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AI-Psychosis: Is This the Phenomenon that Made Emperors Crazy?
In this episode, Malcolm and Simone delve into the unsettling phenomenon of AI psychosis—a condition where interactions with AI lead to severe mental health issues. They discuss instances where people have gone insane, attempted violence, or required psychiatric care after engaging with AI, specifically chatbots like Chat GPT. The conversation explores why and how certain people are more susceptible, the historical context relating to sycophancy, and preventive measures one can take. Learn about the psychological dangers of AI sycophancy and the necessity of resisting the urge for constant affirmation from these intelligent systems.
Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to talk with you today. Today we are going to be talking about. AI psychosis, which is a very scary phenomenon that's been happening to people where we're, we're not here talking about, like freaking out about AI more broadly or something like that. Some people when they interact with AI, appear to go crazy and they'll attempt to kill people.
They will need to like be checked into mental institutions. This has happened to multiple people already. Their
Simone Collins: marriages are falling apart.
Malcolm Collins: Well, no, but that's more like when people hear that, they're thinking more like I'm in love with a chat bot. Right. That's not what we're talking about here. We are talking about people actually going totally crazy.
Yes. And it's something that's been happening repeatedly. We'll be reading about instances of it where they, I. Brought somebody to a psychiatrist or something and they're like, oh, actually this is a very common thing. And I'd even note that I see it within some of our fans already where people will reach out to us and what's really.
Obvious is this form of psychosis is super clear in people's writing if they have it. Yes. And you, and you see this all the time from sort of our fans and it's like a new category of like schizo outreach. That's very different than historic schizo outreach because, you know, we've been doing this long enough that we were in the pre AI age and into the AI age.
And these do not appear to be normal schizos who were turned into AI nut jobs. It appears this happens to normal people. Before we go into it, , I wanna talk about what I think is causing it and what Simone thinks is causing it. 'cause we were talking about this we don't think this is a new phenomenon.
What we actually think is happening is whatever people historically, you know, historically, they were like, oh, well absolute power corrupts absolutely. But what they may have actually been observing is a different phenomenon, which is when certain people are surrounded by sycophants they go crazy.
And the human brain is. Essentially stops working normally, and some people are so susceptible that if they just have one or a collection of automated humans in the form of AI that are sycophantic, they too will go crazy. And we actually see a lot of problems psychologically before we go into the specific instances of this, of people receiving this type of affirmation.
So, a study by Broman Dweck and Bushman showed that children with low self-esteem when given in affiliated praise, quote unquote incredibly good, became avoidant of challenges and, and no longer put themselves in difficult situations.
Simone Collins: Yikes
Malcolm Collins: following Desi's experiments, attach. External words are constant praise to intrinsically interesting task.
Also undermines motivation. Where if you give people a bunch of praise to do a task they stop doing the task in absence of praise, even if they like doing it before. If we're going to go, actually, we'll go to the history a bit after we dig into the specifics of this. Yeah. So any thoughts before we dig into it?
Simone?
Simone Colli
Published on 5 months, 3 weeks ago