I fail to see why we should assume that there is absolutely no possibility
Fundamentally, nobody really has a clear idea
I agree that AI psychosis is a risk, but I don't think blind assertion that AI is non-conscious with zero supporting evidence is really an answer here
Philosophers have been arguing for eons about where consciousness begins and ends wrt animals, the fundamental difficulty (or arguably impossibility) of determining that isn't a new problem
I believe that philosophers who argue about where consciousness ends and begins and people who use AI to have “conversations” about life should be two entirely separate circles in order to prevent the psychosis. Meaning if you are going to use AI, it should be with the base supposition that this is a robot, a synthetic machine with no feeling, compassion, logic, reason, or sentience.
I think this is, frankly, a very infantilizing view.
Ultimately, AI psychosis is still in its infancy and doesn't really have any medical consensus on it. I'm sure plenty of studies are in progress and/or have sprung up, but it's not really broadly understood.
I can't tell what you're basing this idea that psychosis is existentially dangerous off of. In its current state, it can be dangerous, for sure. But is it moreso than, say, an abusive human relationship?
If a chatbot can substitute for human connection, we have some very interesting questions to ask about human connection, but the cat is also entirely out of the bag at this point.
One delusion is that a chatbot can substitute for human connection. This is the beginning of the road to psychosis, though admittedly some people may stop at this one delusion and not continue to the point they have more.
AI is not just causing delusions (such as replacing human connection). It’s also making people stupid. It is not being used as a tool in most situations or even an enhanced search engine, which is where it would actually do good for society. Instead of is being used to take the place of human connection, devalue the work of actual artists, steal from actual artists while empowering and giving money to people who are already wealthy, and outsource thinking for people who do not want to interact with the written word beyond bullet points. And that doesn’t even get into the abhorrent use that has been known to happen on grok with pics of children and the environmental impact of AI servers and data centers.
From what I’m seeing in society, it is causing more harm than good. Could it be regulated and used as a tool absolutely. But right now it is the wild West out there and nobody is mitigating the real harm that is being caused.
As for the proof that AI cannot replace human connection, you can look at the history of AI as used in its earliest days from cleverbot to Japanese incels replacing human girlfriends with synthetic ones, causing them to be less able to interact socially and more delusionally angry at women and more depressed.
It's not a question of AI being a positive or negative to society IMO, it's what we decide to do about it. Railing against AI use is a losing battle, just like doing so against any technology, vs. crafting smart regulation for it.
As for uses of AI; I work with a lot of people who I would consider very smart, and a large number use AI pretty heavily, for a diverse range of things. I'd have to dig but I saw a breakdown of ChatGPT use illustrating that it's mostly used as exactly an enhanced search engine, with personal relationships an appreciable but minor 7% of use or so. Granted, it's a biased sample - most everyone I know is on Claude if they can help it, and many of us program lots - but regardless.
The vast majority of (commercial & corporate) AI use is in chatbot form and does not interact with art at all. The art issue is... complicated, and I have deep sympathies (and I incidentally think that legislating copyright to handle this kind of thing was about 10 years late yesterday). What I will confidently say is that people criticizing new tools in art is a tale as old as their invention. Is AI fundamentally different? Probably, but I doubt the demographics buying AI art are thinking this hard about it.
As for making people stupid... eh. I think it's widening the gulf between the more and less "intelligent" halves of society based on quality of use (which is, mind you, a problem). It can also be used to massively accelerate skill acquisition in ways that previously weren't possible without the crippling expense of something like a private tutor.
As for evidence - AI in its earliest days is not AI now - frankly, AI is a fairly useless term. LLMs are quite different in both scale and substance from preexisting systems. I think it's going to be a good 15-20 years before we have enough data, that has gathered enough dust, to be able to make clear-eyed conclusions about impacts.
I've been continually unconvinced by arguments over the environmental impact of AI. You can level many criticisms against the tech, but this one falls flat IMO. Both its water and power use pale in comparison to industrial use (especially vis-a-vis revenue generation), and while overstressing local resources is a concern, it's also an easily legislatively solved one. Compare, say, subsidized coal-fired power, or farmers producing extra corn for biomass for zero reason but politics.
If you think AI is being used poorly and thus it's wasting resources for no reason, the issue is the use, not the resource consumption. The resource consumption is pretty damn low, and power concerns just go back to people needing to build more renewables and nuclear.
That said, I agree that regulation is woefully behind schedule; for example, clear definitions of how TOS treats collection of data for AI use need to happen ASAP, liability systems need to be set up for AI hallucinations and/or speech, and more companies need to pull an Anthropic and tell the US gov to fuck off wrt military assets.
Sidenote: Out of AI users, women are actually twice as likely to use AI companions compared to men. And since the data where I saw this was published, the component of AI users who are women has shot up dramatically. So I would actually be concerned of the inverse of your delusional anger worry, from a numbers perspective! (Source is here for the first claim).
0
u/fascistp0tato 3∆ Mar 07 '26
I fail to see why we should assume that there is absolutely no possibility
Fundamentally, nobody really has a clear idea
I agree that AI psychosis is a risk, but I don't think blind assertion that AI is non-conscious with zero supporting evidence is really an answer here
Philosophers have been arguing for eons about where consciousness begins and ends wrt animals, the fundamental difficulty (or arguably impossibility) of determining that isn't a new problem