A new trend is emerging in psychiatric hospitals. People in crisis are arriving with false, sometimes dangerous beliefs, grandiose delusions, and paranoid thoughts. A common thread connects them: marathon conversations with AI chatbots.<\/p>\n
WIRED spoke with more than a dozen psychiatrists and researchers, who are increasingly concerned. In San Francisco, UCSF psychiatrist Keith Sakata says he has counted a dozen cases severe enough to warrant hospitalization this year, cases in which artificial intelligence<\/a> \u201cplayed a significant role in their psychotic episodes.\u201d As this situation unfolds, a catchier definition has taken off in the headlines: \u201cAI psychosis.\u201d<\/p>\n Some patients insist the bots are sentient or spin new grand theories of physics. Other physicians tell of patients locked in days of back-and-forth with the tools, arriving at the hospital with thousands upon thousands of pages of transcripts detailing how the bots had supported or reinforced obviously problematic thoughts.<\/p>\n Reports like this are piling up, and the consequences are brutal. Distressed users and family and friends have<\/a> described<\/a> spirals<\/a> that<\/a> led<\/a> to lost jobs, ruptured relationships, involuntary hospital admissions, jail time, and even death<\/a>. Yet clinicians tell WIRED the medical community is split. Is this a distinct phenomenon that deserves its own label, or a familiar problem with a modern trigger?<\/p>\n AI psychosis is not a recognized clinical label. Still, the phrase has spread in news reports and on social media as a catchall descriptor for some kind of mental health crisis following prolonged chatbot conversations. Even industry leaders invoke it to discuss the many emerging mental health problems linked to AI. At Microsoft, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of the tech giant\u2019s AI division, warned in a blog post last month<\/a> of the \u201cpsychosis risk.\u201d Sakata says he is pragmatic and uses the phrase with people who already do. \u201cIt\u2019s useful as shorthand for discussing a real phenomenon,\u201d says the psychiatrist. However, he is quick to add that the term \u201ccan be misleading\u201d and \u201crisks oversimplifying complex psychiatric symptoms.\u201d<\/p>\n That oversimplification is exactly what concerns many of the psychiatrists beginning to grapple with the problem.<\/p>\n Psychosis is characterized as a departure from reality. In clinical practice, it is not an illness but a complex \u201cconstellation of symptoms including hallucinations, thought disorder, and cognitive difficulties,\u201d says James MacCabe, a professor in the Department of Psychosis Studies at King\u2019s College London. It is often associated with health conditions like schizophrenia<\/a> and bipolar disorder, though episodes can be triggered by a wide array of factors, including extreme stress, substance use, and sleep deprivation.<\/p>\n But according to MacCabe, case reports of AI psychosis almost exclusively focus on delusions\u2014strongly held but false beliefs that cannot be shaken by contradictory evidence. While acknowledging some cases may meet the criteria for a psychotic episode, MacCabe says \u201cthere is no evidence\u201d that AI has any influence on the other features of psychosis. \u201cIt is only the delusions that are affected by their interaction with AI.\u201d Other patients reporting mental health issues after engaging with chatbots, MacCabe notes, exhibit delusions without any other features of psychosis, a condition called delusional disorder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new trend is emerging in psychiatric hospitals. People in crisis are arriving with false, sometimes dangerous beliefs,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":165260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,4320,97,259,79,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-165259","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-chatbots","12":"tag-health","13":"tag-mental-health","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}