[spprashant]

AI psychosis just a lazy term, much like Trump Derangement Syndrome.

It sounds hostile while also removing any scope for productive discourse.

Once you call someone a 'psycho', they are less likely to engage with you, and more likely to double down on their views.

[cyberax]

I saw that psychosis happening in real time with a coworker. It absolutely is a real phenomenon. After a while, he started presenting ChatGPT's replies as the absolute truth.

I don't think there ever has been something that can _answer_ you back and reinforce your delusion. This is a new thing.

[aurareturn]

I'm one of the biggest AI bulls on HN. I think given to the right people, it's immensely powerful and I think people in general underestimate how powerful it will get.

However, AI psychosis in 2026 is definitely real. I have a non-technical high ranking (nepotism) coworker who discovered vibe coding and is now absolutely wild. He thinks he can build anything and he questions why our dev team isn't moving fast enough. Why aren't we changing the UI to a newer, more modern one every single week? Why aren't we vibe coding this new feature in 2 hours? This guy generates massive amount of text and calls it a roadmap or a spec.

It's honestly maddening working with people under AI psychosis.

[aurareturn]

I want to add that I think AI absolutely massively inflates the dunning kruger effect.

[slfnflctd]

As a longtime student of the human condition, it is so obvious to me that this is real, has been happening, and will continue to happen as long as homo sapiens (in our current state) exists.

False beliefs are not a neutral thing to ignore. The way people react to them has strikingly tangible consequences for the rest of us.

A frightening number of people already believe all kinds of wildly irrational things about AI, and I don't see any way this doesn't become an increasingly complex issue we will all continue to have to deal with for the rest of our lives. In addition to everyone who comes after us.

[LorenPechtel]

Some *thing*, no, but we have seen the same thing with a slower feedback loop before: every conspiracy that comes along. Adherents fall into a trap of believing each other, getting more and more extreme. And losing the ability to rationally consider relevant information. An example I hit: 9/11 truthers. I wanted to put some scale to numbers, compared the energy of the fall to a small nuke. He seized on that as my admitting the towers were brought down by a nuke and I had a hard time explaining that it was simply a comparison.

It used to take filtering through a group of like-minded nuts, now we don't need a slow filtering through other nuts.

[cyberax]

Yep, and the emergence of social networks became a real catalyst for that. But that still requires humans in that feedback loop, it takes time and attention. And people also have different opinions, even if they believe in roughly the same conspiracy (was it a plane, a truck bomb, a nuke?).

ChatGPT provides an instant sycophantic reply. I think they toned that down a bit, but it's still completely unparalleled.

[jdgoesmarching]

It’s a real phenomenon that gets lazily slapped onto anyone using AI poorly.

[fullmoon]

It’s absolutely lazy, because it’s not psychosis.

[causal]

It might be psychosis.

> Psychosis is the term for a collection of symptoms that happen when a person has trouble telling the difference between what’s real and what’s not[0]

For many seemingly intelligent, rational, competent humans AI has become a layer between them and reality that has absolutely sabotaged their ability to know what is real.

[0] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/23012-psychos...

[ssl-3]

There probably are a non-zero number of people in the world who are afflicted with real-live AI psychosis.

For everyone else, that term is being applied with disingenuous levels of incompetence.

[pocksuppet]

There are lots of people who have chatbox psychosis, like the one who ChatGPT convinced to shoot up a school.

[gretch]

Or maybe this guy was always going to reach the endpoint of shooting up a school, and he happened to talk to ChatGPT along the way.

These people have existed long before llm chats and they had no problem committing horrific offence in the absence

[mcmcmc]

AI-induced psychosis... "AI Psychosis" is not a real thing. People who aren't psych professionals should stop trying to make psych diagnoses. I made another comment in another thread about this that got downvoted to hell, but as someone who has experienced actual psychosis (several years ago, unrelated to AI) it's extremely grating to see "AI Psychosis" become part of the zeitgeist, especially when psychosis is still highly stigmatized.

[saltcured]

It's a subtlety of context that distinguishes hyperbole from delusion...

[Lerc]

There is a difference between being unable to tell if something is true or false and bring unable to tell if something is real or not.

Eveyone has things that they don't know the answer to. There are also plenty of things that an individual is wrong about. There is a fundimental differsnce between being wrong about something and being delusional.

>AI has become a layer between them and reality that has absolutely sabotaged their ability to know what is real.

You could say much the same about adgenda driven media coverage on any given topic. That can lead a rational person to believe untrue things. The distinction is that, given that perspective, it is reasonable to believe those untrue things.

If you decade everyone who firmly believes untrue things to be psychotic you would have to apply that to everyone who doesn't share your religious views.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's psychosis in the sense that it's a strong feeling at odds with reality.

And I wonder how many CEOs believe these LLMs are truly sentient and truly friendly and supportive.

[andyfilms1]

Correct, it's addiction.

[supern0va]

It's not. Believe it or not, words mean things.

[ulbu]

this comment sounds so ironic in the context of a discussion pertaining to llms

[amanaplanacanal]

The problem is, most of us are not psychologists and don't know enough to accurately diagnose somebody. But we can definitely see when someone is acting crazy.

[Brendinooo]

I'm not sure that's a good term either, unless we're also saying that nail guns and microwaves are addictions.

[ssl-3]

I used to have a job that involved swinging a hammer over and over again. I got pretty good at it.

Then the boss-man bought a minty-new Senco 650 air nailer for me to use.

At first, I could take it or leave it. After all, I was proud at the skill I gained in driving nails with a hammer, and the ways my muscles seemed to automatically steer the nail straight into a board without missing a beat even if things started going sideways.

But the air nailer sure was faster. And it only had one job, but it did that job fantastically. I started using it more and more.

Things very quickly got to the point where I was organizing my work to maximize my use of that new tool, which is to say: The tool began to have a role in controlling my actions.

It even began to control my emotions; I felt better and more accomplished after a day of using that tool than I did when I couldn't.

And this control accelerated: When the tool didn't work today or we ran out of the special coils of nails it used, then my focus didn't shift back to swinging a hammer. It instead shifted towards fixing the tool or finding more nails to feed into it.

The more I used it, the more powerless I was to avoid it. As time moved on, I got worse at swinging a hammer and increasingly dependent upon that air nailer.

(That's a true story. If I understand what addiction is, then I think I just described an addiction to an air nailer.)

[Brendinooo]

I'm gonna disagree, but before I do: love this story, thanks for typing it up.

I guess my point is: tools are like this. A moldboard plow was better than a straight plow, and therefore...what, people became addicted to them? I'm addicted to grocery stores and dollars as a means to acquire the food I need to survive? Hey, even your hand nailing pushed out the mortise-and-tenon people! Talk about sacrificing craft for convenience...

I don't think "addiction" is the right word to try and describe what's going on there.

Any new tech that ends up "winning" (being adopted by the masses) is going to do so because it becomes indispensable, and when it wins it usually displaces some sort of craft that required skills that were cultivated through struggle, and will be missed by those who have those skills and are no longer differentiated by them.

Thinking out loud: when is the description of "addiction" more accurate? It's when the thing is a vice: it doesn't provide enough value to justify its costs. We tolerate caffeine addictions because caffeine is cheap, doesn't have a ton of health drawbacks, stuff like coffee and pop taste good, and we get productivity gains. Cigarettes are less tolerated because the health drawbacks are more pronounced and the smoke gets everywhere. Social media gets called an addiction because people see the hours lost to doomscrolling as worse than the human connections that are made. And so on.

So, back to LLMs, I guess the question is more about how the thing is being used! I wouldn't apologize for feeling addicted to a machine that writes my unit tests for me; but I'd feel bad if I started having an emotional affair with one...

[daemin]

There's definitely some form of addictive behaviour going on in a similar vein to poker/slot machines. There are studies and anecdotes that I've heard where the most thrill and reward comes not from the wins at gambling but from the near-wins, those close calls and near misses. It seems very similar to the kind of output that an LLM generates where it looks like what you want but is not quite there so you try to fix it by going again.

[ssl-3]

There's lots of very healthy addictions. There are also lots of very unhealthy addictions. Dental hygiene addiction? Good -- if kept in check (it can go too far). Heroin addiction? Bad -- always bad!

These things are all included under the addiction umbrella.

I was addicted to using that air nailer. The boss might tell me to use my hammer instead when it was out of service and to just get the work done, but when that happened I'd start fixing it anyway as soon as he wasn't looking... like a drug addict who is working towards getting his next hit at every opportunity.

I'm not compelled to feel bad about having been addicted to using that tool. I did a lot of good work with it. It was a good addiction to have. I fed this addiction 5 days a week for years.

Anyway, yes: LLMs. I use the shit out of LLM tools. I understand what they are, and what they are not -- I'm not psychotic in this way at all. I spend a lot of time correcting their errors so whatever I'm working on can move forward.

And after several decades of trying, LLMs allow me to finally accept that I'm just terrible at writing code. I used to feel inferior about this. Every little project would get completely hung up on something that many, many other folks would have no trouble overcoming.

Like: Somewhere in a box in my basement I even have the original TI MSP430 LaunchPad kit that I bought at launch 16 years ago with focused intention to get a very specific thing done with it. I never got it done. As time moved on, I bought ESP dev boards and Pi Picos hoping that things would finally let me finish my one simple little project, but I always got hung up whether in C or C++ or uPython or whatever. Different IDEs, no IDEs, different build processes, whatever. The process always stalled and died. Every. Single. Time.

Again, I suck at code. Being able to finally accept this has been richly rewarding.

With an ESP32 board, Codex, a clear vision of what I wanted, and a fragile dysfunctional draft written in uPython that didn't come close to actually working (despite years of effort), I got that thing working properly and cleanly in one single evening -- in C++.

16 years of effort resolved all at once, just like that. With guidance, the bot even wrote its own tests that worked with real-world feedback from the hardware the ESP32 was driving.

That all felt great. It was a tremendous relief.

I spent part of another evening making it fancy with a web interface for tuning and monitoring. I transferred the circuit over to perfboard and installed it in the place I've wanted it for 16 years. It's now a completely functional prototype. I want to rejigger it a bit with a custom PCB and a different MCU, but with LLMs I find that all very practical and approachable without fear.

This tool lets me work with things that I am otherwise incapable of working with. It lets me do things I was always ultimately incapable of doing.

Am I addicted to it? Yes. I'm completely finished with trying to write code the old-fashioned way, and LLMs make me feel good about finally accomplishing some good stuff. Like the air nailer in construction, I use LLMs compulsively in these tasks.

For programming, the bot is the first thing I reach for; in fact, it's the only thing I reach for.

If the bot is unreachable today and I have programming to do, then I seek to restore my use of the the bot just like I sought to fix the air nailer back when I had nailing to do.

And like any other addict of any other thing: I don't care if this causes harm to me, or to others, or the world itself. Maybe it's turning a part of my brain into mush; I don't care (the coding part was apparently mush to begin with). I enjoy using it enough that I'm just going to keep doing it no matter what. I've got more programming to do now than I ever have before, and so my use is accelerating: This is the feedback cycle typical of addiction.

I'm not sorry about any of that at all.

[j4k3]

A cat named Jacques Ellul would probably call your addiction a technique. And it's definitely fleshed out in his book.

https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...

Pretty prescient stuff!

[ssl-3]

That book has a greater number of lengthy preambles than I've ever before seen for any single volume. It's very impressive to me in that way.

I will try to give it a read.

Thanks!

[celdon25]

Seems like privilege to soften the term only now that we are talking about CEOs.

[Brendinooo]

You're claiming that the person you replied to changed tune when we started talking about CEOs?

[coliveira]

It has always been ok to talk about psychosis in the general public, known as a "mass psychosis". Why is that suddenly a problem for CEOs?

[worik]

> AI psychosis just a lazy term, much like Trump Derangement Syndrome.

It is how languages works. The written word is not a precise art.

Both those terms carry meaning, even if they abuse the term "derangement" and "psychosis"

[shimman]

It's also a great way to dampen the massive bipartisan moment against AI. Just attack your critics, attack their arguments, and do nothing to better the lives of people.

[jimmy2times]

I think the bipartisan moment against AI is in large part (surprise, surprise) optics. In reality, the powers that be may have already set their sights on AI as the next "too big to fail" industry due to a perceived economic threat from China.

[Willish42]

Like a lot of things in tech and pop science, "AI psychosis" had a narrow(-er) definition [1] (psychotic-like symptoms, i.e. believing the AI is in love with you, or being fueled by the AI into some strong delusions or belief in a "mission" so important your faith in it becomes quasi-religious/"destiny"), which aligned loosely with actual psychiatric symptoms.

The much broader version of people getting a bit too full of themselves or trusting an LLM's sycophantic nature as validation that they are right or uniquely smart with their ideas seems to be the version I'm seeing more of in tech news sites and places like HN

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/20250...