psychosis at scale

actually llm psychosis is obviously real and obviously a major issue and obviously only going to get worse. the weird memetic backlash against it looks like a combination of motivated reasoners, idiots, and "nothing ever happens"-addicts

"it's only happening for people who are already insane" yeah obviously people who are 100% mentally healthy aren't going to be randomly driven to schizophrenia. still when someone with a family history smokes weed and gets pushed to psychosis it was in fact the weed that did it

suicide is heavily memetic and transmissible. the internet more than doubled the rates of anorexia. serious mental illness *is* compounded and created by environmental triggers.

right now hundreds of thousands to millions of people are genuinely addicted to ai boyfriends and girlfriends. they're real people, they have subreddits, they tell u about it, they petition sam altman to bring back 4o.

they might not be mentally healthy either way, but they are certainly in a worse state due to having this totally new way to interact with something fake that acts like it loves and validates them 24/7. that is the creation of a new class of drug.

i have personally watched people descend down the rabbit hole of talking to llms day and night about increasingly strange and incomprehensible theories. ur friend who sometimes has strange ideas about physics and reads a questionable crank subreddit or two is mostly fine...

but when they're provided with constant validation and feedback and random suggestions and poking and prodding, that can put them in an entirely different state.

if cult leaders can put ideas in people's heads that derail their whole lives, so can llms

"why aren't they showing up in intake forms" cmon man how competent do u think the american psychiatric organizations are? they'll still tell u antidepressants work by modulating serotonin with a straight face. it'll take years for this shit to reach medical consensus

this is a real concern, and as far as i can tell most of the people calling bullshit are basically just wishing really hard that ai was safe, easy, or just too silly and dumb to result in anything like this.