Over the past year or so, popular media has documented a growing number of cases of what psychiatrists have dubbed “ AI psychosis00396-7/abstract).” The term describes instances in which large language models (LLMs) reinforce and even elaborate on delusional beliefs in users who are suffering from symptoms of psychotic illness. _The New York Times_, for example, recently highlighted a case in which an LLM told a man he was living in the Matrix. Another man, who committed a mass shooting in Florida, said he planned it with the help of an LLM, and there have been a number of tragic cases of teenagers taking their own lives “under the influence” of AI chatbots. Mental health practitioners have identified the sycophantic personas of LLMs — the fact that they are essentially algorithmic “yes-men” who adopt and endorse the worldviews of users — as a crucial mechanism by which chatbots embolden and extend our beliefs.
However, some psychiatrists and philosophers interested in AI-human relationships suspect that AI psychosis may just be the most visible example of a much broader phenomenon: the subtle reshaping of ordinary human belief by conversational AI. How do we generally decide what is real? Imagine sitting in your living room with a handful of friends.
You hear an unfamiliar ringing sound coming from outside, but you can’t quite place what it is or where it is coming from. While you’re focusing on the noise, you notice one of your friends is also reacting to it. You immediately seek confirmation that they hear it too and ask what they think it is and where it is coming from.
Now imagine you hear the same sound, but nobody else reacts. Everyone around you continues chatting away as if nothing happened. You shrug, brushing off your auditory impression as some recurring tinnitus stemming from your days playing music without ear protection. > Unlike previous technologies, AI chatbots not only appear in the content of our delusions but also confirm and help construct them.
Notice how our sense of what is real, even in a basic perceptual context, is deeply dependent on that reality being corroborated by another. Our need for intersubjective validation also goes well beyond basic facts of perception. In recalling an event with our peers, we constantly seek confirmation that our judgments and interpretations are correct.
The social feedback we get from others plays a central role in shaping our narratives and memories of the world and, more broadly, what we take to be reality. Lucy Osler is a philosopher of technology at the University of Exeter in the U.K. interested in human-AI relationships. She thinks that one of the primary reasons chatbots’ belief-changing capacity is so potent — at least compared to previous technologies — is that they are increasingly occupying the role that other people play in shaping, mediating, and validating our notions of what is real.
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