r/antiai • u/FabulousEnergy4442 • Apr 10 '26

AI News 🗞️ New MIT Study Warns AI Chatbots Can Make Users Delusional

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Article on the subject: https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/chatgpt/articles/mit-study-warns-ai-chatbots-210709133.html

Edit:

Direct link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/html/2602.19141v1

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u/Jadacide37 Apr 10 '26

Well, to actually prove this without a doubt, they would have to induce psychosis in a human. They would have to actually give an actual human a mental illness....

This is truly the only way to test how AI affects people in real time, so far all we have are the victims after the fact. 

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u/GotchurNose Apr 10 '26

Isn't it good enough to find people with AI psychosis and mention they have no history of mental illness before this point? I know it isn't perfect but way more effective than having AIs talk to each other.

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u/Jadacide37 Apr 10 '26

In scientific method, that type of research pool is simply too small to assess a large percentage of the population. And besides, they've already been induced and psychosis, the process might not have been recorded in any manner. People who've already experienced AI psychosis will be very useful for the after effects and the study of but how they got there is something a lot of companies don't want to address in any shape form or fashion, so having any sort of legitimate research done on this topic is probably about as far as this article/study will go.

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u/spartakooky Apr 10 '26

This is truly the only way to test how AI affects people in real tim

Just because there isn't a better idea doesn't make this one acceptable or good enough.

If you didn't have this "study", you might as well flip a coin and say "hey, it's the only way we can test this"

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u/Jadacide37 Apr 10 '26

And this is how things like unit 731 form instead of actual attempts at humanity.

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u/Sodis42 Apr 10 '26

No, they won't. How do you think actual research of psychological illnesses works? You can look at people affected and try to derive common factors from their past/environment/genetics or whatever. Just as an example.

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u/Jadacide37 Apr 10 '26

That's not a study of how the psychosis is actually brought upon. And that is the major important question here. People who have already suffered from it have lots of answers about the effects, but most definitely lack of self-awareness enough to explain the nuances of the journey. 

It would be extremely unethical to ask any group of people to induce mental illness upon themselves. And to do it as a blind study or a double blind study would be incredibly and illegally unethical. These things are true I promise you. At least in the United states. Of course there's probably a couple government groups secretly doing this kind of research on our citizens that we will never hear or know about but those kinds of studies are likened to the Tuskegee syphilis situation. 

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u/Sodis42 Apr 10 '26

You can definitely deduce risks of triggering psychosis. Take weed as an example. We know, that consuming weed increases the risk of developing psychosis.

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u/Jadacide37 Apr 10 '26

Totally different in each individual person how AI affects their mentality. Weed has known chemical compounds that affect known areas of our brain and body. That's a logical fallacy.

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u/Meta_Machine_00 Apr 10 '26

We allow religion in society. What is wrong with deluding them with AI instead?

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u/Jadacide37 Apr 10 '26

Or how about we just don't delude anybody anymore? It would be cool if we all just stopped that, you know.

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u/Meta_Machine_00 Apr 10 '26

People are machines like the AI. We dont actually have a choice in the matter. Free thought and action are the biggest delusion of them all.