> Because what loosened those patients’ grip on reality was prolonged exposure to a voice that sounded informed and assured, and always felt supportive and patient.

Clearly Opus 5 was an overreaction to this then.

I've thought long and hard over leadership and management, worked in consulting shops, big tech, startups, scaleups and then I tried launching my own indie practice where I cold called numerous business owners and CEOs trying to sell them AI automation tech.

The answer to this chaos is deceptively simple - people want to make money first and foremost, then they want the money to be recurring and somewhat stable, and then select few want to grow and make more money with new and latest tech, but not at the expense of what they already have.

Everything else is in service to this, anything that gets in the way of this is rejected and ignored.

I don't like the term "AI psychosis" because I think it's the incorrect way to describe what's happening here. I think "cognitive surrender" is a much better term. Because it's not that people are getting "crazy" due to AI, but rather that somehow these people are totally fine with having zero critical thinking and blindly trusting whatever junk the AI decides to regurgitate. A lot of my colleagues don't even have opinions of their own anymore, they are just meat proxies to whatever AI they happen to be using at the moment. Which is really purely about laziness and / or ignorance rather than a medical condition.

IMO many of my coworkers are in a state of unreality that seems related to AI usage. There's a kind of religious faith that these tools can't fail, only be failed. I use them too, not least because it's expected of me by management, but some people seem to spend so much time with them that they develop their own reality. It manifests as a kind of antsy, optimistic affect (I'm hesitant to use the word "manic" but it's in that direction) and scattered, chaotic way of working. These are mostly people who were previously extremely well organized professionals.

I worry about them. I also worry about myself -- what is working with these psychosis machines doing to me? Will I start sounding like that? Do I already? I am thinking about ways to insulate myself from this as much as possible.

Is AI psychosis the white collar black lung?

They always need a new religion to keep ruling over the peasants:

First Blockchain, then DEI, then COVID, then AI.

Any of these completely filled the headlines to the exclusion of everything else and were used internally to solidify and extend your influence and keep people in check. Then they were dropped.

Managers need a mission, and AI will be abandoned soon as well in favor of a new religion.

At this point I'd rather the LLM take charge, at least we wouldn't have to worry about its ego.

My product manager has given me five paragraphs of requirement/ word salad generated by AI. I couldn't for my life understand what it meant , so I have used AI to list it down in simple English requirement end of the day it is adding an SDK.

love that Standford started using "workslop" and i hope it makes its way to the general lexicon asap because my fury builds at every one of these pdf "summaries" my teammates send

the most depressing part of this for me is that i know im not that bright, but i scrutinize llm results. then my execs are more or less professional confidence men whove been selling to each other for decades, but then they so easily fall for a confidence game? when i see them speak with confidence on AI they just sound like clowns to me now

I don't want to name this person because he's very nice and I don't want to make fun of him. But he's as close to AI psychosis as I've seen. He's totally non-technical, and someone set him up with Discord and OpenClaw. He has an entire "team" of agents - a CEO, a CTO, etc. What they're building, god knows what. But he just released a "podcast" interview with his CEO, setting up a secondary screen with an AI-generated face speaking into a microphone. It's absolutely insane.