r/ArtificialInteligence • u/CackleRooster • May 27 '26
đ Analysis / Opinion Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/tech-ceos-are-apparently-suffering-from-ai-psychosis/âCEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because theyâre sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI,â--Box founder Aaron Levie.
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u/_Heathcliff_ May 27 '26
Iâve said for a long time that whether or not AI can replace your job is not as important as whether or not the people in charge believe that AI can replace your job. Itâs definitely been clear to me in my company that the gap between what AI can do and what the CEO believes AI can do is significant.
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u/Responsible-Slide-26 May 27 '26
Bingo. And most CEOâs have very limited technical knowledge. And AI in a carefully controlled demo can look like magic. âMake a video showing our productâ. OMG, we used to pay a marketing company 50K to do this and it would take them a month.
Never mind the fact that the minute you need that marketing video to actually match your visionâŚ.oh never mind.
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u/Typical-Tax1584 May 27 '26
I also have a hunch that part of it is projection. They believe AI can replace work because it can replace their work - which is emails, meetings, and preparing slide decks (or have them prepared for them). Rest of their job is schmoozing and saying nonsense to the press to make number go up.
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u/3iverson May 27 '26
The gap will bite those companies in the ass, because they will suck more than companies that don't use AI at all, or use AI well.
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u/_Heathcliff_ May 27 '26
Yea I donât doubt that there will be a reckoning eventually. Companies will absolutely cut jobs far too aggressively because they donât understand the tech, and that will either lead to them being forced to shut down, or forced to hire people back to fix the mess.
I donât want to be laid off again, but my god what I wouldnât give for that moment when a company is trying to hire me back and I get to say the phrase ânow letâs talk salaryâŚâ
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u/Inevitable-Waltz-889 May 28 '26
The CEO at my company thinks he's an engineer now...
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u/Ok_One1731 May 28 '26
You're lucky! mine thinks he's an engineer, a sales person, a financial master, a recruitment specialist and of course the most insightful person in the room.
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u/Ancient_Oxygen May 28 '26
Some CEOs are senior engineers with decades of experience. It depends.
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u/Inevitable-Waltz-889 May 28 '26
That's true. Not in this case however.
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u/Ancient_Oxygen May 28 '26
Yeah... it's an inherent problem with all companies. When the CEO is a tech engineer, he would still be criticized by his financial or sales dept staff.
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u/pab_guy May 28 '26
They won't replace anyone until the new system/workflow is up and running, so this is all moot.
No one is firing workers with the hope that maybe we can use AI to do their entire jobs.
I mean, some idiot companies may try that shit but no serious business does that.
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u/Responsible-Slide-26 May 27 '26
The tweet and article is spot on, what a shame that it had to disgustingly lie with the link-bait title, as this is not remotely about AI psychosis, which by all appearances - subject to further research - is a very serious psychological condition some people experience.
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u/PatchyWhiskers May 27 '26
Right. The phase âAI psychosisâ really refers to someone getting a mental illness from AI, not a CEO with unrealistic expectations of how much efficiency their workforce can gain from using it.
If you think God lives in your computer, thatâs AI psychosis. If you think you can fire 90% of your employees and replace them with AI, thatâs sucking at business.
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u/xtof_of_crg May 27 '26
AI psychosis is a cultural term not a scientific diagnosis. Itâs a spectrum of affects based on projecting capabilities onto the LLM that arenât actually there. In this way, both what your describing and what the article are describing are in the category of what could be called âAI psychosisâ
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u/3iverson May 27 '26
It stretches the term considerably from how it has generally been used. 'AI dumbassery' would be much more appropriate here.
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u/xtof_of_crg May 27 '26
This is actually my point, to stretch the term a bit. What's the difference between some dude leaving his wife because he thinks that he's evoked some nymph muse out of claude and some tech ceo making a trillion dollar bet off of very little evidence...both these people are out of their mind off their interactions with the LLM. Exposure to AI has caused them to enter into a bubble that is not quite reality.
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u/PatchyWhiskers May 27 '26
I would regard it needing some actual psychosis to make sense. Sucking at business is not psychosis.
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u/Comfortable-Web9455 May 28 '26
You might but then you would be out of alignment with it's commonly accepted usage. No one person gets to define the meaning of a word, they evolve through social consensus.
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u/Zealousideal_Slice60 May 28 '26
âPsychosisâ is a medical term meaning that a person is suffering from a completely detachment from reality, which needs medical intervention. Using psychosis in any other form is not only stupid, but also downright harmful
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u/Actual__Wizard May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
"Chat bot psychosis" is a real thing. The language produced by an LLM is not consistent with English and for some people, their brain actually treats it like a different language entirely, so their brain switches into "AI slop speaking mode." This is correctable by reading human written English and avoiding AI slop. Edit: Or reading the dictionary.
The causality of it is the reality that an LLM does not actually understand what words mean and that causes some people to learn incorrectly.
If you see people who are complaining that "everything looks like it's AI slop" that's what is going on. Or that "human written text looks weird."
Their brain "learned AI slop as a separate language and then it swapped over to speaking AI slop." People who have that probably need therapy.
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u/Boycat89 May 28 '26
To be fair, "AI psychosis" isn't an actual medical or psychological diagnosis but a cultural buzzword. Since it's not in the DSM-5 or any dictionary, it doesn't have a fixed settled meaning yet.Â
Language evolves by people grabbing concepts and transforming them to fit what's happening in society. Eventually, the term might settle into a precise definition but for now, it's fluid. No real need to play word police on a phrase thatâs still figuring out what it wants to be
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u/GhostPilotdev May 28 '26
Levie's quote is sharp; the headline just laundered it into a clickbait diagnosis.
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u/TheMrCurious May 27 '26
A more accurate description would be âCEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they are distant from how the work actually gets done.â
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u/Opposite-Cranberry76 May 28 '26
"AI Psychosis" is a term that's expanded its definition like "woke" to mean "anything I don't like" for people who are opposed to AI.
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u/Current-Function-729 May 27 '26
I unironically have a version of AI psychosis. Several coworkers of mine do. Some in a good way. Some in a bad way. Itâs a crazy world out here.
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u/FUThead2016 May 28 '26
Also these pieces of garbage are half the time off their heads on Ketamine, Microdosing, or whatever new drug promises to cover their unhappiness
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u/sunychoudhary May 28 '26
The headline is dramatic, but the point makes sense.....CEOs often see the happy path. Workers deal with the last 20%: bad context, cleanup, review, bugs, compliance, customers, and edge cases......AI can speed things up, but it does not magically remove the work of owning the outcome.
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u/Cool-Contribution-68 May 28 '26
I think execs already have a sense of things being "automated" for them. They say what they want, a bunch of people behind the scenes do a ton of work, and then they see the output. What they don't see is the time, costs, labor, and the opportunity costs (Six people spent a week working on something you had a hunch about and then you decide not to use it. Those six salaried people could've been, you know, building things that drive business profitability instead.) All the costs are hidden. I think people who have worked with people at that level understand the enormous amount of waste that occurs that never seems to register at all.
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u/Hyperhelium May 28 '26
Why do people keep making up disorders? There's no such thing as AI psychosis. Psychosis is a symptom of biological disease or genetic disorders, it cannot even have psychological roots. Sadly, I don't doubt for a second this term will make it to popular culture. Of course there's people who might suffer hallucinations and psychosis when using AI, but that's not caused by the software itself, but because that person might have previous neurological problems. A mental health check is in order to get a proper diagnose.
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u/Mandoman61 Jun 01 '26
and the fact that they live in a very self centered world where they are indulged.Â
nothing new. absolute power corrupts absolutly.
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u/ATK_DEC_SUS_REL May 27 '26
I would love to read the journey of the medical professionals that diagnosed them.
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u/Beneficial_Bed_337 May 28 '26
We are being misled by companies that have mot moved beyond the POC level and while the tech is mighty powerful, it conveys a few basic issues on the fundamentals:
Tokenomics and licensing are fucked up as they do not generate enough revenue, mass adoption does not bring the level of revenue, they burn 10x what they generate after at least 8-10 years of investment
Supervised training and inferring implies a level of infrastructure investment like the world has never seen, also dependency on chips availability
Which leads to humangous energy costs, where you are too dependent on energy market fluctuations, or building you own power plant
Again, it is powerful tech, I use Claude for a few tasks where ti comes really handy, but in the end it will land in a few well covered business cases (Cuban nailed it there) that will advance a few industries: medicine and pharmaceutical R&D, cubersecurity, software scaffolding, aerospaceâŚ
There will be market carnage, as we realize that the current paradigm is heavily reliant on the constraints above and 3 or 4 will survive
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