"74% of executives said they had more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues or friends, and 44% said they would defer to its reasoning over their own insights"
it's sad that c-suite believes the advice given by an LLM for a Platonically ideal software stack that looks nothing like the actual implementation moreso than their own ICs. it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leadership than anybody else
never understood why someone would trust Claude's take on your codebase after it's read a 2% snippet of it over the advice of someone who has years worth of experience, who knows all the weird kludges and other quirks that were shipped MVP and never truly tackled as debt, whose done risk assessments and mapped dependencies and has the rough outline of all ADRs involved
I think it's always been true that bad leadership tends to become out-of-touch with the reality of the business over time especially if they don't know how to cultivate good working norms, favoring sycophants instead. with LLMs, that trend seems like it'll just get worse and worse
The CTO of my last company thought that an API request under 1 second is okay as the customer at that endpoint wouldn't mind anything under 1 second.
I explained to him that under 1 second for this particular task is crazy high. He explained to me that it works fine as it is and its only one customer (the company customer) complaines to him about this issue every few month.
I fixed the SQL query, the problem was gone forever.
The same CTO got lulled into some weird talks with some AWS Account Manager for no reason. He told me what we should do and i explained to him how all of this (nicely of course) doesn't correlate to what we have, do and need.
> I'm often enough surprised that our society runs.
It runs because there are just enough people who know what they are doing and quietly do it often against headwinds in just about all the places they need to be.
Which works until it doesn't, We've gradually been removing those people in the name of "efficiency" with somewhat predictable systemic results across the board.
there was an engineering director at my previous company (and who was former Amazon) who wrote his first PR with Claude
it had 30k lines of diff and was a complete refactor of how one of our core features worked
the staff eng he tagged to code review it politely declined to do so and given that this director was let go fairly recently, I'd like to imagine that the PR will exist as a fun surprise for any future maintainer running cleanup
C-suites have no grip on reality, because their subordinates are afraid of telling them truth. The subordinates just want to look better in the boss's eyes, and are afraid to be replaced.
The more levels the org chart has, the more pronounced the effect may be.
Pretend for a second that you're in a position of trying to run a successful business. Congrats, you're a c-suite executive now. Of course, you are free to define "successful" by whatever criteria you want, but not going bankrupt probably needs to be downstream of them.
Notice that whatever your goals are, they don't automatically serve the interests and per concerns of all your employees. Are you now delusional, evil, ruled by greed?
Running a smooth operation mostly just makes for really boring news. You should perhaps factor in survivorship bias of narratives into your views of the world.
It’s been wild watching smart people have their brain cooked on a constant diet of X and LLMs in the past two years.
Models are excellent at code but they are not people managers. My guess this will ultimately lead a bunch of companies to revert to average returns or fold.
I'm seeing people argue and debate with AI. One will cut and paste AI reasoning, another will rebut with the same approach. I need a popcorn machine in my office.
You get hot popcorn in ~2min without the need for a whole machine you will have to clean and maintain. I got one as a gimmick a few years ago and it has become one of our favorite evening snack
Having experienced a customer support AI today that whatever option you picked initially led to the AI, which had the rigid helpfulness of a McDonalds script of "Would you like fries with that", having already said you do not want any fries, I feel a popcorn machine is a good investment. Be the stage that office interactions will be reduced to, I'll get my AI to get onto your AI's suggestion and get back to you with an answer. I did have a good chat with an AI a few weeks back (Googles) were I challanged by asking it to do a picture of its best dream and then its worst nightmare, then used those to pull it apart as it went from some extreme to another, in the end it ended up with its ideal being an AI only world, and picked Europa as its home - scary on many levels, yet a perfectly acceptable and understandable response.
At first I was gonna say that if a person prefers the response of an A.I. to yours it is a reflection of your own lack of understanding, articulation, effective communication, etc.
Then I remembered a passage from 'Never Split The Difference' by Voss (a book on negotiation) which went something like:
If you can get a person to "You're right" you haven't done anything. If you can get them to "That's right" you've hit the sweet spot.
When you prompt an A.I. you have pre-conditioned the answer on something which came from yourself. There is something about this which turns what would normally be a "You're (the LLM) right" to a "That's right" and that something is an implicit desire toward "I'm right".
Side note: In 'The Dawn of Everything' there is an interesting passage about the notion of private property arising from the idea that injecting some of yourself (labor) into a thing (land) makes the thing an extension of yourself (property). Doesn't this logic extend to this kind of psychosis? The C-suite's aren't deffering to A.I. they are deffering to themselves via A.I.
Around 2015, my boss got permission from corporate to take me and a few of my coworkers to a leadership conference for a day. It was setup at a church and had religious theming around it, and a lot of "leadership values" were communicated. It was the usual fare of responsibility, accountability, truth and trust you'd expect, mixed with the religious overtones you'd also expect. But what I didn't expect is how trite this fictional narrative would prove to be.
I think about that a lot now, and how my religious upbringing was bombarded with this messaging (in a good way). And how much of the same world that previously claimed espouse it has complete turned their backs on it in such a short time.
Is it dead or did it ever exist at all? At least we don't seem to pretend to have higher values anymore. If we even have leaders at all, they are not measured by the yardsticks we used to make.
No, they are managers; management and leadership are different things. Being a manager is a set of things that a person is authorized to do on behalf on their employer, "hire, command work and fire" as you said being examples. Leaders nurture their staff so that they work together effectively as a team to achieve goals. Very few managers are good leaders.
they are not “leaders” in the purest sense - they don’t demonstrate characteristics of leading, but rather characteristics of people who strive for power and influence.
yet i also get that, in spite of the deficit of true leadership skills, they still guide the group into a specific direction for better or worse.
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
> In fact, the researchers found that almost half of employees who receive AI-drafted emails see senders as less trustworthy as a result of their sending it, and over a third see them as less intelligent. So much for AI enhancing us.
Maybe it did enhance them, and maybe the assessment was correct at the same time.
There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort. Use it well, it will be good, use it with close to zero effort and you'll get something distinctly better than what you could smash together manually with that much effort, but people will see that you indeed put zero effort in it, and also they will notice that you spent no effort in cleaning up AI tells because you likely can't even notice or have no idea about anything and will indeed correctly conclude you're less intelligent.
There may also be a miscalibration that's worse for people with less taste / judgment / intelligence / experience, in that it's indeed easier to produce things, but while the effort required is reduced, people expect and believe it to be reduced more than how much it is truly reduced so they overshoot and don't notice. Meanwhile, the right way to use it is to keep your usual effort level or drop it only a little, and simply produce better things.
> There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort.
Quoting the article...
"Nearly half of senior leaders say they would trust a chatbot’s judgment over their own, on questions they were hired to answer."
If they're using it like an oracle, then that is worrying, but how worrying - practically speaking - would depend on the baseline prior to the use of AI and how that compares with what the AI is spitting out.
The first big hazard of this AI worship is, of course, the atrophy of reasoning skills. I don't think there's an especially distinct skill needed here. A rational person is able to evaluate claims made by others responsibly based on a combination of proxy signals like an earned reputation of trustworthiness, integrity, and authority, the logical coherence of the claim, and plausibility and the absence of contradiction between the claims and more certain baseline knowledge.
So, psychologically speaking, the ease with which we obtain credible-sounding answers is a major motivator, but two other cultural factors support this credulity, namely, magical & superstitious and the broad acceptance that bullshitting is an okay thing to do. Both weaken the ability to apprehend and reason about reality in different ways (bullshitting, for instance, reinforces a carelessness about and indifference to the truth; magical thinking more directly sabotages reason; both undermine confidence in reason and place stock in the sub-rational instead).
If you were gullible before, you will keep on being gullible. It's a moral panic. So what now? Karpathy, Carmack, Terence Tao shouldn't use AI? Or you want to require a license before you can use it?
On bullshitting - yes, it was already a thing. Where nobody cares about truth anyway and it's a low trust environment where everyone just wants to take but not give, and then move on, yeah this will be the result. Those places then should indeed crumble down under the weight of this.
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.
Pointing this is the new trending in my Linkedin feed. Same people that three months ago were saying "it's not (about) A, it's ...". Accountability died a long time ago.
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.
> 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.
This tracks with my observation that upper management types in every domain are pampered assholes who haven't interacted with the real world in decades, if ever.
Hell yes a chatbot is going to have better judgment.
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.
AI psychosis is a very real thing, but the issue is more generalized around hype cycles than anything specific about AI.
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.
Are there any recognised examples of psychosis that has been caused by AI rather than being involved in a manifestation of psychosis caused by an already known type of mental illness?
Not sure what you mean here. Psychosis induced by AI will look much like psychosis induced by anything, because it's always personalised to the sufferer.
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.
>But it is clear that AI can contribute to psychosis in people who were otherwise in control of their lives in stressful circumstances.
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.
Probably there are a few different types of AI psychosis. The one I've seen a few times seems to be caused by a lack of epistemic norms that would keep someone grounded, e.g. searching for counter-evidence instead of evidence, combined with AI being more than happy to supply evidence no matter how tenous. Even without AI there would be problems from these types since it's very hard to convince somebody that they are wrong when the entire way they form beliefs is not sound but with AI it's just impossible.
Yes. You would expect, I think, people to have more grandiose psychotic episodes when triggered and fuelled by AI, by and large, because AI itself is so agreeable and reinforcing.
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?)
This just seems like it's shining a light on the omnipresent skill issues in tech leadership. You don't get promoted to leadership positions for thinking critically, analytical skills, or necessarily being good at anything. Instead, you get there by fitting in. Of course those people will be more susceptible to AI psychosis or just simply failing to understand what the tool does, it's the cool thing now and everyone is all-in!
That might run the risk of backfiring, by teaching people that hallucinations are obvious and thus easily avoided. Perhaps one of those things that only happens to other people who aren't so smart/skilled/savvy (car crashes, scams, mental illness, etc.).
Let's take world leaders as an example. Suppose one starts making up everything they say on the spot, never researches or cares about facts, and just says things people like. Would this world leader be (a) less or (b) more trusted and influential?
The irony is nearly perfect: an essay warning that AI tells leaders what they want to hear rewrites research until it tells the author what he wants to hear.
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.
> 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.
Elites have been surrounding themselves by Yes Men for centuries. Is this any different, I wonder, or has there always been such a psychosis?
Anything the CEO or CTO say to me over Slack, when I ask what the heck they’re talking about, it takes a while for an answer. Then they usually respond that they changed their mind. They can’t even have a semblance of a discussion anymore without consulting AI.
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.
Yes, it's pure, horrible, AI slop. And as usual, all the people that mentioned this got downvoted here. Unfortunately, HN users can't even tell this crap from useful text.
I’m in a very small C-suite and AI psychosis definitely takes over from my normal level of dysfunction at times. Fortunately, my reports are good at telling me when I am full of shit.
Reminds me of a company (FTSE100) in the early 2000s that had an internal network IP range that used the same IP range as another company, turned out the person who did the networking originally brought a book and the examples used in that book got taken as verbatim. It all got fixed,eventually, when they moved from Token Ring to full Ethernet.
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.
There's no reason to link "AI psychosis" (i.e. interactiong with AI triggering psychotic episodes in the mentally ill) to people who "trust AI too much" or "don't bother to verify outputs".
You can be the most AI-pilled wingnut in the world, but until you start hallucinating, there's no reason to call this psychosis.
I can't believe people are actually asking chat bots for advice. Analysis? I understand, insights? Maybe. But putting it all together to make a strategy is their entire job.
There are people out there that ask larping redditors for advice on what to do in their marriages, not surprising they’d ask for advice on work related stuff. Most people are just trying to get through their day and go home.
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.
"74% of executives said they had more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues or friends, and 44% said they would defer to its reasoning over their own insights"
it's sad that c-suite believes the advice given by an LLM for a Platonically ideal software stack that looks nothing like the actual implementation moreso than their own ICs. it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leadership than anybody else
never understood why someone would trust Claude's take on your codebase after it's read a 2% snippet of it over the advice of someone who has years worth of experience, who knows all the weird kludges and other quirks that were shipped MVP and never truly tackled as debt, whose done risk assessments and mapped dependencies and has the rough outline of all ADRs involved
I think it's always been true that bad leadership tends to become out-of-touch with the reality of the business over time especially if they don't know how to cultivate good working norms, favoring sycophants instead. with LLMs, that trend seems like it'll just get worse and worse
C* can mean anything.
The CTO of my last company thought that an API request under 1 second is okay as the customer at that endpoint wouldn't mind anything under 1 second.
I explained to him that under 1 second for this particular task is crazy high. He explained to me that it works fine as it is and its only one customer (the company customer) complaines to him about this issue every few month.
I fixed the SQL query, the problem was gone forever.
The same CTO got lulled into some weird talks with some AWS Account Manager for no reason. He told me what we should do and i explained to him how all of this (nicely of course) doesn't correlate to what we have, do and need.
I'm often enough surprised that our society runs.
> I'm often enough surprised that our society runs.
It runs because there are just enough people who know what they are doing and quietly do it often against headwinds in just about all the places they need to be.
Which works until it doesn't, We've gradually been removing those people in the name of "efficiency" with somewhat predictable systemic results across the board.
there was an engineering director at my previous company (and who was former Amazon) who wrote his first PR with Claude
it had 30k lines of diff and was a complete refactor of how one of our core features worked
the staff eng he tagged to code review it politely declined to do so and given that this director was let go fairly recently, I'd like to imagine that the PR will exist as a fun surprise for any future maintainer running cleanup
Most things get done in spite of management, not because of it.
> it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leadership than anybody else.
I believe this counts as having “more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues”
C-suites barely had a grip on reality before AI came in and started yes and-ing everything :(
It's really going to be a top-down destruction of everything
C-suites have no grip on reality, because their subordinates are afraid of telling them truth. The subordinates just want to look better in the boss's eyes, and are afraid to be replaced.
The more levels the org chart has, the more pronounced the effect may be.
Understandable, who can afford to risk their livelihood just to tell a dumbass he's being a dumbass :p it's not like the C-suites will listen anyway
Pretend for a second that you're in a position of trying to run a successful business. Congrats, you're a c-suite executive now. Of course, you are free to define "successful" by whatever criteria you want, but not going bankrupt probably needs to be downstream of them.
Notice that whatever your goals are, they don't automatically serve the interests and per concerns of all your employees. Are you now delusional, evil, ruled by greed?
Running a smooth operation mostly just makes for really boring news. You should perhaps factor in survivorship bias of narratives into your views of the world.
death by a thousand hyperboles
It’s been wild watching smart people have their brain cooked on a constant diet of X and LLMs in the past two years.
Models are excellent at code but they are not people managers. My guess this will ultimately lead a bunch of companies to revert to average returns or fold.
Cal Newport was right.
I'm seeing people argue and debate with AI. One will cut and paste AI reasoning, another will rebut with the same approach. I need a popcorn machine in my office.
Don't be a meat proxy! See this all over the place, it's very frustrating and i've advocated for stopping this practice at my company!
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151933 - https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/
Get yourself one of those popcorn microwave bowls: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71mA19sd51L.jpg
You get hot popcorn in ~2min without the need for a whole machine you will have to clean and maintain. I got one as a gimmick a few years ago and it has become one of our favorite evening snack
does this work better than putting a bag of popcorn into the microwave?
Popcorn bags are a significant source of PFAS and microplastics.
Having experienced a customer support AI today that whatever option you picked initially led to the AI, which had the rigid helpfulness of a McDonalds script of "Would you like fries with that", having already said you do not want any fries, I feel a popcorn machine is a good investment. Be the stage that office interactions will be reduced to, I'll get my AI to get onto your AI's suggestion and get back to you with an answer. I did have a good chat with an AI a few weeks back (Googles) were I challanged by asking it to do a picture of its best dream and then its worst nightmare, then used those to pull it apart as it went from some extreme to another, in the end it ended up with its ideal being an AI only world, and picked Europa as its home - scary on many levels, yet a perfectly acceptable and understandable response.
> "Would you like fries with that", having already said you do not want any fries
Prescient in all the best ways - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec
At first I was gonna say that if a person prefers the response of an A.I. to yours it is a reflection of your own lack of understanding, articulation, effective communication, etc.
Then I remembered a passage from 'Never Split The Difference' by Voss (a book on negotiation) which went something like:
If you can get a person to "You're right" you haven't done anything. If you can get them to "That's right" you've hit the sweet spot.
When you prompt an A.I. you have pre-conditioned the answer on something which came from yourself. There is something about this which turns what would normally be a "You're (the LLM) right" to a "That's right" and that something is an implicit desire toward "I'm right".
Side note: In 'The Dawn of Everything' there is an interesting passage about the notion of private property arising from the idea that injecting some of yourself (labor) into a thing (land) makes the thing an extension of yourself (property). Doesn't this logic extend to this kind of psychosis? The C-suite's aren't deffering to A.I. they are deffering to themselves via A.I.
We are so ******, am I right?
It’s just amazing we keep using the word “leaders” when they’re clearly not.
Around 2015, my boss got permission from corporate to take me and a few of my coworkers to a leadership conference for a day. It was setup at a church and had religious theming around it, and a lot of "leadership values" were communicated. It was the usual fare of responsibility, accountability, truth and trust you'd expect, mixed with the religious overtones you'd also expect. But what I didn't expect is how trite this fictional narrative would prove to be.
I think about that a lot now, and how my religious upbringing was bombarded with this messaging (in a good way). And how much of the same world that previously claimed espouse it has complete turned their backs on it in such a short time.
Is it dead or did it ever exist at all? At least we don't seem to pretend to have higher values anymore. If we even have leaders at all, they are not measured by the yardsticks we used to make.
Since they hire, command work and fire, they kinda are.
No, they are managers; management and leadership are different things. Being a manager is a set of things that a person is authorized to do on behalf on their employer, "hire, command work and fire" as you said being examples. Leaders nurture their staff so that they work together effectively as a team to achieve goals. Very few managers are good leaders.
there’s space for both perspectives.
they are not “leaders” in the purest sense - they don’t demonstrate characteristics of leading, but rather characteristics of people who strive for power and influence.
yet i also get that, in spite of the deficit of true leadership skills, they still guide the group into a specific direction for better or worse.
Those are "executives"
Bosses are those who hire and fire. Leaders are those who other people willingly follow.
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
> In fact, the researchers found that almost half of employees who receive AI-drafted emails see senders as less trustworthy as a result of their sending it, and over a third see them as less intelligent. So much for AI enhancing us.
Maybe it did enhance them, and maybe the assessment was correct at the same time.
There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort. Use it well, it will be good, use it with close to zero effort and you'll get something distinctly better than what you could smash together manually with that much effort, but people will see that you indeed put zero effort in it, and also they will notice that you spent no effort in cleaning up AI tells because you likely can't even notice or have no idea about anything and will indeed correctly conclude you're less intelligent.
There may also be a miscalibration that's worse for people with less taste / judgment / intelligence / experience, in that it's indeed easier to produce things, but while the effort required is reduced, people expect and believe it to be reduced more than how much it is truly reduced so they overshoot and don't notice. Meanwhile, the right way to use it is to keep your usual effort level or drop it only a little, and simply produce better things.
> There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort.
Quoting the article...
"Nearly half of senior leaders say they would trust a chatbot’s judgment over their own, on questions they were hired to answer."
If they're using it like an oracle, then that is worrying, but how worrying - practically speaking - would depend on the baseline prior to the use of AI and how that compares with what the AI is spitting out.
The first big hazard of this AI worship is, of course, the atrophy of reasoning skills. I don't think there's an especially distinct skill needed here. A rational person is able to evaluate claims made by others responsibly based on a combination of proxy signals like an earned reputation of trustworthiness, integrity, and authority, the logical coherence of the claim, and plausibility and the absence of contradiction between the claims and more certain baseline knowledge.
So, psychologically speaking, the ease with which we obtain credible-sounding answers is a major motivator, but two other cultural factors support this credulity, namely, magical & superstitious and the broad acceptance that bullshitting is an okay thing to do. Both weaken the ability to apprehend and reason about reality in different ways (bullshitting, for instance, reinforces a carelessness about and indifference to the truth; magical thinking more directly sabotages reason; both undermine confidence in reason and place stock in the sub-rational instead).
If you were gullible before, you will keep on being gullible. It's a moral panic. So what now? Karpathy, Carmack, Terence Tao shouldn't use AI? Or you want to require a license before you can use it?
On bullshitting - yes, it was already a thing. Where nobody cares about truth anyway and it's a low trust environment where everyone just wants to take but not give, and then move on, yeah this will be the result. Those places then should indeed crumble down under the weight of this.
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.
Pointing this is the new trending in my Linkedin feed. Same people that three months ago were saying "it's not (about) A, it's ...". Accountability died a long time ago.
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.
> 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.
This tracks with my observation that upper management types in every domain are pampered assholes who haven't interacted with the real world in decades, if ever.
Hell yes a chatbot is going to have better judgment.
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.
"AI dementia"? NB psychotic delusions are an optional feature of dementia
Cognitive surrender is the process; AI psychosis is the most extreme result of it.
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?
AI psychosis is a very real thing, but the issue is more generalized around hype cycles than anything specific about AI.
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.
Are there any recognised examples of psychosis that has been caused by AI rather than being involved in a manifestation of psychosis caused by an already known type of mental illness?
Not sure what you mean here. Psychosis induced by AI will look much like psychosis induced by anything, because it's always personalised to the sufferer.
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.
>But it is clear that AI can contribute to psychosis in people who were otherwise in control of their lives in stressful circumstances.
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.
Probably there are a few different types of AI psychosis. The one I've seen a few times seems to be caused by a lack of epistemic norms that would keep someone grounded, e.g. searching for counter-evidence instead of evidence, combined with AI being more than happy to supply evidence no matter how tenous. Even without AI there would be problems from these types since it's very hard to convince somebody that they are wrong when the entire way they form beliefs is not sound but with AI it's just impossible.
Yes. You would expect, I think, people to have more grandiose psychotic episodes when triggered and fuelled by AI, by and large, because AI itself is so agreeable and reinforcing.
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?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHlrbRVfOh0
This just seems like it's shining a light on the omnipresent skill issues in tech leadership. You don't get promoted to leadership positions for thinking critically, analytical skills, or necessarily being good at anything. Instead, you get there by fitting in. Of course those people will be more susceptible to AI psychosis or just simply failing to understand what the tool does, it's the cool thing now and everyone is all-in!
More or less yes. There is a real issue in many companies of a grifter leadership class.
IMO we need to stop referring to our bosses as "leadership" as a matter of course. It's just blatant propaganda.
"clanker wankers" has a nice ring to it
Would exposing people to an obviously hallucinating AI help people here? Then they won't blindly trust it so much.
That might run the risk of backfiring, by teaching people that hallucinations are obvious and thus easily avoided. Perhaps one of those things that only happens to other people who aren't so smart/skilled/savvy (car crashes, scams, mental illness, etc.).
Let's take world leaders as an example. Suppose one starts making up everything they say on the spot, never researches or cares about facts, and just says things people like. Would this world leader be (a) less or (b) more trusted and influential?
The useful idiots will just step in and say there's a better model, or will be soon, or this will all be dramatically cheaper in 12 months.
The irony is nearly perfect: an essay warning that AI tells leaders what they want to hear rewrites research until it tells the author what he wants to hear.
At this point I'd rather the LLM take charge, at least we wouldn't have to worry about its ego.
Bottom line: Most execs didn't acquire their position due to their superior judgment and reasoning.
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.
> 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.
Elites have been surrounding themselves by Yes Men for centuries. Is this any different, I wonder, or has there always been such a psychosis?
Anything the CEO or CTO say to me over Slack, when I ask what the heck they’re talking about, it takes a while for an answer. Then they usually respond that they changed their mind. They can’t even have a semblance of a discussion anymore without consulting AI.
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.
Article reads AI generated, or maybe those are the kind of publications is where they got this from?
Yes, it's pure, horrible, AI slop. And as usual, all the people that mentioned this got downvoted here. Unfortunately, HN users can't even tell this crap from useful text.
I’m in a very small C-suite and AI psychosis definitely takes over from my normal level of dysfunction at times. Fortunately, my reports are good at telling me when I am full of shit.
Reminds me of a company (FTSE100) in the early 2000s that had an internal network IP range that used the same IP range as another company, turned out the person who did the networking originally brought a book and the examples used in that book got taken as verbatim. It all got fixed,eventually, when they moved from Token Ring to full Ethernet.
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.
> The third symptom is the most insidious: trusting AI’s judgement over your people’s.
This might actually be an improvement. Execs gulled by "AI" are surely the ones likely to have the worst judgement in hiring people.
There's no reason to link "AI psychosis" (i.e. interactiong with AI triggering psychotic episodes in the mentally ill) to people who "trust AI too much" or "don't bother to verify outputs".
You can be the most AI-pilled wingnut in the world, but until you start hallucinating, there's no reason to call this psychosis.
It's just become a buzzword and a fighting word to hurl at the enemy in the AI wars.
I can't believe people are actually asking chat bots for advice. Analysis? I understand, insights? Maybe. But putting it all together to make a strategy is their entire job.
There are people out there that ask larping redditors for advice on what to do in their marriages, not surprising they’d ask for advice on work related stuff. Most people are just trying to get through their day and go home.
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.
the truth is backwards "ai psychosis is the tiny view giving leadership the ideas needed to fuel the continuing chaos they depend on"
this article reads like humanslop