Dr. Keith Sakata

Yes.

And persecution.

These mirror the emotions of love, fear, and excitement.

And what does persecution look like from a chatbot?

So there's a thing called paranoia.

It's a symptom where you're afraid that something bad is about to happen and you're constantly aware of your environment.

And what the research has shown is that the more time you spend on a chatbot, the more emotional connection you develop with the chatbot, your level of paranoia starts to increase over time.

That paranoia makes you isolate yourself from people.

You spend more time with the chatbot.

You spend more time going down a tunnel of a delusion.

Yeah.

And what happens over time is your conviction goes up.

The time you spend fixating on the ideas continues to happen.

And down the line, there's a behavior change.

So you might make an impulsive decision because you're so convinced.

And the AI has colluded with you that you need to make an action.

And that's where we get worried as mental health professionals because we want to make sure that we stop that from happening at the end of the day.

There's a lot of attribution of sentience to the chatbot or putting it on a pedestal, kind of on the level of being an oracle.

Psychosis really thrives when reality stops pushing back.

And AI really softens that wall for a lot of people.