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Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

I saw that psychosis happening in real time with a coworker. It absolutely is a real phenomenon. After a while, he started presenting ChatGPT's replies as the absolute truth.

I don't think there ever has been something that can _answer_ you back and reinforce your delusion. This is a new thing.

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I'm one of the biggest AI bulls on HN. I think given to the right people, it's immensely powerful and I think people in general underestimate how powerful it will get.

However, AI psychosis in 2026 is definitely real. I have a non-technical high ranking (nepotism) coworker who discovered vibe coding and is now absolutely wild. He thinks he can build anything and he questions why our dev team isn't moving fast enough. Why aren't we changing the UI to a newer, more modern one every single week? Why aren't we vibe coding this new feature in 2 hours? This guy generates massive amount of text and calls it a roadmap or a spec.

It's honestly maddening working with people under AI psychosis.

I want to add that I think AI absolutely massively inflates the dunning kruger effect.

As a longtime student of the human condition, it is so obvious to me that this is real, has been happening, and will continue to happen as long as homo sapiens (in our current state) exists.

False beliefs are not a neutral thing to ignore. The way people react to them has strikingly tangible consequences for the rest of us.

A frightening number of people already believe all kinds of wildly irrational things about AI, and I don't see any way this doesn't become an increasingly complex issue we will all continue to have to deal with for the rest of our lives. In addition to everyone who comes after us.

Some *thing*, no, but we have seen the same thing with a slower feedback loop before: every conspiracy that comes along. Adherents fall into a trap of believing each other, getting more and more extreme. And losing the ability to rationally consider relevant information. An example I hit: 9/11 truthers. I wanted to put some scale to numbers, compared the energy of the fall to a small nuke. He seized on that as my admitting the towers were brought down by a nuke and I had a hard time explaining that it was simply a comparison.

It used to take filtering through a group of like-minded nuts, now we don't need a slow filtering through other nuts.

Yep, and the emergence of social networks became a real catalyst for that. But that still requires humans in that feedback loop, it takes time and attention. And people also have different opinions, even if they believe in roughly the same conspiracy (was it a plane, a truck bomb, a nuke?).

ChatGPT provides an instant sycophantic reply. I think they toned that down a bit, but it's still completely unparalleled.

It’s a real phenomenon that gets lazily slapped onto anyone using AI poorly.

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