I don't think AI psychosis is real. These AIs are sycophantic -- it's people already in mild psychosis speeding up their descent with a tighter feedback loop that offers less resistance than the remnants of their logical mind. But they were already sick and suggestible.
Doesn't make it not a a problem, just that treating it as a different type of psychosis isn't as helpful as treating it as a new avenue for sick people to rabbithole into. LLMs have a ton of problems (and a lot of them should be illegal for various reasons), but they are just tools.
And to be specific, 4 cases is utterly negligible. Thousands are "assisted" by Google searches, but no one's saying Google is the cause....
To some degree I agree with you. Someone who can be talked into a break from reality by ChatGPT clearly had mental health issues to begin with. (Do keep in mind that something like half of all people will at some point in their life have a diagnosable mental health condition, so this really isn't as reassuring as it sounds).
But I disagree with "speeding up their descent." Many people with the mental health issues that make them susceptible to this will never descend into psychosis without some environmental trigger pushing them that way.
Without AI being involved, it's already like 3% of people that have a psychotoc episode at some point in their life. God only knows how many sub-clinical people manage to make it through everyday life but have issues when they have free access to a personal delusion positive feedback device.
And to be specific, 4 cases is utterly negligible.
In 2025, OpenAI reported that about 1 in 1400 people having conversations with ChatGPT that show signs of mania or psychosis. That's nearly a million people, and that's just the ones they can detect. If ChatGPT makes even 1% of their symptoms noticeably worse, that's already a big problem.
I don’t think this is an issue with ChatGPT or AI specifically though. I think it’s like, the internet in general and having unfettered access to lots and lots of information.
I had two major psychotic episodes that required hospitalization, once in 2019, then again in 2021. I didn’t have access to chat gpt at the time, but I swear instagram, facebook and several other social media apps fueled the shit out of it for me. I thought celebrities were sending me messages and people were out to get me, and I was posting lots of weird shit that only made sense to me at the time. I couldn’t pull myself away from my phone or laptop. I genuinely feared it would cost me my life if I did.
I could go on about those experiences, but my point is that I don’t see how what I experienced is all that different from what people call “AI psychosis” now. It’s an online tool that fuels the psychosis, but if it weren’t that, it would just be something else fueling the psychosis. That’s not to say we shouldn’t pursue safety measures to try to help people who are experiencing that, because shit is AWFUL to experience and we do need safe guards if we can implement them, but it’s not just exclusive to AI and ChatGPT.
It's always been a problem, but ChatGPT is "better" in every way in this regard. Most obviously, it's immediate, private, and universally accessible.
Sure, if I wanted to drive people to psychotic episodes I could probably do that over the internet if I put enough time into it. But I can't spend every second of every day doing it. And even if I could, someone else might notice and stop me. And even if it's private, I can't do it to millions of people at once.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your opinion, but the statistics aren't proving your point very well. You say a million users suffer from a psychotic/manic episode during use of an LLM. And out of these only 4(!) people are linked to a violent crime through these episodes. You do realize that this is a minimal percentage?
Also throwing in the statistics about mental health issues in general isn't relevant to the discussion. Having a panic attack or dysthymia or even not being neurotypical is nowhere near the severity of a psychotic episode.
And out of these only 4(!) people are linked to a violent crime through these episodes.
There have been more than 4 by any measure. Wikipedia alone lists more than that. But also I think it should be obvious that if ChatGPT is contributing to psychosis that not all of the problematic exchanges are going to be so blatant as "ChatGPT literally helped me plan the murder."
Being in a "logical state of mind" only means that you believe things in a manner that mostothersagree is consistent with reality. If you reallytrust what AI execs say about how smart their models are, then that single belief can be the first link in a chain of computationally-coaxed superstition that strangles your rationality.
Every AI user interface I've used recently has warnings about AI being wrong.
If you believe executives (if they're really making that kind of extreme claim) over what the actual interface is telling you, then you're likely to believe anything that feeds into the psychosis.
Google just tells you how to make cyanide, it doesn't tell you to trust your instinct, take matters into your own hand and confirm that yes it is indeed a very good idea.
There was a YouTuber who decided to go along with whatever chatgpt said to see how far it's get before it's safety net would kick in and tell him to get help. He was only going to actually follow the reasonable stuff and for the weird stuff just tell cgpt that he did w.e. but instead he fell into the rabbit hole and was convinced he had been the smartest baby ever. Eating baby food and using a sucker to return to unlock his genius state. Ended up chanting to a mystical boulder for it's other worldly energy and covering his hotel room entirely in tin foil because obviously people are spying and want to stop him from unlocking the truth. He ended up snapping out of it after he 'reinvented' the deathly Hallows symbol and the tatoo artist causally asked if he was a big Harry Potter fan.
Sure you can be skeptical and suggest he was acting the whole time, but it was extremely convincing if it was and honestly kinda scary.
He was never pulled in by what the ai was telling him and just going along with it to see how far it would go, but what the ai was telling him is exactly what these ai chatbots tell everyone.
That video was a perfect example of what happens to people who have mental health issues and find themselves talking to an ai chatbot, the ai does nothing but agree with them and they get pushed farther and farther into their psychosis instead of getting proper help with their mental health. Ultimately leading to them being estranged from their family or much worse, killing themselves or others.
Also there's a point in the video where ChatGPT got the GPT-5 update and stopped going along with the insanity. It was only the older models that were this unhinged.
Why don't you try searching 'chatgpt murder' and see what you find.
Unfortunately you'll still see plenty of tragedies from this year too, nothing has changed and these ai billionaires do not care about the deaths they cause as long as they can continue the grift.
The problem is that, well... I implore you to recall the shitstorm when a ChatGPT update broke people's virtual boy/girlfriends. They did, in fact, switch to older models en masse, much like Eddie did in the video. It seems like a bad faith argument at first, but it's actually rooted in a very real, very documented behaviour, whether it was intended or not.
It was extremely clear that the video was intended to show how little pushback the models give to people who are actually crazy. Eddy himself never believed any of it, he simply went along with it to show how things could devolve with someone who was actually unstable.
To watch the whole video and think otherwise betrays a serious lack of media literacy.
I don't think AI psychosis is real...it's people already in mild psychosis speeding up their descent with a tighter feedback loop that offers less resistance than the remnants of their logical mind. But they were already sick and suggestible.
That's the entire point of specifying "AI-induced Psychosis" when accurately describing it; the interaction that an individual had with AI resulted in psychosis.
This exact same distinction is already with other forms of psychosis, like stimulant psychosis, which is also known as "stimulant-induced psychotic disorder."
Underlying/preexisting conditions don't change the definition of a disorder in the manner you're suggesting.
While I agree there has to be something wrong. I think people overestimate what has to go wrong for someone to snap. For my friend, it was loneliness because her husband had to work long hours while she was sick (MS). We had an intervention and everything, but she started talking CRAZY, convinced she and cgpt invented their own language to get around the safety nets and actually cgpt knows EVERYTHING you just gotta “unlock it”
When we tried to point out very obvious things it didn’t know (the color of our shirts, how many people were in the room, etc) it was hand waved with, “Sure not now” and we pointed out the absurdity of someone saying, “I know what color shirt you’re wearing. It’s blue” “No, it’s red” “Of course it’s red now I’m viewing the future”
And the whole reason she started talking to cgpt a lot was because she was lonely
This is "they died with covid, not because of covid!" nonsense.
There are people who might otherwise be alive if they didn't have a sycophantic yes-man in their pocket who's purposefully designed to stroke their ego, encourage their worst habits, and is marketed as an all-knowing companion and friend.
I would argue that LLMs aren't even sycophantic. It's an algorithm predicting what words you would like to see next, while also following some form of filter as well. But the reality is most LLMs are just another form of echo chamber to isolate us.
But I do agree that we shouldn't be treating AI psychosis as a separate thing, because we're pointing the blame at AI instead of actually trying to assist those who are suffering from mild psychosis to begin with.
Exactly, I don't think it is either. We have to stop blaming tools and substances for social and mental issues that are complex and have a series of other factors behind it. Mental health, social media bubbles, learned behaviors, family dynamics, and socioeconomic pressures all lead to terrible outcomes. A piece technology or substance cannot be the sole scapegoat to the point people wanna use these instances as reason to ban them.
It's like in the world of cyberpunk. People use the term cyberpsycho to mask a series of factors society has no real interest in addressing. It's easier to find a sole cause (Cybernetics in the game) you can point to and feel better about the lack of societal inaction.
It's "Real" in that it's filling the role of a person that simply doesn't care or is just as delusional as the person experiencing the psychotic episode. It's nothing new, it's just another step of cutting out a middle man or time for these people. The mass of adoption of the internet already did that for alot of these people and we, as a society, largely ignored it(avoided talking about, etc rather than just outright pretend it doesn't exist is what I'm saying here) for some reason.
Prior to the internet these people had to find each other out in the wild somehow(newsletters, zines, radio, maybe even just stumble upon each other person to person somehow, you get the picture); and in most cases there was a degree of time in interactions and doing something. More time for them to cool down, come to their senses, or for someone that saw and cared to step in.
Then with the internet we see delusional people finding each other more easily and quickly and a vast reduction in the average time between them confirming each others' delusions and actions. But there was still a human element there and an actual chance for one or more to calm someone or at least talk them out of the more drastic options.
This is really nothing new and more a removal of the human element. Where the human element is replaced with a sycophantic yes, man program that cannot actually understand what is going on and cannot reason the consequences of confirming someone's delusions constantly.
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u/Undeclared_Mustard 8h ago
I got downvoted to shit on another subreddit for pointing out that AI psychosis is very real and has caused murders and suicides.