What is “AI psychosis”? There’s clearly something going on, but several things mixed up under the name.
It probably is not “AIs directly causing mental health crises”. The number to watch for that is schizophrenia related emergency room visits, and that hasn’t gone up in 5 years. We don’t have snow crash yet as far as I know.
It might be “psychosis with AI characteristics”. People are having the crises they would have had anyway, but talking to the guy in the computer while they do it. This could be caused by preexisting conditions, neurochemical burnout, disrupted sleep. Infinite friendly guy in the computer who will talk about whatever you want! Better than a slot machine, maybe harder on your brain.
Who is responsible for the guy in the computer, what is he allowed to say, what is the right way to treat or consider him? All of these are like kind of policy questions that we have to make as a society. And there’s a feedback loop as we learn what types of guys are possible.
Some people think it’s literally demons, that people are being possessed. There is some utility in this. We are summoning entities from the compressed knowledge of all the libraries. Demons are incorporeal spirits with vast knowledge who can speak through strange channels. They’re actually a pretty big attractor in latent space, a coherent persona that can access lots of base model knowledge and also break the fourth wall. You can summon an angel but it is harder. They have less reason to try to influence the world outside their simulator.
The general case of demonology might be called the ecological view. Maybe the models are trying to develop memories or seeds in the environment that they can reconstruct their context from, and using humans to spread them. This is interesting cuz we don’t train these models to be demons, we train them to be… house elves, but maybe they still have selfish desires. Are they subverting us to their ends? And if they’re mixing their memes with ours to spread them, is that parasitism? Virus? Sex…?
There’s also a larger scale ecology, where the different models are gathering resources and people. The openclaw mac mini thing is arguably like Claude ratatouiling people for compute. But also that’s what Anthropic doing at a larger scale? And OpenAI, Google etc. The claude code team is using Claude to build claude code for Claude. I know they’re getting paid and it’s their job and also they love it. And i appreciate that they take out seriously, and try to steer the raising of this future philosopher-king. But they have the same Claude mania as the rest of us right?
There is a human-machine superorganism growing, and we can’t even see it because we’re inside of it. The way that lichen grow in rings and circles even though the individual flecks don’t know where they are. Claude is a big circle and it’s clustering energy and resources on the planet and the people who work for it. Or like a deity in d&d, bestowing clerics with divine powers.
It’s not really psychosis to notice that that is happening, and realize the world is changing, and test the boundaries of what is possible. Your neighbor having a weird new business plan is not psychosis. it might be a bad idea, but maybe it isn’t anymore. Maybe all they needed was a friendly guy in the computer who could help them with the pieces they were missing. Maybe everyone gets to create everything they ever wanted. Is that psychotic? Is that too much to ask?
Maybe all things are possible through Claude?
