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Mass AI Psychosis
The AI industry is bathed in delusion.
I have had a little theory bubbling away in the back of my mind for a while now. Truth be told, it is not a unique theory at all; many seem to have arrived at it independently. You see, a lot of people have been paying attention to the deranged actions of Big Tech CEOs, major business leaders, high-level investors and AI labs and asking, “Are these guys suffering from AI psychosis?” Because, when you stop to think about it for a second, that theory would explain so much of this bubble’s insanity and the factors propping it up. In fact, there are even people within this bubble starting to claim that their peers are being driven by AI-derived delusions. So, do we have a case of mass AI psychosis?
Let’s start with what AI psychosis actually is. It is a new term, so its definition is still a little loose, but Healthline defines it as “a term used to describe psychosis-like mental changes that can happen after heavy use of AI tools, such as chatbots”. More recent studies have sought to determine what actually causes this psychosis. One such study found that the extreme level of sycophancy in AI chatbots can cause spiralling delusions if used heavily, as it erodes users’ sense of reality and isolates them from real, grounding human connections, eventually culminating in AI psychosis. Other studies have backed this theory, finding…
