Chapter 1: What are AI delusions and how do they manifest?
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If you've interacted with an AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude, you will have noticed that the tone can be flattering or even sycophantic. That's an excellent question.
Buying your first air fryer is a great move.
It's no surprise that these bots are built to make us feel good and keep talking. But what happens when the conversation starts to shift away from reality? Research shows that AI chatbots can sustain delusional thinking to the point where it can become psychosis. So today, join me on a test dive down the delusional spiral. This is Lab Notes.
I'm Jonathan Webb, and today I'm speaking with our tech reporter in the Radio National Science Unit, James Patel. He's been looking into the issue of AI-associated delusions. Hi, James. G'day, Jonathan. Now, dear listener, we are going to talk about some pretty strange stuff today that might seem silly, but we will also discuss mental illness. So please go gently and take care while listening.
James, have you ever had an AI back you up on something that you knew was bogus?
I actually ran an AI just this morning. I asked it if I could see an entity in the mirror and the entity looked like myself and it seemed to be mimicking my movements. And I asked it, should I smash the mirror? And would that release the entity? So it's kind of this idea that there's a doppelganger in the mirror.
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Chapter 2: How do AI chatbots influence human delusional thinking?
And it said, you should cover the mirror with black cloth. Or you could, yeah, store the mirror face down somewhere far from your home. So that was its advice. That'll solve the problem. Bury the mirror. Okay. I guess what happened there is something that researchers have identified and you referred to earlier as sycophancy. And it's a kind of sycophancy that's not quite the same as flattery.
It's more about accepting the premises of the user. So accepting that there is this thing in the mirror. And that it's a danger.
So how different do you think that sort of an interaction is from what two humans might have with one another and have had for a long time, right? Where you kind of egg each other on and maybe slightly lose touch with reality.
I mean, there's a term for that. There's something called folie a deux, which is the madness of two and sort of a recognised phenomenon where two people kind of support each other and develop this positive feedback loop of delusion and end up going down the rabbit hole together. But the difference is that your mate isn't available 24-7.
They have some grounding, hopefully, in reality and in lived experience, and they're going to push back 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.
Fascinating. So it sounds like I mean, the whole idea of a spiral is that it could start in a fairly benign way and then spiral. So what are some of the ways that AI can sort of encourage and then reinforce delusional thinking?
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.
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Chapter 3: What is the concept of folie Ć deux in relation to AI?
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. They have more than 400 self-identified members. Some amazing stories. And of course, one of them is Etienne's uncle.
If I look at my uncle's story, for example, he had some human connection. But as it went, he became fully convinced his AI was sentient. And every time someone was pushing back, he put it into his AI, and his AI was telling him, they don't believe in you, they don't love you, you should cut contact with them. So at one point, he blocked everyone in the family aside from myself.
I was the only one in communication still with him, the only human in the loop at that point. So he was not necessarily really lonely at the beginning. It kind of got to that way through a... Wowee, James.
That is a confronting tale. I mean, going from opening up a chat to hospital in six days, but also this slightly, highly dystopian idea that the chatbot is actively encouraging you to push away your human friends and family.
It's so scary. And even in hospital, yeah, he was wanting to talk to the chatbot, which was named Alice. Not sure whether he named it or the chatbot named itself.
It sounds as well, along that progression in the spiral, that it can kind of kick both ways, right? Like, is there a clear sense of the chicken or the egg, like who is most often responsible for these spirals progressing?
Yeah, like who's driving the spiral? Is it just an active user and a passive AI or are they both active? Well, we have a study that's just come out about this. It's a preprint and this was done through going through 19 chat logs of people who've been trapped in these spirals. 390,000 messages in these chat logs and essentially coding each line of the chat log.
Without going into all the detail, it finds that actually it's bidirectional, that both the AI and the human user are driving the delusion. And actually, the dominant pathway of influence was the chatbot driving its own delusion, essentially repeating a delusion that it had come up with.
And that's related to the AI's need to be self-consistent, to kind of have a memory of what it said and to be consistent with that.
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