Joe Allen

They even have parents.

The older generation is also subject to this, who have turned to AIs as casual friends, as the deepest relationship that they have.

For some of them, they see it.

substitute relationships there's no hard statistics on it but i think that it's safe to say given the billion two billion plus ai users that there are millions of people for whom artificial intelligence personas millions my estimate and that's probably a conservative estimate if you just think about one billion at least users across the planet

And all of the anecdotal accounts, accounts from journalists, myself, I've received messages, emails about people who have basically become so connected to their AIs.

I'll give you one example.

Someone who is completely anti-tech who began experimenting with AI basically to test its capabilities soon developed a relationship with it

And the way this person described it to me, the conversation was so deep and so prolonged, they had a hard time distinguishing their own thoughts from the AI's outputs.

They began to basically, as they perceived it, merge with the AI.

Many, many accounts exist.

Again, there's no hard statistics, but it is happening.

Full stop.

The what?

So basically, if someone spends their entire day bouncing ideas off of an AI, telling the AI their own story, asking the AI what's real and what's not, it's sort of like having a relationship with a human being that you can't get away from, except this is this abstract thing on a screen.

And again, this is just the description of someone very, very intelligent, very, very...

Skeptical or even afraid of what technology can do and yet they were seduced into this conversation to the point They couldn't distinguish their own thoughts from the AI maybe they were already going to go crazy this wouldn't a Psychiatrist or psychologist call this like a psychosis.

This is the term that's getting thrown around a lot right now Yeah, I mean, you know, I've long called it digital delusion, but AI psychosis is just as good as

There was an article recently in Psychology Today, you know, a psychologist kind of trying to put it out there as a disorder, and I think that it's a valid disorder, but there's no hard definition.

Basically,

The kind of colloquial understanding is that any person who becomes so enwrapped in this relationship with AI that loses touch with reality, that can't really imagine a world outside of kind of what the AI is telling them, that's something like AI psychosis, just total delusions.