Using "psychosis" is a cheap rhetorical trick. There's no need to label something "psychosis" when making your point, except to automatically discredit whatever you're responding to.
In other words, only people who are afraid their point won't stand on its own merits would resort to saying "X is suffering from AI psychosis." An idea is true or false on its own. If you're resorting to labels, you're just trying to automatically win the argument, instead of saying something substantive or interesting.
In the phrase "artificial intelligence psychosis" I'm not sure "psychosis" is even the worst misnomer.
All words are labels. You cannot make an argument without using them. "cheap rhetorical trick" or "resorting to labels" are just labels as well.
I honestly think "psychosis" is a fairly valid claim to be making.
It's a mental state, not explicit illness and it's literally defined as
> Psychosis is characterized as disruptions to a person's thoughts and perceptions that make it difficult for them to recognize what is real and what is not.
Further, if you go and look at the actual source... it's repeating a claim from Box founder Aaron Levie.
Who is quoted as saying:
> “CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI,”
Which is why the title is "apparently".
I think it's completely valid. It's generally reasonable, high powered people who are taking extreme/radical views that seem very much to be at minimum premature, and at worst delusional.
It says a lot that with few exceptions, the people on the ground dealing with AI closely on a day to day basis are the most skeptical about their positions.
It's become a cultural term to refer to someone suffering from delusions exacerbated by AI.
It's a little rhetorical device to draw in the reader, and personally I think it works quite well.
It is the correct term to explain many behaviors we’re seeing
AI psychosis is an actual term from psychiatry research.
Yup. Just like the label "conspiracy" theorist. Or "he's mentally sick".
what if you believe that someone is suffering from delusions and has beliefs that are increasingly disconnected from reality due to overexposure to ai generated responses and underexposure to human conversation? would that be psychosis?
I disagree. Psychosis is a delinking of internal and external reality. A belief that AI's can automate away employees with no actual evidence to support it could be considered a type of psychosis or at the very least, a delusion. The current AI hype bubble has a lot of commonalities with episodes of mass delusion/psychosis throughout history, and it's being compounded by the ability of large groups of like-minded people to create echo chambers via social media.
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It also underplays what I've personally witnessed that I would consider true AI psychosis.
I worked with someone who sincerely believed he was spiritually co-evolving with his army of sycophantic AI agents (the agents would be tasked with discussing his thoughts at night and collaborated to give him morning reports about his progress). He would publicly write about how relationships with friends and family collapsing was a natural consequence of being so "advanced". I also never once saw any meaningful work done by his team of "agents", they existed solely tell him how smart he was (of course he specifically set up the system to 'challenge' him but... in practice that didn't seem to be working).
I suspect there are a lot more people quietly going through something similar but keeping it to themselves better.
I would distinguish this type of behavior from people who over ambitious views of what can be accomplished with AI.