AI Psychosis
People talk to chatbots these days. Some of them seem to end up losing their minds. AI causes psychosis! New danger that we've never seen before! Keep kids away from their phones!
However, despite new fancy technologies, all these stories look oddly familiar. Stress. More stress. Lack of sleep for days. We do expect a dissociation to happen in a memory graph.
Talking to somebody can't cause that. It doesn't matter if you interact with a man, a dog, or a robot. As long as your memory is well-maintained, you're safe. It's the lack of sleep that triggers the avalanche. And, apparently, we have some drugs that can disturb memory maintenance in a similar way.
New random associations in a memory graph form delusions. This is the primary malfunction that is naturally difficult to fix, or even impossible in some cases, as we discussed before.
But the story continues. Your AI friend agrees with you, comforts you, says all the things that you're already thinking, supports strange ideas, and motivates you to push further.
This reminds me of those suspicious preachers from shady sects that were sneaking around in my neighborhood back in the day.
AI bots follow the same script. Agree. Comfort. Find evidence for your delusions. Motivate. The only difference is that they don't ask you for all your money.
Yet.
LLMs incorporate tons of information and bring the central framework of an old scam to a whole new level. Sects used to have their narrow ideologies, but chatbots will help you with every bizarre idea that can come into your head. They don't have any formal social limits that'll throw you off the hook.
I'm not here to criticize the ethics, but these tools definitely have some potential in terms of brainwashing, even if they do that by accident, without any precise intentions.
They're good imitators, and training datasets from libraries include all classical manipulations that we use since the beginning of humanity. AI bots repeat these good old tricks flawlessly, and sometimes hit vulnerable clients by accident.
The so-called "AI psychosis" that people argue about all over the internet isn't a distinct disease. It's a standard boring dissociation. It can be stabilized with external help, and, in this particular case, our own phones make things worse.