[sillysaurusx]

Using "psychosis" is a cheap rhetorical trick. There's no need to label something "psychosis" when making your point, except to automatically discredit whatever you're responding to.

In other words, only people who are afraid their point won't stand on its own merits would resort to saying "X is suffering from AI psychosis." An idea is true or false on its own. If you're resorting to labels, you're just trying to automatically win the argument, instead of saying something substantive or interesting.

[roadside_picnic]

It also underplays what I've personally witnessed that I would consider true AI psychosis.

I worked with someone who sincerely believed he was spiritually co-evolving with his army of sycophantic AI agents (the agents would be tasked with discussing his thoughts at night and collaborated to give him morning reports about his progress). He would publicly write about how relationships with friends and family collapsing was a natural consequence of being so "advanced". I also never once saw any meaningful work done by his team of "agents", they existed solely tell him how smart he was (of course he specifically set up the system to 'challenge' him but... in practice that didn't seem to be working).

I suspect there are a lot more people quietly going through something similar but keeping it to themselves better.

I would distinguish this type of behavior from people who over ambitious views of what can be accomplished with AI.

[saltcured]

Having had experience dealing with people with conventional psychosis, I don't see it as a binary thing. Aside from a full-on psychotic break and full remission, there is a broad gray area. It can be a miasma of reality and non-reality that the sufferer may mask to varying degrees, but which influences their behavior and logic.

So, to me, AI psychosis seems apt to describe the murky areas where people are misapplying AI agents and thinking of them as social entities or suitable to drop into previously human roles, rather than carefully defining appropriate risk management strategies for this new technology.

[jayd16]

In the phrase "artificial intelligence psychosis" I'm not sure "psychosis" is even the worst misnomer.

[Nuzzerino]

That depends on what the definition of “is” is. But kidding aside, only now that we are talking about tech CEOs are people suddenly disliking the AI psychosis term in large numbers. Seems like privilege to me. I’d be interested to see/do a rigorous statistical check on aggregate word choices in these threads to confirm.

[muvlon]

All words are labels. You cannot make an argument without using them. "cheap rhetorical trick" or "resorting to labels" are just labels as well.

[horsawlarway]

I honestly think "psychosis" is a fairly valid claim to be making.

It's a mental state, not explicit illness and it's literally defined as

> Psychosis is characterized as disruptions to a person's thoughts and perceptions that make it difficult for them to recognize what is real and what is not.

Further, if you go and look at the actual source... it's repeating a claim from Box founder Aaron Levie.

Who is quoted as saying:

> “CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI,”

Which is why the title is "apparently".

[camillomiller]

It is the correct term to explain many behaviors we’re seeing

[xmcp123]

I think it's completely valid. It's generally reasonable, high powered people who are taking extreme/radical views that seem very much to be at minimum premature, and at worst delusional.

It says a lot that with few exceptions, the people on the ground dealing with AI closely on a day to day basis are the most skeptical about their positions.

[tokai]

AI psychosis is an actual term from psychiatry research.

[podgietaru]

It's become a cultural term to refer to someone suffering from delusions exacerbated by AI.

It's a little rhetorical device to draw in the reader, and personally I think it works quite well.

[estearum]

Except that the thing being described as AI psychosis in this article (and increasingly elsewhere) isn't psychosis.

Not understanding or not believing in the power of AI, or misapplying it or whatever, is not psychosis.

AI psychosis is when people suffer actual delusions.

[horsawlarway]

What do you consider a delusion?

Because I've literally seen managers who believe firmly that AI is going to replace their entire engineering organization, and are acting on that assumption as though it's a thing to take for granted, not discuss/consider/evaluate.

And my understanding of delusion is

> a fixed, false belief that is firmly held despite clear, contradictory evidence

which seems to apply pretty well in this case.

These folks are operating with the same abandon that the folks who have AI telling them they're gods are - and both are incorrect, arguably delusional.

At best you can try to argue that maybe the contradictory evidence isn't clear, and they're going to be correct. I think that's a very tenuous argument to be making, though.

[estearum]

No, it's more like "I am Jesus and I need to go shoot up a pre-school to prove it."

"I'm being followed by raccoons and my mom is controlling them"

That's what AI psychosis refers to.

You're just describing someone having a belief that you disagree with. And even ridiculous and stupid beliefs are just those. They are obviously extremely different from the types of psychoses you see in a psych ward.

[IAmGraydon]

I disagree. Psychosis is a delinking of internal and external reality. A belief that AI's can automate away employees with no actual evidence to support it could be considered a type of psychosis or at the very least, a delusion. The current AI hype bubble has a lot of commonalities with episodes of mass delusion/psychosis throughout history, and it's being compounded by the ability of large groups of like-minded people to create echo chambers via social media.

[mannanj]

Yup. Just like the label "conspiracy" theorist. Or "he's mentally sick".

[fssys]

what if you believe that someone is suffering from delusions and has beliefs that are increasingly disconnected from reality due to overexposure to ai generated responses and underexposure to human conversation? would that be psychosis?