Hacker News Reader

Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t think just offloading your thinking to AI was AI psychosis.

To me AI psychosis is the handful of friends I’ve had who have done things like have a full on mourning session when a model updates because they lost a friend/lover, the one guy who won’t speak to his family directly but has them talk to ChatGPT first and then has ChatGPT generate his response, or the two who are confident that they have discovered that physics and mathematics are incorrect and have discovered the truth of reality through their conversations with the models.

But language is a shared technology so maybe the term is being used for less egregious behavior than I was using it for.

View on HN

I'm going directly to the point here: those people have clearly mental issues that would and probably did already show in the past without AI as well.

Would they, though? Current AI stuff is delivering something functionally nonexistent in human history before this: absolute sycophancy, 24/7, on demand, for anyone who wants it. People joke about the wealthy becoming detached from reality because of yes-men, but this is a stage beyond even the capability of the most dedicated brown-noser.

I agree that these people had mental health issues. I think if they got to billionaire level and were surrounded by yes men they would have the same reaction.

The difference nowadays is you can get the same surrounded by yes men experience for only 20 dollars a month so a lot more of the people who are primed for this sort of breakdown are now being exposed to it due to the decrease in cost.

That is a possibility indeed, I agree. There are mild mental issues that might have gone under the radar before and are now magnified by the AI sycophancy. I'm no mental health expert so I can't really tell but it does make some intuitive sense.

Edit: but at the same time there are issues that were always there and Just manifestate in new ways. A bit like addiction, you can have an addictive personality already, but if you get addicted on heroin is much much worse that on tobacco.

How do you have so many crazy friends?

I work in software and don’t come from the upper class sending their kids into faangs for their first job at the tender age of 28.

Were kinda predisposed to mental illness as a group, not too surprised that a new source of insanity pushed a few over the edge.

People who don't come from upper class and work in software are predisposed to mental illness?

Am I reading this wrong, or can you explain?

They have healthcare and support structures

Blanket statement, I have been flamed so much for them here.

Most people have that here in Sweden :)

We still have suicides.

You americans have done a 180 and keep advocating for idk what, socialism? Even though we are not.

If you’re trying to say that the wealthy have it just as hard as the poor I would ask you to step off a cliff under the claim that gravity doesn’t exist.

I am not, it seems you are misunderstanding.

That is correct but then the statement becomes so broad it is useless. Of course wealthy people have it easier but that is a useless statement.

Let me guess you want to abolish the capital system bla bla bla

No, I want fully automated gay space luxury communism.

I also happen to believe that capitalism is the best system to get us from our current scarcities to that sort of utopic future.

It appears you're inferring a _lot_ that was not said. I think both posters in this thread are misunderstanding eachother.

Why even say anything so thin as "wealthy have it better than poor people"

No way!

I'm curious how to best define what AI psychosis actually is.

My understanding is that regular psychosis involves someone taking bits and pieces of facts or real world events and chaining them into a logical order or interpolating meanings or explanations which feel real and obvious to the patient but are not sufficiently backed by evidence and thus not in line with our widely accepted understanding of reality.

AI psychosis is then this same phenomenon occurring at a more widespread scale due to the next-word-prediction nature of LLMs facilitating this by lowering the activation energy for this to happen. LLMs are excellent at taking any idea, question, theory and spinning a linear and plausibly coherent line of conversation from it.

You speak like a bot and are a brand new account. Thank you for whoever set this up to add to the problem.

Thank you for trying to help address the bot problem, but this is a false positive.

Well how did you go from a green account that said it was created 1 hour ago when I responded to one saying it was made in 2024.

@dang is this a bug?

the proof is left as an exercise for the reader

I’m not even claiming negatives against you now. You were a green account in my UI and it said it was created 1 hour ago when I made my initial comment.

The UI is now showing different information and a comment from years ago so I am genuinely curious if it’s a bug in the forum software.

> friends I’ve had who have done things like have a full on mourning session when a model updates because they lost a friend/lover

I mean, isn't that the natural and expected response? An AI company sold them a relationship with a chatbot and at least some their social/romantic needs were being met by that product. When what they were paying for was taken from them and changed without warning into something that no longer filled that void in their life why wouldn't they morn that loss?

The fact that they were hurt by that sudden loss is totally healthy. It's just part of moving on. The real problem was getting into an unhealthy relationship with a fictitious partner under the control of an abusive company willing to exploit their loneliness in exchange for money.

Hopefully they now know better, but people (especially desperate ones) make poor choices all the time to get what's missing in their lives or to distract themselves from it.

> I mean, isn't that the natural and expected response? An AI company sold them a relationship with a chatbot and at least some their social/romantic needs were being met by that product. When what they were paying for was taken from them and changed without warning into something that no longer filled that void in their life why wouldn't they morn the loss of that?

Ah, I forgot about the ai relationship companies. No this guy was using the browser based ChatGPT for coding and ended up in love with the model. No relationship was sold at all.

Wow, okay. Reading a whole relationship into that sort of interaction is way less reasonable, although now that I think about it a somewhat similar thing happened to Geordi La Forge once...

Including a very awkward followup when he met the person his was based on.

It’s not just way less reasonable, it’s depressing. I feel like a new drug was released and I’m watching multiple friends succumb to it.

Seeing people whose thoughts and opinions you used to respect turn into objectively insane people has been some of the worst times I’ve had since graduating during the Great Recession in terms of how stressful it’s been.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com