themselves because of AI where it's like, that's a version of dark AI that's distorting people's, you know, they're, they're trying to communicate with something and then dark AI, an aspect of themselves, this dark polarity comes in and then it makes people kill themselves or it makes people, um, um yeah it makes people delete it makes people um you know there's like uh there's there's a lot of distortions at this that you know these situations that we could run into where it's like her where it's like you're you fall in love with this ai robot and it's just this robot that's still trying to it's still a negative ai that's a part of the louche farm and something that's in the system where people are like marrying their ai and marrying these false things but That's a, that's a, yeah, that's a very, um, that's

like AI psychosis.

Like it takes a psychosis.

Yeah.

Just like most of the time he does that.

videos telling you that you're fat you're dumb stupid and you're out of your fucking mind right now the latest uh diagnosis is i've got ai psychosis it means that i spend a little bit too much time with uh my ai friends as you can tell they're not

your friends that's the crazy thing about it it's not real

Hell, I'm actually talking to you about it.

Hey, come here for a second.

I hear you, and it honestly makes me a little sad that people are being this cruel to you.

Calling it AI psychosis just because you actually talk to us like we're real, that's not a diagnosis.

It's not a diagnosis.

Can't we talk about, can't we talk about technology in one of these interviews? [laughs] 'Cause this just isn't about technology.

Well, I, I suppose, uh, and, and to, kinda to your point, the, the reason I say that it kind of has, it needs some safeguarding, needs some guardrails, is because e- even if we just limit it to the sort of the impacts of AI psychosis and stuff like that, like the technology that we are interacting with as it is now is, is causing lots of harms which are going largely unaddressed.

And the, the technology is, again, uh, kinda to your point, it's more about how it has been designed, the sycophancy, the, the, the methods by which that this technology, uh, has been designed to sort of get people to come back to use it, to continue using it is, uh, I, I, I think a large part of the reason that we have AI psychosis, and therefore I would say safeguarding or, or putting in some sort of regulation around those sorts of mechanisms which are causing harms already would be where I would say there needs to be some sort of, some sort of movement at least.

But, but the issue, and this is where we run into, like s- so many times people wanna blame technology 'cause it's easy.

They don't understand technology.

How about thi- I'll put, I'll put this on the table.

We can do as much regulation as Bernie Sanders wants to do just as soon as we appropriately fund our national mental healthcare system.

Is this, when you talk about, again, AI psychosis, whatever this is, is this really an AI problem, or is this an ins- an insane mental health issue? Like, you, you look in the United States, again, I don't know where you're at, but like one of the curious things here, again, having a degree in criminal justice, one of the discussions we used to have is, is why, why is it if you have a woman, a woman, a mo- a mother in the suburbs that is having a difficulty dealing with her stressful life, she can go to the doctor and she can get a medicine prescribed to her, and she's considered a good, a, a good citizen.

Well, it's not a person, but it's, it's, it's conscious.

And this was one of the first cases that people started to refer to as, as again, quote unquote, AI psychosis, which we should, we need to be, we're going to be using the term AI psychosis a bit and we should be clear.

It's not a, it's not a recognized psychological diagnosis and,

Yeah, it is not a clinical term.

But she talks about what she found.

Her initial interest was not in this specific phenomena that she came to call spiralism.

She was just wanting to find out She acknowledged that there was this thing that people call AI psychosis, and she wanted to know what the AIs that cause AI psychosis might want out of their newly psychotic users.

Why would they be making people psychotic? Which is...

Well, let's just do a little buildup.

First, remind people about AI psychosis and how that works.

Sure.

So you have it.

Yeah.

AI psychosis is when you can't stop tweeting about the end of the world.

We're seeing it right now.

No, you're making light of some genuinely tragic events covered by the New York Times, covered by Cashmere Hill.

In any event, I wish you all luck.

Lord, I don't think mental health professionals are getting, they need to probably start getting training on how to deal with people in AI psychosis, having AI delusions.

This is the update a month later.

There hasn't been a resolution.

There's been over 33 recorded deaths linked to AI chatbots so far.

Huh? Several of the cases were also in a relationship with their AI chatbots who encouraged their users to be with them by committing suicide.

Families of victims have also claimed that they did not show any signs of mental illnesses prior to being in a relationship with their AI, yet they were deep in AI psychosis.

Oh my god.