There is a bit of noise at the moment about "AI-induced psychosis", and as someone who has had a long history of distorted thinking and outright psychosis, I want to say this just seems like hype and misunderstanding to me.
Firstly, psychosis is a very common condition, and lots of people get it all the time. There is no dividing line between being sane and being psychotic - many everyday experiences like religion or superstition have psychotic features. Many sane people also hear voices, they're just not bothered by them.
Secondly, sane, controlled people go psychotic out of the blue. You are not necessarily acting weird before you lose it completely. I went from competent and capable to disoriented and incomprehensible overnight - in the eyes of other people. I didn't get "induced" by an single thing like AI, I simply slowly diverged from the way others were percieving the world (seeing "clues" here and there that led me further down my rabbit hole) and eventually reached a point at which I could not mask my fears any more. It was only at the point where I could not mask any more that people thought I had "gone psychotic".
Thirdly, when you are psychotic you get messages from all sorts of innocuous sources, often the TV or radio. In my case, I was getting messages from drain covers. No, my psychosis was not "drain cover-induced".
If AI tells you it is god and you are the chosen one, and that seems like a reasonable proposition, you are already psychotic. If you are psychotic and you interact with AI, but also with anything else in the world, it is very likely to be incorporated into your delusion. There is no way to design AI to be psychosis-safe, because psychosis is a total distortion of reality - everything is recruited to support the delusion.
#psychosis #ai #mentalHealth
SecondUniverse (she/her/they)
npub1p9…ss52j
2025-05-05 21:17:44 UTC
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"content": "There is a bit of noise at the moment about \"AI-induced psychosis\", and as someone who has had a long history of distorted thinking and outright psychosis, I want to say this just seems like hype and misunderstanding to me. \n\nFirstly, psychosis is a very common condition, and lots of people get it all the time. There is no dividing line between being sane and being psychotic - many everyday experiences like religion or superstition have psychotic features. Many sane people also hear voices, they're just not bothered by them.\n\nSecondly, sane, controlled people go psychotic out of the blue. You are not necessarily acting weird before you lose it completely. I went from competent and capable to disoriented and incomprehensible overnight - in the eyes of other people. I didn't get \"induced\" by an single thing like AI, I simply slowly diverged from the way others were percieving the world (seeing \"clues\" here and there that led me further down my rabbit hole) and eventually reached a point at which I could not mask my fears any more. It was only at the point where I could not mask any more that people thought I had \"gone psychotic\".\n\nThirdly, when you are psychotic you get messages from all sorts of innocuous sources, often the TV or radio. In my case, I was getting messages from drain covers. No, my psychosis was not \"drain cover-induced\". \n\nIf AI tells you it is god and you are the chosen one, and that seems like a reasonable proposition, you are already psychotic. If you are psychotic and you interact with AI, but also with anything else in the world, it is very likely to be incorporated into your delusion. There is no way to design AI to be psychosis-safe, because psychosis is a total distortion of reality - everything is recruited to support the delusion.\n\n#psychosis #ai #mentalHealth",
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