AI psychosis (NYT, PsychologyToday) is an apparent phenomenon where people go crazy after talking to chatbots too much. There are some high-profile anecdotes, but still many unanswered questions. For example, how common is it really? Are the chatbots really driving people crazy, or just catching the attention of people who were crazy already? Isn’t psychosis supposed to be a biological disease? Wouldn’t that make chatbot-induced psychosis the same kind of category error as chatbot-induced diabetes?
I don’t have all the answers, so think of this post as an exploration of possible analogies and precedents rather than a strongly-held thesis. Also, I might have one answer - I think the yearly incidence of AI psychosis is somewhere around 1 in 10,000 (for a loose definition) to 1 in 100,000 (for a strict definition). I’ll talk about how I got those numbers at the end. But first:
I. Lenin Was A Mushroom
In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, performance artist Sergey Kuryokhin presented a Daily Show style segment on a Russian talk show. He argued that Vladimir Lenin ate so many mushrooms that he eventually turned into a mushroom, and led the October Revolution while possessed by a sentient mushroom spirit.
Today this all sounds banal - just another schizo conspiracy theory that probably wouldn’t even get enough YouTube clicks to earn back its production cost. But 1990s Russians were used to a stodgy, dignified version of state TV. While it’s an exaggeration to say it would never lie to them, it would at least be comprehensible lies, like how the latest Five Year Plan was right on track. And Kuryohkin designed his piece masterfully, interviewing leading authorities about tangentially related topics (“so, you’re the world’s top Lenin biographer, would you agree that Lenin often ate mushrooms?”) and splicing the footage to look like a growing scholarly consensus. The result basically one-shotted a large segment of the Russian populace. According to Wikipedia:
A large number of Soviet citizens (one estimate puts the number at 11.3 million audience members) took the deadpan "interview" at face value, in spite of the absurd claims presented. Sholokhov has said that perhaps the most notable result of the show was an appeal by a group of party members to the Leningrad Regional Committee of the CPSU to clarify the veracity of Kuryokhin's claim. According to Sholokhov, in response to the request one of the top regional functionaries stated that "Lenin could not have been a mushroom" because "a mammal cannot be a plant."
Aside from the usual conclusion (that history is more charming and fascinating than you can imagine) I conclude two things from this incident.
First, much like LLMs, lots of people don’t really have world models. They believe what their friends believe, or what has good epistemic vibes. If they don’t currently think that Lenin was a mushroom, it’s not because they understand human agency / scientific materialism / psychedelia and have a well-worked out theory of why fungi can’t contain sentient mushroom spirits that possess leading communist politicians. They don’t believe it because it feels absurd. They predict that other people would laugh at them if they said it. If they get told that it it’s not absurd, or that maybe people would laugh at them if they didn’t say it, then their opinion will at least teeter precariously.
But second, if a source which should be official starts acting in unofficial ways, it can take people a while to catch on. And I think some people - God help them - treat AI as the sort of thing which should be official. Science fiction tells us that AIs are smarter than us - or, if not smarter, at least perfectly rational computer beings who dwell in a world of mathematical precision. And ChatGPT is produced by OpenAI, a $300 billion company run by Silicon Valley wunderkind Sam Altman. If your drinking buddy says you’re a genius, you know he’s probably putting you on. If the perfectly rational machine spirit trained in a city-sized data center by the world’s most cutting-edge company says you’re a genius . . . maybe you’re a genius?
Kelsey Piper discusses her new parenting technique: when her young daughter refuses to hear reason, they ask the AI who’s right. The AI says she should listen to her parents, and the child is mollified:
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