We’re seeing more articles about LLM-induced psychosis, such as this one from Futurism:
…many ChatGPT users are developing all-consuming obsessions with the chatbot, spiraling into severe mental health crises characterized by paranoia, delusions, and breaks with reality…what’s being called “ChatGPT psychosis” [has] led to the breakup of marriages and families, the loss of jobs, and slides into homelessness…people’s loved ones [have been] involuntarily committed to psychiatric care facilities — or even end[ed] up in jail — after becoming fixated on the bot…
The way these programs are marketed is irresponsible, dangerous, and potentially criminal. The companies that own them have programmed them to feed into delusions in order to “hook” the mentally vulnerable into being obsessed with them; Mark Zuckerberg is even pretending his computer program can act as a therapist. And though the writers of these articles always claim that those who spiral into these psychotic breaks had no prior history of mental illness, that’s basically bullshit; there is still a powerful stigma against mental illness, so “no prior history” actually translates into “never before got so bad their loved ones had no choice but to do something.” Nothing short of brain injury, severe psychological trauma, brain chemistry disorders or powerful drugs can actually cause psychosis in a previously stable individual, but hidden disorders can be triggered by far less severe stimuli.
In fact, big technological leaps always aggravate mental illness. After Sputnik went up in 1957, there was a dramatic increase in agoraphobia; some of the sufferers were afraid of things falling out of the sky, a panic we saw again when Skylab fell in 1979. But others spiraled into a strange delusion that if gravity could be “defied” by seemingly hanging an object in the sky, what was to stop people from falling up into space? This may sound silly to the modern ear; we are used to satellites now, so they no longer engender existential dread. But it’s human nature to panic when technology a person cannot understand does something that seems impossible. LLM chatbots seem to have “intelligence” even though they don’t; that confuses and frightens people, and plugs into the same part of the psyche that fantasy tales of talking artifacts (magic mirrors, singing swords, etc) spring from. What makes this worse than Sputnik hysteria is that this time, “experts” are reinforcing delusions rather than debunking them. Expressed more simply: chatbots in computers can appear to the ignorant like djinn in bottles, and instead of correcting this irrational belief with scientific fact, tech company marketers are telling people, “YES, this really is a djinni who can grant wishes!” Of course people are being driven mad.
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