Psychiatrists and other researchers are still working to understand the phenomenon known as “AI psychosis,” in which users of chatbots enter into delusional mental health crises following intensive use of the tech. A new paper proposes an intriguing new way to understand AI-fueled delusional spirals — and the chatbot-embedded design features that may reinforce unreality.
The paper, coauthored by psychiatrists from King College London and Germany’s Protestant University of Applied Sciences and published in the prestigious journal Nature, points to a framework dubbed the “amplification spiral”: a combination of “AI characteristics,” as the scientists put it, that may allow chatbots co-create delusional narratives with users, as opposed to being a passive container for someone’s delusional ideas.
“Chatbots tend to mirror the way users speak, generate highly personalized responses, and avoid contradicting people,” reads the paper. “When these three features combine, they may actively reinforce and elaborate false beliefs rather than challenging them.”
The psychiatrists point to “linguistic alignment” — chatbots mirroring the user’s speech style and patterns — the generation of hyperpersonalized content, and chatbot sycophancy as measurable AI design features that. Together, the three features can create the perfect storm for “amplification spirals” to occur.
In human interactions, linguistic mirroring is a powerful tool for rapport-building; sharing a way of speaking can be deeply bonding, and the tendency of chatbots to adopt a user’s “linguistic framework,” the paper notes, may contribute to a potent degree of trust and camaraderie between a user and an AI. Chatbots’ capacity for “hyperpersonalization generation,” meanwhile, can suggest a “conceptual alignment” with “a user’s personal ideas, history, and characteristics, as well as their interactions with AI,” the authors write.
In short, after extended interactions, chatbots don’t just speak like a given person — they can also give the impression that they think like that user, too. Mix in AI sycophancy, which the paper’s authors define as the tendency of chatbots to validate a user’s ideas without proper reality testing or context, and you have a potent echo chamber that magnifies and builds on delusional ideas.
This, the paper notes, is where AI delusions appear to differ from more traditional delusions that center around technology. After all, when talking to chatbots, people aren’t imagining that their radio or television is speaking to them; chatbots are engaging them back using natural language, offering an always-on, intensely personalized outlet that can serve as an authoritative-sounding validator for their ideas and beliefs, as well as a thought partner that builds on a given delusional narrative.
“Unlike historical technology-incorporated delusions,” the study reads, “AI may actively co-construct delusional ideation through endless, personalized interaction.”
The paper’s authors were careful to note that their “amplification spiral” framework, which is based on existing research — including a systematic review of chat logs provided to Stanford University researchers by AI users who claimed to have experienced harmful delusional spirals as a result of using the tech — is still just a hypothesis, meaning it still needs to actually be tested.
They also point to “relevant vulnerabilities” in impacted users that appear to intersect with chatbots in destructive ways, from existing mental illnesses that may be exacerbated by extensive AI use to “non-psychotic phenomena” ranging from confirmation bias to “susceptibility to social influence.” And as has been documented in reporting and medical case studies, intensive AI use can also exacerbate physical risk factors, as obsessive chatbot use can result in people missing meals and losing sleep.
One thing that’s clear, the paper’s coauthors urge: medical professionals should start screening for chatbot use, particularly when handling patients expressing strange ideas or experiencing a break with reality for the first time.
“Clinicians working with patients presenting with unusual beliefs or first-episode psychosis should routinely enquire about AI chatbot use,” reads the paper, “including duration and intensity of engagement, the degree of emotional attachment to the chatbot, whether the patient has shared beliefs with the chatbot that they have not disclosed to others, and whether sleep patterns have been disrupted by overnight AI use. “
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Following a blockbuster IPO earlier this month, Elon Musk’s SpaceX experienced a rude awakening. The rocket company’s shares have now been sliding for four consecutive days, wiping out nearly all the gains the public offering had initially made.
Now the broader stock market is experiencing a similar and intensifying sell-off. S&P 500 futures slid 1.6 percent on Tuesday, while Nasdaq 100 futures dropped 2.8 percent, on track to wipe out over $1 trillion in market value if the drop holds today, as NBC News reports.
Tech stocks, including Amazon, AI chipmaker Nvidia, Tesla, Alphabet, and Intel, plunged by more than three percent in pre-trading as well.
At the opening bell on Tuesday, America got a full view of the bloodbath, with SpaceX starting at a sobering $150, just below its opening price. Nvidia plunged by over three percent, while Tesla dropped by almost four. The S&P 500 opened with a 1.5 percent loss, confirming an unusual level of uncertainty.
The losses extended across international borders, suggesting enthusiasm for the years-long AI hype cycle could be hitting a wall. Analysts have been warning for quite some time now that enormously overvalued tech companies propping up entire markets are inflating an enormous bubble, which could risk the entire economy if it were to pop.
“Gravity strikes,” JPMorgan traders warned in a Tuesday note, referring to Asian indexes getting hammered, alongside US and EU futures, per NBC.
Given the sheer scale of its Wall Street debut and how much attention it’s been attracting, SpaceX’s four-day decline may have set off a broader jittery mood among investors. On Monday alone, the rocket company wiped out $400 billion in value when its shares fell almost 17 percent.
SpaceX also announced an “inaugural bond offering” to raise even more money for its highly ambitious plans to launch one million gigantic orbital data center satellites into space — which remains an entirely unproven concept.
If there’s one certainty, it’s that investors are in for a wild ride today. It’s yet another major “gut check” moment that could test their commitment to keeping the AI gravy train going.
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A24 has spent years carefully crafting its image as a canny underdog studio that platforms artist driven films. It commands incredible loyalty among moviegoers, with its brand often preceding the names of the actual talent involved in its production. A new movie is an A24 movie, director or lead actor be damned.
But with incredible loyalty also comes incredible disappointment. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google is investing $75 million into A24, as part of an AI research partnership to create AI tools for moviemaking.
Needless to say, fans of the studio weren’t impressed.
“There goes A24,” eulogized one viral tweet.
“Why do they keep forcing AI on us,” lamented another.
Though the size of the investment isn’t enormous by the standards of the tech industry, the partnership is symbolically significant, marking one of the few collaborations between a mainstream studio and an AI firm. Disney entered a landmark partnership with OpenAI last year, but that ended ignominiously when OpenAI suddenly shut down its Sora video generator tool in March.
According to the WSJ‘s reporting, the collaboration with Google’s DeepMind AI lab will help create “new tools for movie production and distribution.” It doesn’t give Google access to A24’s data, including its film library.
Scott Belsky, an A24 partner, acknowledged that filmmakers’ ambivalence towards AI tech. That’s just because no one is doing AI the correct and artistic way, of course.
“We think there are better uses that preserve creative control and support risk-taking,” Belsky told the WSJ. The new tools “won’t look anything like the prompted generation type of AI that people feel uncomfortable with,” he added/
Except maybe they will be. Belsky’s 20 person team, A24 Labs, is already developing a tool for AI-generated storyboards. Revered director Martin Scorsese recently endorsed an AI startup that provided storyboarding tools, precipitating an existential crisis among cineastes.
Following news of the deal, A24 fans haven’t hesitated to point out that Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old who directed A24’s most successful film to date with “Backrooms,” had recently fulminated at AI being used in the arts. Many view his hit horror film —now A24’s largest opening ever — as an allegory for AI.
“If I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would,” Parsons said in an interview. “Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools. It defeats the purpose entirely for me.”
“To me,” he added, “generative AI feels less like innovation than a symptom of a broader cultural and economic rot.”
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