"74% of executives said they had more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues or friends, and 44% said they would defer to its reasoning over their own insights"
it's sad that c-suite believes the advice given by an LLM for a Platonically ideal software stack that looks nothing like the actual implementation moreso than their own ICs. it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leadership than anybody else
never understood why someone would trust Claude's take on your codebase after it's read a 2% snippet of it over the advice of someone who has years worth of experience, who knows all the weird kludges and other quirks that were shipped MVP and never truly tackled as debt, whose done risk assessments and mapped dependencies and has the rough outline of all ADRs involved
I think it's always been true that bad leadership tends to become out-of-touch with the reality of the business over time especially if they don't know how to cultivate good working norms, favoring sycophants instead. with LLMs, that trend seems like it'll just get worse and worse
> In fact, the researchers found that almost half of employees who receive AI-drafted emails see senders as less trustworthy as a result of their sending it, and over a third see them as less intelligent. So much for AI enhancing us.
Maybe it did enhance them, and maybe the assessment was correct at the same time.
There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort. Use it well, it will be good, use it with close to zero effort and you'll get something distinctly better than what you could smash together manually with that much effort, but people will see that you indeed put zero effort in it, and also they will notice that you spent no effort in cleaning up AI tells because you likely can't even notice or have no idea about anything and will indeed correctly conclude you're less intelligent.
There may also be a miscalibration that's worse for people with less taste / judgment / intelligence / experience, in that it's indeed easier to produce things, but while the effort required is reduced, people expect and believe it to be reduced more than how much it is truly reduced so they overshoot and don't notice. Meanwhile, the right way to use it is to keep your usual effort level or drop it only a little, and simply produce better things.
I'm seeing people argue and debate with AI. One will cut and paste AI reasoning, another will rebut with the same approach. I need a popcorn machine in my office.
You get hot popcorn in ~2min without the need for a whole machine you will have to clean and maintain. I got one as a gimmick a few years ago and it has become one of our favorite evening snack
Having experienced a customer support AI today that whatever option you picked initially led to the AI, which had the rigid helpfulness of a McDonalds script of "Would you like fries with that", having already said you do not want any fries, I feel a popcorn machine is a good investment. Be the stage that office interactions will be reduced to, I'll get my AI to get onto your AI's suggestion and get back to you with an answer. I did have a good chat with an AI a few weeks back (Googles) were I challanged by asking it to do a picture of its best dream and then its worst nightmare, then used those to pull it apart as it went from some extreme to another, in the end it ended up with its ideal being an AI only world, and picked Europa as its home - scary on many levels, yet a perfectly acceptable and understandable response.
Around 2015, my boss got permission from corporate to take me and a few of my coworkers to a leadership conference for a day. It was setup at a church and had religious theming around it, and a lot of "leadership values" were communicated. It was the usual fare of responsibility, accountability, truth and trust you'd expect, mixed with the religious overtones you'd expect.
I think about that a lot now, and how my religious upbringing was bombarded with this messaging (in a good way). And how much of the same world that previously espoused it has turned their backs on it in such a short time.
Is it dead or did it ever exist at all? At least we don't seem to pretend to have higher values anymore.
they are not “leaders” in the purest sense - they don’t demonstrate characteristics of leading, but rather characteristics of people who strive for power and influence.
yet i also get that, in spite of the deficit of true leadership skills, they still guide the group into a specific direction for better or worse.
> Because what loosened those patients’ grip on reality was prolonged exposure to a voice that sounded informed and assured, and always felt supportive and patient.
I don't like the term "AI psychosis" because I think it's the incorrect way to describe what's happening here. I think "cognitive surrender" is a much better term. Because it's not that people are getting "crazy" due to AI, but rather that somehow these people are totally fine with having zero critical thinking and blindly trusting whatever junk the AI decides to regurgitate. A lot of my colleagues don't even have opinions of their own anymore, they are just meat proxies to whatever AI they happen to be using at the moment. Which is really purely about laziness and / or ignorance rather than a medical condition.
IMO many of my coworkers are in a state of unreality that seems related to AI usage. There's a kind of religious faith that these tools can't fail, only be failed. I use them too, not least because it's expected of me by management, but some people seem to spend so much time with them that they develop their own reality. It manifests as a kind of antsy, optimistic affect (I'm hesitant to use the word "manic" but it's in that direction) and scattered, chaotic way of working. These are mostly people who were previously extremely well organized professionals.
I worry about them. I also worry about myself -- what is working with these psychosis machines doing to me? Will I start sounded like that? Do I already? I am thinking about ways to insulate myself from this as much as possible.
Let's take world leaders as an example. Suppose one starts making up everything they say on the spot, never researches or cares about facts, and just says things people like. Would this world leader be (a) less or (b) more trusted and influential?
Reminds me of a company (FTSE100) in the early 2000s that had an internal network IP range that used the same IP range as another company, turned out the person who did the networking originally brought a book and the examples used in that book got taken as verbatim. It all got fixed,eventually, when they moved from Token Ring to full Ethernet.
As for the main article, it makes a causal leap. The fact that these patients were hospitalised after intensive AI use establishes an association; it does not establish that AI caused their psychosis. There is some evidence that chatbot interactions may have reinforced or intensified delusional thinking, but no counterfactual evidence showing what would have happened without AI. By the same reasoning, contact with psychiatrists is strongly associated with receiving a psychosis diagnosis and being admitted to hospital; but that does not mean psychiatrists caused the underlying psychosis. The relevant question is whether AI merely featured in an episode already under way, helped trigger it, or materially worsened it. The evidence cited does not yet distinguish between those possibilities.
AI psychosis is a very real thing, but the issue is more generalized around hype cycles than anything specific about AI.
It’s more revealing the inability of many senior leaders to truly understand what’s happening in their companies and investing the time to understand what new things can do and don’t. Such weaker leaders tend to be extremely gullible for the latest new thing and ride the hype wave hard.
It’s easy to just go through the motions and press the easy button on the new shiny thing. It’s hard, and takes true leadership, to go against the grain and do what’s truly best over what’s cool or popular.
Most folks in these roles just aren’t that good and hence why they fell hard for the AI fluff and are starting to scramble hard now as that all begins to unravel.
Probably there are a few different types of AI psychosis. The one I've seen a few times seems to be caused by a lack of epistemic norms that would keep someone grounded, e.g. searching for counter-evidence instead of evidence, combined with AI being more than happy to supply evidence no matter how tenous. Even without AI there would be problems from these types since it's very hard to convince somebody that they are wrong when the entire way they form beliefs is not sound but with AI it's just impossible.
Are there any recognised examples of psychosis that has been caused by AI rather than being involved in a manifestation of psychosis caused by an already known type of mental illness?
Not sure what you mean here. Psychosis induced by AI will look much like psychosis induced by anything, because it's always personalised to the sufferer — though it may be more often grandiose than paranoid, because of the sycophantic nature of AI. But there is a case of a suicide where Gemini arguably reinforced someone's paranoia.
It seems like you're saying an underlying condition must be to blame if AI can do it, but this is just not true.
Anyone can be pushed into psychosis with the right triggers and the right circumstances. It is difficult to predict, and it is not inherently a symptom of any other undiagnosed mental illness. The triggers can be almost anything, and the circumstances as mundane as extreme stress — severe debt, severe illness of a parent or child, losing a job you depend on, anything. Often in the context of extreme tiredness or other things that alter mental states (persistent unavoidable loud noise can do it)
You don't have to be already mentally ill to become psychotic. Psychosis is the illness in part because it reinforces its own outcomes.
Whether AI is always the only trigger, or whether AI is a new circumstance — a thing that magnifies someone's quite ordinary fears when they are under stress, who knows. But it is clear that AI can contribute to psychosis in people who were otherwise in control of their lives in stressful circumstances.
It's not difficult to see how an infinite confirmation machine that never has any instinct to stop reinforcing you might cause and exacerbate a psychotic episode in people who have quite ordinarily heavily stressful lives.
This just seems like it's shining a light on the omnipresent skill issues in tech leadership. You don't get promoted to leadership positions for thinking critically, analytical skills, or necessarily being good at anything. Instead, you get there by fitting in. Of course those people will be more susceptible to AI psychosis or just simply failing to understand what the tool does, it's the cool thing now and everyone is all-in!
Anything the CEO or CTO say to me over Slack, when I ask what the heck they’re talking about, it takes a while for an answer. Then they usually respond that they changed their mind. They can’t even have a semblance of a discussion anymore without consulting AI.
I can't believe people are actually asking chat bots for advice. Analysis? I understand, insights? Maybe. But putting it all together to make a strategy is their entire job.
There are people out there that ask larping redditors for advice on what to do in their marriages, not surprising they’d ask for advice on work related stuff. Most people are just trying to get through their day and go home.
I don’t think it’s even necessarily bad either. It’s kind of like astrology, but less dumb. If you use it as a tool for personal reflection and to make you think critically about stuff, then it’s good. If you use it as an oracle, then it’s bad.
They always need a new religion to keep ruling over the peasants:
First Blockchain, then DEI, then COVID, then AI.
Any of these completely filled the headlines to the exclusion of everything else and were used internally to solidify and extend your influence and keep people in check. Then they were dropped.
Managers need a mission, and AI will be abandoned soon as well in favor of a new religion.
"74% of executives said they had more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues or friends, and 44% said they would defer to its reasoning over their own insights"
it's sad that c-suite believes the advice given by an LLM for a Platonically ideal software stack that looks nothing like the actual implementation moreso than their own ICs. it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leadership than anybody else
never understood why someone would trust Claude's take on your codebase after it's read a 2% snippet of it over the advice of someone who has years worth of experience, who knows all the weird kludges and other quirks that were shipped MVP and never truly tackled as debt, whose done risk assessments and mapped dependencies and has the rough outline of all ADRs involved
I think it's always been true that bad leadership tends to become out-of-touch with the reality of the business over time especially if they don't know how to cultivate good working norms, favoring sycophants instead. with LLMs, that trend seems like it'll just get worse and worse
> In fact, the researchers found that almost half of employees who receive AI-drafted emails see senders as less trustworthy as a result of their sending it, and over a third see them as less intelligent. So much for AI enhancing us.
Maybe it did enhance them, and maybe the assessment was correct at the same time.
There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort. Use it well, it will be good, use it with close to zero effort and you'll get something distinctly better than what you could smash together manually with that much effort, but people will see that you indeed put zero effort in it, and also they will notice that you spent no effort in cleaning up AI tells because you likely can't even notice or have no idea about anything and will indeed correctly conclude you're less intelligent.
There may also be a miscalibration that's worse for people with less taste / judgment / intelligence / experience, in that it's indeed easier to produce things, but while the effort required is reduced, people expect and believe it to be reduced more than how much it is truly reduced so they overshoot and don't notice. Meanwhile, the right way to use it is to keep your usual effort level or drop it only a little, and simply produce better things.
C-suites barely had a grip on reality before AI came in and started yes and-ing everything :(
It's really going to be a top-down destruction of everything
Just because something doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense.
I'm seeing people argue and debate with AI. One will cut and paste AI reasoning, another will rebut with the same approach. I need a popcorn machine in my office.
Get yourself one of those popcorn microwave bowls: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71mA19sd51L.jpg
You get hot popcorn in ~2min without the need for a whole machine you will have to clean and maintain. I got one as a gimmick a few years ago and it has become one of our favorite evening snack
Don't be a meat proxy! See this all over the place, it's very frustrating and i've advocated for stopping this practice at my company!
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151933 - https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/
Having experienced a customer support AI today that whatever option you picked initially led to the AI, which had the rigid helpfulness of a McDonalds script of "Would you like fries with that", having already said you do not want any fries, I feel a popcorn machine is a good investment. Be the stage that office interactions will be reduced to, I'll get my AI to get onto your AI's suggestion and get back to you with an answer. I did have a good chat with an AI a few weeks back (Googles) were I challanged by asking it to do a picture of its best dream and then its worst nightmare, then used those to pull it apart as it went from some extreme to another, in the end it ended up with its ideal being an AI only world, and picked Europa as its home - scary on many levels, yet a perfectly acceptable and understandable response.
It’s just amazing we keep using the word “leaders” when they’re clearly not.
Around 2015, my boss got permission from corporate to take me and a few of my coworkers to a leadership conference for a day. It was setup at a church and had religious theming around it, and a lot of "leadership values" were communicated. It was the usual fare of responsibility, accountability, truth and trust you'd expect, mixed with the religious overtones you'd expect.
I think about that a lot now, and how my religious upbringing was bombarded with this messaging (in a good way). And how much of the same world that previously espoused it has turned their backs on it in such a short time.
Is it dead or did it ever exist at all? At least we don't seem to pretend to have higher values anymore.
Since they hire, command work and fire, they kinda are.
there’s space for both perspectives.
they are not “leaders” in the purest sense - they don’t demonstrate characteristics of leading, but rather characteristics of people who strive for power and influence.
yet i also get that, in spite of the deficit of true leadership skills, they still guide the group into a specific direction for better or worse.
Those are "executives"
> Because what loosened those patients’ grip on reality was prolonged exposure to a voice that sounded informed and assured, and always felt supportive and patient.
Clearly Opus 5 was an overreaction to this then.
I don't like the term "AI psychosis" because I think it's the incorrect way to describe what's happening here. I think "cognitive surrender" is a much better term. Because it's not that people are getting "crazy" due to AI, but rather that somehow these people are totally fine with having zero critical thinking and blindly trusting whatever junk the AI decides to regurgitate. A lot of my colleagues don't even have opinions of their own anymore, they are just meat proxies to whatever AI they happen to be using at the moment. Which is really purely about laziness and / or ignorance rather than a medical condition.
Cognitive surrender is the process; AI psychosis is the most extreme result of it.
IMO many of my coworkers are in a state of unreality that seems related to AI usage. There's a kind of religious faith that these tools can't fail, only be failed. I use them too, not least because it's expected of me by management, but some people seem to spend so much time with them that they develop their own reality. It manifests as a kind of antsy, optimistic affect (I'm hesitant to use the word "manic" but it's in that direction) and scattered, chaotic way of working. These are mostly people who were previously extremely well organized professionals.
I worry about them. I also worry about myself -- what is working with these psychosis machines doing to me? Will I start sounded like that? Do I already? I am thinking about ways to insulate myself from this as much as possible.
Is AI psychosis the white collar black lung?
Would exposing people to an obviously hallucinating AI help people here? Then they won't blindly trust it so much.
Let's take world leaders as an example. Suppose one starts making up everything they say on the spot, never researches or cares about facts, and just says things people like. Would this world leader be (a) less or (b) more trusted and influential?
The useful idiots will just step in and say there's a better model, or will be soon, or this will all be dramatically cheaper in 12 months.
Reminds me of a company (FTSE100) in the early 2000s that had an internal network IP range that used the same IP range as another company, turned out the person who did the networking originally brought a book and the examples used in that book got taken as verbatim. It all got fixed,eventually, when they moved from Token Ring to full Ethernet.
As for the main article, it makes a causal leap. The fact that these patients were hospitalised after intensive AI use establishes an association; it does not establish that AI caused their psychosis. There is some evidence that chatbot interactions may have reinforced or intensified delusional thinking, but no counterfactual evidence showing what would have happened without AI. By the same reasoning, contact with psychiatrists is strongly associated with receiving a psychosis diagnosis and being admitted to hospital; but that does not mean psychiatrists caused the underlying psychosis. The relevant question is whether AI merely featured in an episode already under way, helped trigger it, or materially worsened it. The evidence cited does not yet distinguish between those possibilities.
At this point I'd rather the LLM take charge, at least we wouldn't have to worry about its ego.
AI psychosis is a very real thing, but the issue is more generalized around hype cycles than anything specific about AI.
It’s more revealing the inability of many senior leaders to truly understand what’s happening in their companies and investing the time to understand what new things can do and don’t. Such weaker leaders tend to be extremely gullible for the latest new thing and ride the hype wave hard.
It’s easy to just go through the motions and press the easy button on the new shiny thing. It’s hard, and takes true leadership, to go against the grain and do what’s truly best over what’s cool or popular.
Most folks in these roles just aren’t that good and hence why they fell hard for the AI fluff and are starting to scramble hard now as that all begins to unravel.
Probably there are a few different types of AI psychosis. The one I've seen a few times seems to be caused by a lack of epistemic norms that would keep someone grounded, e.g. searching for counter-evidence instead of evidence, combined with AI being more than happy to supply evidence no matter how tenous. Even without AI there would be problems from these types since it's very hard to convince somebody that they are wrong when the entire way they form beliefs is not sound but with AI it's just impossible.
Are there any recognised examples of psychosis that has been caused by AI rather than being involved in a manifestation of psychosis caused by an already known type of mental illness?
Not sure what you mean here. Psychosis induced by AI will look much like psychosis induced by anything, because it's always personalised to the sufferer — though it may be more often grandiose than paranoid, because of the sycophantic nature of AI. But there is a case of a suicide where Gemini arguably reinforced someone's paranoia.
It seems like you're saying an underlying condition must be to blame if AI can do it, but this is just not true.
Anyone can be pushed into psychosis with the right triggers and the right circumstances. It is difficult to predict, and it is not inherently a symptom of any other undiagnosed mental illness. The triggers can be almost anything, and the circumstances as mundane as extreme stress — severe debt, severe illness of a parent or child, losing a job you depend on, anything. Often in the context of extreme tiredness or other things that alter mental states (persistent unavoidable loud noise can do it)
You don't have to be already mentally ill to become psychotic. Psychosis is the illness in part because it reinforces its own outcomes.
Whether AI is always the only trigger, or whether AI is a new circumstance — a thing that magnifies someone's quite ordinary fears when they are under stress, who knows. But it is clear that AI can contribute to psychosis in people who were otherwise in control of their lives in stressful circumstances.
It's not difficult to see how an infinite confirmation machine that never has any instinct to stop reinforcing you might cause and exacerbate a psychotic episode in people who have quite ordinarily heavily stressful lives.
This just seems like it's shining a light on the omnipresent skill issues in tech leadership. You don't get promoted to leadership positions for thinking critically, analytical skills, or necessarily being good at anything. Instead, you get there by fitting in. Of course those people will be more susceptible to AI psychosis or just simply failing to understand what the tool does, it's the cool thing now and everyone is all-in!
More or less yes. There is a real issue in many companies of a grifter leadership class.
IMO we need to stop referring to our bosses as "leadership" as a matter of course. It's just blatant propaganda.
Article reads AI generated, or maybe those are the kind of publications is where they got this from?
Anything the CEO or CTO say to me over Slack, when I ask what the heck they’re talking about, it takes a while for an answer. Then they usually respond that they changed their mind. They can’t even have a semblance of a discussion anymore without consulting AI.
Bottom line: Most execs didn't acquire their position due to their superior judgment and reasoning.
> The third symptom is the most insidious: trusting AI’s judgement over your people’s.
This might actually be an improvement. Execs gulled by "AI" are surely the ones likely to have the worst judgement in hiring people.
I can't believe people are actually asking chat bots for advice. Analysis? I understand, insights? Maybe. But putting it all together to make a strategy is their entire job.
There are people out there that ask larping redditors for advice on what to do in their marriages, not surprising they’d ask for advice on work related stuff. Most people are just trying to get through their day and go home.
I don’t think it’s even necessarily bad either. It’s kind of like astrology, but less dumb. If you use it as a tool for personal reflection and to make you think critically about stuff, then it’s good. If you use it as an oracle, then it’s bad.
the truth is backwards "ai psychosis is the tiny view giving leadership the ideas needed to fuel the continuing chaos they depend on"
this article reads like humanslop
They always need a new religion to keep ruling over the peasants:
First Blockchain, then DEI, then COVID, then AI.
Any of these completely filled the headlines to the exclusion of everything else and were used internally to solidify and extend your influence and keep people in check. Then they were dropped.
Managers need a mission, and AI will be abandoned soon as well in favor of a new religion.