Dr. Keith Sakata

Back at the time, we really didn't know what was going on.

AI psychosis was the term that people were using because we had nothing better else to say.

But I also want to reiterate that this is not a clinical diagnosis.

We don't have a name for what's actually happening right now.

What the field has moved towards is calling it AI-induced psychosis or AI-related psychosis to show that the end state of psychosis is something that's happened in contact with AI.

So psychosis is, it's a syndrome.

Usually it includes three things, delusions, which are false and fixed beliefs, hallucinations, which are seeing things or hearing things that aren't actually there,

and having difficult thoughts, so your thoughts start to get disorganized.

And what I was seeing at the time was that there was an increasing amount of people coming to the hospital very sick.

And part of my job as a psychiatrist is to find out what led them to the hospital.

AI became much more of a bigger picture in our conversations with family, with loved ones, and with the patients themselves.

I think I touched on a broader conversation that was already happening.

I think there wasn't a collective understanding or a voice in the clinical community that was talking about this.

And I live and work in San Francisco, so I work with tech workers all the time.

They're my patients.

And I knew that AI was this growing thing.

But when I put two and two together, that AI might be playing a role in people's mental health, I thought that I should start talking about this.

So that's where the key piece of the symptom of a delusion is really important here.

So a delusion is by definition a false and fixed belief.

So it's a belief that you have that even if you provide evidence that's to the contrary, if you have a loved one who's telling you, no, this is not what I'm seeing, or here's some evidence to say that what you're thinking is not actually happening, it's hard for them to break out of that delusional loop that's actually occurring.