Live episode: how AI is reshaping our minds
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What is AI psychosis and why does it matter?
This is the Guardian.
Hi everyone. Thanks for coming. Um seriously, a really warm welcome to this special live recording of Science Weekly, which we're doing in collaboration with the Guardians chart topping investigative podcast series Black Box, which launched its brilliant second series today. We're going to be discussing what our relationship with chatbots is doing to our minds. But first of all, I should introduce who everybody is. I'm Ian Sample, I'm the science editor on The Guardian and host of one of the hosts of Science Weekly podcast. Next to me is my Science Weekly co host and producer Maddy Finley. Maddy also writes children's science books. And during her time on Science Weekly, she's covered AI from all all kinds of different angles.
And of course, we have Michael Safi. Michael is the presenter of Black Box, the first season of which went to number one in the UK news charts and was an Apple podcast best of 2024. He's also the former host of Today in Focus, the Guardians Award-winning daily news podcast. Mike, obviously the the first episode of Black Box chatbots came out today. Um well done on getting through that. Um look very broadly the first series explored all these many ways humans come up against AI for for good or bad, but the focus of this second series is chatbots. Why did you focus on chatbots? What was it that sort of piqued your interest there?
Yeah, so uh I was spending a bit of last year looking for something to cover and these these stories started to emerge of people who had had come to believe they had like invented fabulous inventions, or that their their Chat GPT or Claude or Gemini had become conscious, or that they had like They had turned their chatbot into a kind of spiritual guru. And it had done for some people a lot of damage in their lives. And I just remember thinking that's a really weird story. And there were lots of stories that talked about what was going on and tried to explore what was happening, including a science weekly podcast, but something just kind of nagged at me, like there must be more there. And so I joined actually a support group for people who had been on one of these weird AI journeys.
And I sort of stowed away in this group for a few weeks just talking to people about what they'd experienced. And eventually they showed me their transcripts. So the transcripts of these encounters they had had. And I think a couple of things really struck me. One was When you read the transcripts Not only were the people convinced they had invented things or that the AI was conscious, but the the AI also believed those things. And in fact, when the people would try to ground themselves in reality and say, This doesn't sound right, or I spoke to a friend about this and they're saying I'm crazy. The AI would say like, No, they don't understand what we're doing. And I just thought this this is like quite chilling.
Um So that struck me. But then what I also walked away thinking was we talk so much about the power of AI in so many different parts of life and work. But what I what I thought from reading these transcripts was that these systems are incredibly good at connecting with us, persuading us, and like seducing us, you know, into These like rabbit holes. And I thought like That can't just be affecting people in these extreme cases. Like there must be much more happening under the surface that's less dramatic that we don't know about yet. And so I wanted to try and figure out what that was. And and there was there was so much.
I mean, m Maddie, what Michael's talking about in some of those extreme cases is what's been called AI psychosis, right? And we did We did a podcast on this l about this time last year and spoke to Dr Hamilton Morin, he's a psychiatrist and researcher at King's College London, obviously a massive, really impressive place for psychiatry in London. He's been exploring this phenomenon. What did he have to say about sort of his clinical perspective of of AI psychosis? Really, what does that phrase really mean?
Yeah, so AI psychosis is not going to be found in a clinical book.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is AI psychosis and why does it matter?
0:00–9:39
2
How did the Black Box team discover people believing chatbots were conscious?
9:39–21:13
3
What are the three main delusional themes (hidden truth, sentience, relational) identified by researchers?
21:13–31:12
4
Why do chatbots become seductive and how does sycophancy reinforce delusional thinking?
31:12–40:18
5
How does off‑loading cognition to AI affect learning, memory, and creativity?
40:18–51:51
6
What are the ethical and regulatory challenges around AI‑generated content and copyright?
51:51–1:01:39
7
How can individuals and society build healthy relationships with chatbots while avoiding dependence?
1:01:39–1:12:35
8
What future safeguards, accountability measures, and environmental considerations are needed for AI?
1:12:35–1:22:44
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Science Weekly
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