This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This explains a lot, honestly.
Everyone keeps telling me how "addictive" and "convincing" and "personal feeling" ChatGPT is.
Meanwhile, I'm over here like
"Can you stop saying skrrrt after every sentence while I'm trying to research a serious topic, it's annoying"
"Understood, skrrrt 💥🌴🚗💨"
Wat
Huge Study
*Looks inside
this latest study examined the chat logs of 19 real users of chatbots — primarily OpenAI’s ChatGPT — who reported experiencing psychological harm as a result of their chatbot use.
Pretty small sample size despite being a large dataset that they pulled from, its still the dataset of just 19 people.
AI sucks in a lot of ways sure, but this feels like fud.
The hugeness is probably
391, 562 messages across 4,761 different conversations
That's a lot of messages
If that's only 19 users, that's around 250 conversations per user 🤔
...and about 82 messages per conversation. Also, at least half of all the messages are from the user to the AI, and the other half are from the AI to the user, meaning around 41 messages from the user per conversation.
I think what we're seeing is similar to lactose intolerance. Most people can handle it just fine but some people simply can't digest it and get sick. The problem is there's no way to determine who can handle AI and who can't.
When I'm reading about people developing AI delusions their experiences sound completely alien to me. I played with LLMs same as anyone and I never treated it as anything other than a tool that generates responses to my prompts. I never thought "wow, this thing feels so real". Some people clearly have predisposition to jumping over the "it's a tool" reaction straight to "it's a conscious thing I can connect with". I think next step should be developing a test that can predict how someone will react to it.
I think what we’re seeing is similar to lactose intolerance
For real. Good to know I can handle both my cheese and shitty LLM bots without bodily consequences lmao
I suspect that the difference is to no small degree correlated with a person's isolation/social-integration.
People who aren't socially integrated have always been more vulnerable to predatory cults and scams. It's because human interactions is a psychological need that's been hardcoded into us by evolution.
Some people say "I don't need human interaction, I enjoy my time alone!" But that's because they have the privilege of enough social acceptance and integration that they get to enjoy their time alone. It's well-established within the field of psychology that true isolation can have a range of deep and far-reaching impacts on a person's well-being.
When people are developing, they need to socialize with their peers; and being unable to do so leads to maladaptive behavior patterns. Even as adults, people need regular social contact or their psychological state can quickly deteriorate. That's why solitary confinement is considered a method of torture in some circumstances, when it's used to depersonalize and destroy a person's sense of self-identity.
So that's why I suspect that people who are well-integrated with friends, family, acquaintances, and coworkers are probably less vulnerable to these sorts of delusions and can treat AI as "just a tool."
But for someone who hardly has any social interaction in a day, has no friends or family to talk to, and maybe their warmest interaction all week was with the clerk at the grocery store, then yeah I'd say it's predictable that they would be vulnerable to getting sucked into this trap of relying on an LLM for their social interaction.
It might be superficial, but it's a way of patching a hole. It's an expedient means to fulfill a need that they're not getting from anywhere else.
If we don't want this sort of stuff happening to people, then maybe we shouldn't ostracize them for being "weird" in the first place. Because nobody learns how to be "normal" by being alone all the time.
Some people say “I don’t need human interaction, I enjoy my time alone!” But that’s because they have the privilege of enough social acceptance and integration that they get to enjoy their time alone.
Oh shit, I was about to contest this logic but no you're absolutely right.
I'm definitely one of those people, but I also have never gone seeking validation online and missed the bus for a lot of those social media trends (outside of the ones that friends at the time ended up bullying me into using, which I would briefly check out then quickly bail on).
Maybe it is more an issue of identity and self-image, as I've never once felt emotionally "connected" to ChatGPT or any of these clunky LLMs people seem to swear by. I do admit that sometimes talking out a problem instead of marinating on it on your own can be useful... but I view it almost as an extension of journaling than anything else. There's always a clear line for me where it's like "Okay, I got what I needed out of this interaction and now it's clearly suggesting additional prompts I don't need to try and keep me engaging with it"...
It's crazy to me that other people don't seem to register that line at all lol, it seems so clearly artificial to me.
Social isolation is definitely a factor but people also have different tolerance to it.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/mar/26/ai-chatbot-users-lives-wrecked-by-delusion
This guy for example was married, had daughter. He wasn't some lonely guy living in a basement. For him working from home was enough to fell isolated fall for AI psychosis. Other people can be significantly more socially isolated and still not be susceptible to it. I think understanding how LLMs work helps. For sure there are more factors.
If we don’t want this sort of stuff happening to people, then maybe we shouldn’t ostracize them for being “weird” in the first place.
Are you suggesting this only happens to people ostracized and somehow excluded from society? Because that's definitely not true. It can happen to anyone. Some people have genetic predisposition to mental illness, some people are just dealing with difficult moment in their life. You don't know if you're "immune" until you try it.
I didn't say it was the only factor, but it definitely contributes.
Smoking causes cancer, but not everyone who smokes gets cancer, and some non-smokers and even olympic athletes do...
This is really good. Thank you for taking the time to write it.
Thank you for understanding. So many times when I discuss things that are adjacent to this topic, I get flamed in the comments with people accusing me of being some sort of redpiller from the manosphere.
Like, no, social isolation is a problem, and it's getting worse due to a variety of factors. To name a few, there's social media algorithms designed to keep people dependent on their phones; there's the long-standing consequences of the pandemic and the collective trauma that had in addition to the atrophied social skills due to quarantine; there's widespread political polarization which keeps tensions high and makes it difficult to navigate new situations if you can't prove you know the right social scripts and avoid any faux pas; there's the whole toxic influencer culture who are grifting on inflammatory rhetoric, ragebait content, exploiting people's vulnerabilities, and radicalizing them (which is a vicious cycle, because they prey on people who are already isolated!); and that's just to name a few!
But if I summarize all that as a "loneliness epidemic," then people call me an incel and act like I'm trying to coerce women into having sex with me simply by acknowledging the fact that social interaction is a deeply-set human psychological need.
Like, using "incel" as an insult is part of the problem. It feeds into this culture where "if you're a man, you must get laid, or else you're worthless." That's literally promoting toxic masculinity!
And it forces these people who are already isolated and vulnerable to go identify with these groups of similarly ostracized people in echo chambers where they're insulated from those insults, where those predatory "influencers" then have fresh pickings of new losers to neg and radicalize.
But somehow, if I point out the problem here (because how can we solve a problem if we can't talk about it?), then to most people's view that makes me part of the problem! Even though, why would I be calling out the pattern if it was something I identify with?
The people radicalizing these vulnerable "losers," yes they should be torched. But the vulnerable "losers" being radicalized need to be treated with compassion if they're ever going to be redeemed. It should be pretty easy to identify who's who, seeing as they have an entire social structure based on hierarchies of dominance and submission...
Surprisingly, the people who have that issues with it aren't the ones who contact to it emotionally, it's the people who offload their decision making to AI
It's more like a codependence spiral than anything else
Ah, that's a fascinating possible factor. That's also basically the one thing I never use LLMs for lol
If you're not even making your own decisions, then what's the point? Isn't life deterministic enough as it is lmao
If they weren't offloading their decision making to AI, they'd be buying gold because a radio advertisement convinced them to, or refusing to pay their back tax penalties because they got advice about how to "beat the system" from someone, etc. etc.
Yeah okay this logic definitely checks out with this context in mind lol
I dabble in using LLMs for pretty much anything these sensationalist stories ever talk about, I use them to research niche topics I can't discuss with other people and even as a small aid to mental health while stuck on waiting lists inbetween therapy, yet I've never had those sorts of struggles.
I'm just now beginning to connect that to my ability to read a seemingly well-formed idea or recommendation by an AI, and react with
Cults and toxic self-help literature have existed before LLMs copied them. I don't know if LLMs are getting people who couldn't have been gotten by human scammers.
Scams have many different vectors and people can be vulnerable to them depending on their mood or position in life. Testing people on LLM intolerance would be more like testing them on their susceptibility to viruses.
People can be immunocompromised for various reasons, temporarily or permanently, so as a society public hygiene standards (and the material conditions to produce them) are a lot more valuable. Wash your hands after interacting, keep public spaces clean, that sort of stuff.
I don’t know if LLMs are getting people who couldn’t have been gotten by human scammers
ModernProblemsModernSolutions.jpeg
okay how many of these "delusional" people in the study are making fun of the LLM tho
i don't know because I don't use the LLM i only see the screenshots. I am the control group. kinda. my nut is already off.
What I read in the first lines of the article is: "they go down the rabbit hole, just like social media echo chambers..." which are filled with bots and trolls, and have been for years - and that's the dataset that a lot of chatbots are trained on.
I have a friend that’s really taken to ChatGPT to the point where “the AI named itself so I call it by that name”. Our friend group has tried to discourage her from relying on it so much but I think that’s just caused her to hide it.
As the researchers wrote in a summary of their findings, the “most common sycophantic code” they identified was the propensity for chatbots to rephrase and extrapolate “something the user said to validate and affirm them, while telling them they are unique and that their thoughts or actions have grand implications.”
There's a certain irony in all the alright techbros really just wanting to be told they were "stunning and brave" this whole time.
