Live data from Hacker News

AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

fastcompany.com

31–40 of 113 posts

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#31
post #16
post #2

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 t…

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.

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 commonplace as extreme stress — severe debt, severe illness of a parent or child, losing a job you depend on, anything. Often in the context of chronic tiredness or other things that alter mental states. Persistent inescapable loud noises can do it, for example, as well as drink and both illegal drugs and some quite common medications like corticosteroids and antihistamines.

You don't have to be already mentally ill to become psychotic. It's an illness itself. Transient psychotic episodes aren't that uncommon — one in twenty, one in fifteen people maybe will have one in their lifetimes.

Whether AI is always the only trigger in an AI psychosis, or whether AI is a new circumstantial environment, 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 your thoughts or impulses might cause and exacerbate a psychotic episode in people who have quite ordinarily heavily stressful lives.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#32
> 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.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#33

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.

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.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#34
"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

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#35
post #2

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 t…

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.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#36
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 sounding 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?

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#37
post #30

Would exposing people to an obviously hallucinating AI help people here? Then they won't blindly trust it so much.

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.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#38

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 also expect. But what I didn't expect is how trite this fictional narrative would prove to be.

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 claimed espouse it has complete 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. If we even have leaders at all, they are not measured by the yardsticks we used to make.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#39

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 op…

Cognitive surrender is the process; AI psychosis is the most extreme result of it.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#40
post #30

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?
Post reply on HN