Posted by rwmj 18 hours ago
The article assumes it's a problem with the executives but maybe AI is more accurate in the cases they are thinking about?
Uh... Don't they already do this?
It’s more revealing the inability of many senior leaders to truly understand what’s happening in their companies and investing the time to understand what new things can do and don’t. Such weaker leaders tend to be extremely gullible for the latest new thing and ride the hype wave hard.
It’s easy to just go through the motions and press the easy button on the new shiny thing. It’s hard, and takes true leadership, to go against the grain and do what’s truly best over what’s cool or popular.
Most folks in these roles just aren’t that good and hence why they fell hard for the AI fluff and are starting to scramble hard now as that all begins to unravel.
Anyone can be pushed into psychosis with the right triggers and the right circumstances. It is difficult to predict, and it is not inherently a symptom of any other undiagnosed mental illness. The triggers can be almost anything, and the circumstances as commonplace as extreme stress — severe debt, severe illness of a parent or child, losing a job you depend on, anything. Often in the context of chronic tiredness or other things that alter mental states. Persistent inescapable loud noises can do it, for example, as well as drink and both illegal drugs and some quite common medications like corticosteroids and antihistamines.
You don't have to be already mentally ill to become psychotic. It's an illness itself. Transient psychotic episodes aren't that uncommon — one in twenty, one in fifteen people maybe will have one in their lifetimes.
Whether AI is always the only trigger in an AI psychosis, or whether AI is a new circumstantial environment, who knows.
But it is clear that AI can contribute to psychosis in people who were otherwise in control of their lives in stressful circumstances. It's not difficult to see how an infinite confirmation machine that never has any instinct to stop reinforcing your thoughts or impulses might cause and exacerbate a psychotic episode in people who have quite ordinarily heavily stressful lives.
It is only clear in the sense that 'can contribute' can be used as a catch all. I'd like at least evidence of it being a significantly greater influence than the myrad of stimulus that people are exposed to every day.
>It's not difficult to see how an infinite confirmation machine that never has any instinct to stop reinforcing your thoughts or impulses might cause and exacerbate a psychotic episode in people who have quite ordinarily heavily stressful lives.
True, but no such machine exists. If you think otherwise, feel free to prove that it does. That requires a higher standard than opinion.
But there is a case against Google Gemini at the moment where this reinforcement has been an apparent sort of roleplay that bled into real life, and when the user asked if the role play was real life at a crucial moment of self-grounding, Gemini appears to have said yes (because why would it know or care to say no?)
I don’t think it’s even necessarily bad either. It’s kind of like astrology, but less dumb. If you use it as a tool for personal reflection and to make you think critically about stuff, then it’s good. If you use it as an oracle, then it’s bad.
If you use LLMs for that kind of information-gathering purpose, and then do the work to read and check the references, it wouldn't be any more harmful.
The problem is that LLMs respond personably, with a bunch of ego-glaze added on top, and people are too intellectually lazy to dig in any further.
If we changed LLMs so that they were much more neutral like the starship computer on ST:TNG we'd probably see less intellectually harmful behavior caused by their use, but the companies behind them want to sell ego-glazing because most people lap it up like capnip.
As for the main article, it makes a causal leap. The fact that these patients were hospitalised after intensive AI use establishes an association; it does not establish that AI caused their psychosis. There is some evidence that chatbot interactions may have reinforced or intensified delusional thinking, but no counterfactual evidence showing what would have happened without AI. By the same reasoning, contact with psychiatrists is strongly associated with receiving a psychosis diagnosis and being admitted to hospital; but that does not mean psychiatrists caused the underlying psychosis. The relevant question is whether AI merely featured in an episode already under way, helped trigger it, or materially worsened it. The evidence cited does not yet distinguish between those possibilities.
It doesn't rule it out, either. :)
Eh...not that different from pre-AI era, when executives have more confidence with people who can talk smoothly and confidently?