Comment by paimapi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paimapi | Hacker News Reader

One - delusion is a better fit if you need a term: https://mhanational.org/conditions/paranoia-and-delusional-d...

> Delusional disorder is characterized by irrational or intense belief(s) or suspicion(s) that a person believes to be true

it's still a bad fit because there's not currently popular social convention that trusting AI without validation is a bad idea but it's better than psychosis. also it's still stigmatizing and we live in a world where a thesaurus is seconds away at any time. plus psychosis as a diagnosis is typically a cluster of symptoms that go beyond just delusion: https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/294416-overview

Two - there's also an implication that there's 'harm' that this AI psychotic person inflicts on others embedded in this article. in reality, the vast majority of those suffering mental illnesses are far more likely to be harmed by others - https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtrea...

part of the work of being a good mental health advocate is not stigmatizing specific diagnoses as negative social ills. now if you don't give a single shit about mental health I'm not going to argue to get you to care. but if you do care then you should do better

> Psychosis as a diagnosis is a serious condition. there's an implication that there's 'harm'

I just watched a company fire an entire department of people under the sincere belief a chatbot run by a middle manager could save them 10 million a year. This failed miserably and they now need to hire or re-hire people.

There is a tremendous amount of harm happening. Psychosis is a perfect term for what is happening.

it absolutely is not. when we think of harm in a diagnosis of psychotic disorders, we're talking about things like getting shot to death by the police, running out onto the highway, etc. it is not callously making a lot of people have to jobhunt

which isn't to say that layoffs don't suck (I was impacted by one very recently) but it's not psychosis that causes that to happen, it's greed and short-term shareholder-fixated thinking. that should be named instead of a mental illness that people suffer from

I agree that calling all this "psychosis" is motivated primarily by a desire to make the person in question look or sound crazy, and is plainly irresponsible on that front.

chatbots being able to evoke real manic episodes in otherwise healthy people is basically true, though - folie a deux doesn't require both participants to have some disorder, and the AI is packing all of them (and the harm is real, there has been something like 30 MDS cases already)

of course, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were case studies of this. but it's far from the usage leveraged in this article or by most, really, and that's somewhat unfortunate

A bad business decision is not psychosis. Misjudging the value provided by a product is not psychosis.

Making bad financial decisions is a symptom of mania though

and when you look up what spending while having a manic episode looks like, does it resemble a layoff? or is it substantively different?

It absolutely could be the case a person in a manic episode lays off a bunch of people that wouldn’t be out of the question at all

sure and if layoffs were clinical indicators for mania, we'd probably see a whole lot less of them. unfortunately that's not our world

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