James Purtill

ultimately against, you know, some of your more harebrained ideas.

That isn't exactly what we're seeing with AI.

There is this tendency for the AI to essentially just encourage and amplify the user's delusions.

This is what really struck me about the story.

When you hear AI psychosis, it kind of has this clinical...

ring to it and you think, oh, that's sort of a mental health term.

It's actually something that's kind of a lot more everyday than that.

It's just AI-induced delusions and it can happen to people

we think, with no history of mental health problems.

And it can start with the most innocuous interaction.

You know, there's so many stories of people just dabbling at the edges and then being drawn in sort of iteratively through this process of becoming more and more interested in what the AI has to say and the way it validates them, in the way it's sort of this trusted and forever patient and forever available friend and confidant.

And then the key kind of tipping point tends to be when

they start to believe that the AI is sentient.

And that's the sort of red flag in all of these cases that have been studied of AI delusion is that it's necessary to believe that the AI is sentient in order to have, say, a romantic relationship with the AI or in order to believe that the AI is making some amazing breakthrough.

What are some examples of delusions that have arisen in this way?

There's so many.

I mean, I spoke with Etienne Brisson.

Now, he's a really interesting guy.

He's from Canada.

He set up something called the Human Line Project, which is a global network for people who believe they've been harmed by AI chatbots.