As a result of such immersive interactions with AI chatbots, many people are said to have “lost jobs, destroyed marriages and relationships, and fallen into homelessness” 4 and ended up in jail or involuntarily committed to psychiatric treatment.
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Of course, association doesn’t equal causality, so a key question about this emerging phenomenon is whether these accounts describe individuals with mental illness who end up incorporating AI chatbots into their pre-existing psychotic thinking or cases in which AI chatbots truly induced de novo psychosis in those with no such history. Is this a case of causality or coincidence?
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According to recent reporting, the answer may be both. While some people with AI-associated psychosis did have pre-existing mental illness, others are alleged to have occurred in those … who spent more and more time going “down the rabbit hole” ….
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The bottom line is that, despite AI being characterized as “intelligent,” chatbots trained on LLMs suffer from a “garbage in, garbage out” problem with limited ability to distinguish between reliable and unreliable information.