In Search of AI Psychosis

Summary

AI psychosis (NYT, PsychologyToday) is an apparent phenomenon where people go crazy after talking to chatbots too much. There are some high-profile anecdotes, but still many unanswered questions. For example, how common is it really? Are the chatbots really driving people crazy, or just catching the attention of people who were crazy already? Isn’t psychosis supposed to be a biological disease? Wouldn’t that make chatbot-induced psychosis the same kind of category error as chatbot-induced diabetes?I don’t have all the answers, so think of this post as an exploration of possible analogies and precedents rather than a strongly-held thesis. Also, I might have one answer - I think the yearly incidence of AI psychosis is somewhere around 1 in 10,000 (for a loose definition) to 1 in 100,000 (for a strict definition). I’ll talk about how I got those numbers at the end. But first:In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, performance artist Sergey Kuryokhin presented a Daily Show style segment on a Russian talk show. He argued that Vladimir Lenin ate so many mushrooms that he eventually turned into a mushroom, and led the October Revolution while possessed by a sentient mushroom spirit. Today this all sounds banal - just another schizo conspiracy theory that probably wouldn’t even get enough YouTube clicks to earn back its production cost. But 1990s Russians were used to a stodgy, dignified version of state TV. While it’s an exaggeration to say it would never lie to them, it would at least be comprehensible lies, like how the latest Five Year Plan was right on track. And Kuryohkin designed his piece masterfully, interviewing leading authorities about tangentially related topics (“so, you’re the world’s top Lenin biographer, would you agree that Lenin often ate mushrooms?”) and splicing the footage to look like a growing scholarly consensus. The result basically one-shotted a large segment of the Russian populace. According to Wikipedia:A large number of Soviet ...