Re:In Search of AI Psychosis
by SequoiaHope on Friday August 29, 2025 @03:31AM
(#45061244)
Any idea what caused it? Reminds me of a family member who was addicted to meth and started believing all kinds of wild stuff.
I’ve experienced psychosis and it definitely leans more towards a hardware issue. The reason I think this is apophenia - seeing connections where none exist - is a particular state of the mind where neural connection making is highly elevated. In my lay experience it’s as though dopamine, acetylcholine, and norepinephrine are all chronically elevated and create internal feedback loops, which causes a spiral/cascade of accelerated meaning making and increased neural connectivity. This is also experienced physically and mentally as mania, paranoia, anxiety.
This is probably why antipsychotics usually work by damping down on these neurotransmitters really hard, and by preventing that accelerating cascade they interrupt the illness process.
What I experienced was that psychosis isn't a failure of logic or education. I had never believed in a single conspiracy theory (and I don't now), but during that month I believed all sorts of wild conspiratorial things.
What you're describing with cable news sounds more like 1) Cognitive bias, which everyone has, but yes can be improved. And 2) a social phenomenon, where they create this shared reality of not just information, but a social identity, and they keep feeding that beast.
However, when those people hold beliefs that sound irrational to outsiders, that's not necessarily the same thing as psychotic delusions.
When I was in psychosis, it definitely seemed like more of a hardware issue than a software issue if that makes sense. Sometimes software issues can lead to hardware issues though.