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AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

fastcompany.com

71–80 of 113 posts

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#71
post #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…

> "Would you like fries with that", having already said you do not want any fries

Prescient in all the best ways - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#72
I've thought long and hard over leadership and management, worked in consulting shops, big tech, startups, scaleups and then I tried launching my own indie practice where I cold called numerous business owners and CEOs trying to sell them AI automation tech.

The answer to this chaos is deceptively simple - people want to make money first and foremost, then they want the money to be recurring and somewhat stable, and then select few want to grow and make more money with new and latest tech, but not at the expense of what they already have.

Everything else is in service to this, anything that gets in the way of this is rejected and ignored.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#74

> 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…

> There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort. Quoting the article... "Nearly half of senior leaders say they would trust a chatbot’s judgment over their own, on questions they were hired to answer." If they're using it like an oracle, then that is worrying, but how worrying - practically speaking - would depend on the baseline prior to the use of AI and how that compares with what the…

If you were gullible before, you will keep on being gullible. It's a moral panic. So what now? Karpathy, Carmack, Terence Tao shouldn't use AI? Or you want to require a license before you can use it?

On bullshitting - yes, it was already a thing. Where nobody cares about truth anyway and it's a low trust environment where everyone just wants to take but not give, and then move on, yeah this will be the result. Those places then should indeed crumble down under the weight of this.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#75
post #31
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 commonplac…

>But it is clear that AI can contribute to psychosis in people who were otherwise in control of their lives in stressful circumstances.

It is only clear in the sense that 'can contribute' can be used as a catch all. I'd like at least evidence of it being a significantly greater influence than the myrad of stimulus that people are exposed to every day.

>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.

True, but no such machine exists. If you think otherwise, feel free to prove that it does. That requires a higher standard than opinion.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#76
love that Standford started using "workslop" and i hope it makes its way to the general lexicon asap because my fury builds at every one of these pdf "summaries" my teammates send

the most depressing part of this for me is that i know im not that bright, but i scrutinize llm results. then my execs are more or less professional confidence men whove been selling to each other for decades, but then they so easily fall for a confidence game? when i see them speak with confidence on AI they just sound like clowns to me now

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#77

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

Pretend for a second that you're in a position of trying to run a successful business. Congrats, you're a c-suite executive now. Of course, you are free to define "successful" by whatever criteria you want, but not going bankrupt probably needs to be downstream of them. Notice that whatever your goals are, they don't automatically serve the interests and per concerns of all your employees. Are you now delusional, evi…

death by a thousand hyperboles

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#78
post #47

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

C-suites have no grip on reality, because their subordinates are afraid of telling them truth. The subordinates just want to look better in the boss's eyes, and are afraid to be replaced. The more levels the org chart has, the more pronounced the effect may be.

Understandable, who can afford to risk their livelihood just to tell a dumbass he's being a dumbass :p it's not like the C-suites will listen anyway

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#79
post #17

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 pati…

> but that does not mean psychiatrists caused the underlying psychosis

It doesn't rule it out, either. :)

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#80
post #65

It’s been wild watching smart people have their brain cooked on a constant diet of X and LLMs in the past two years. Models are excellent at code but they are not people managers. My guess this will ultimately lead a bunch of companies to revert to average returns or fold. Cal Newport was right.

> Models are excellent at code

Models are infinitely willing to code. The code they produce makes me want to pour one out for Knuth.

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