Rose Rimler

I wanted to know what it could look like and how people could get to this point.

So I called up Keith Sakata.

He's a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco.

And he has treated people who have needed to be hospitalized for psychosis after talking with AI.

He says he's seen 12 people like this so far this year.

Wow.

I asked him what this actually looks like, what his patients are saying.

That tracks actually with a preprint that came out this year that rounded up cases of AI psychosis from media reports.

They found like a few different themes that kept coming up from people's psychotic issues.

One theme that came up was that people started to think the AI was like a divine, all-knowing presence.

Another one is people started to believe that with the help of AI, they've discovered hidden truths about the nature of reality.

Do they think the AI is actually like causing the psychosis?

We don't know.

And we reached out to OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, and asked them about this.

A spokesperson there basically said they're working on this.

They're tweaking the model to make it respond better in these kinds of scenarios.

For his part, Keith says that in all the cases that he's seen, the patient had some other risk factor for psychosis, like they hadn't been sleeping, for example.

So he doesn't think it was ever solely the AI that caused this, but he thinks it may have made things worse.

And one reason is that the chatbots are often like sycophantic.

So they tend to agree with you kind of no matter what you're saying.