Part 3: "Voluminous AI Psychosis"
Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
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Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
#12People really need an entire article to justify labeling someone as having a mental illness because in their opinion, the their coworker isn't contributing meaninfully, or potentially making things worse. FTA: > Prolific AI psychosis occurs when a person generates a large quantity of AI output without significantly increasing the real value of their work. Guy, we used to just call this a bad coworker. I'm pretty sure…
> Guy, we used to just call this a bad coworker. Not that long ago. People generating large quantities of AI output is a relatively recent phenomenon. At least when compared to labels like this.
its the same individuals in my experience. i don't see people who used to be good employees suddenly sending a 3000 word email, but i sure do see that out of the people who were bad coworkers 12 months ago and still are today.
Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
#13One - delusion is a better fit if you need a term: https://mhanational.org/conditions/paranoia-and-delusional-d...
> Delusional disorder is characterized by irrational or intense belief(s) or suspicion(s) that a person believes to be true
it's still a bad fit because there's not currently popular social convention that trusting AI without validation is a bad idea but it's better than psychosis. also it's still stigmatizing and we live in a world where a thesaurus is seconds away at any time. plus psychosis as a diagnosis is typically a cluster of symptoms that go beyond just delusion: https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/294416-overview
Two - there's also an implication that there's 'harm' that this AI psychotic person inflicts on others embedded in this article. in reality, the vast majority of those suffering mental illnesses are far more likely to be harmed by others - https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtrea...
part of the work of being a good mental health advocate is not stigmatizing specific diagnoses as negative social ills. now if you don't give a single shit about mental health I'm not going to argue to get you to care. but if you do care then you should do better
Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
#14Excellent read! We were talking about the effects of AI Psychosis on companies. It looks like people have a misconceived notion that now work can be done 90% faster and they are attempting to literally get rid of 90% of the engineers. The end result, no one left with do the work - especially when an edge case/disaster strikes or the customer wants something different.
Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
#15I was talking to a friend recently, and i think i aligned with a similar definition. I've seen people who talk nonstop about AI, and how it's changed everything, but then there's no quantifiable output that supports their claim. On the other hand, I've had a friend start a business, and be able to create an app much much faster than what would have been possible in the past. He has real customers paying real money, w…
Back in the 2010s, the best, most efficient software engineers were characterized by 3 things
* end to end rough map of the entire space of compute in their head
* ability to search the internet for the right things
* ability to quickly experiment and try things to figure out how to do things
AI hasn't change that, it just made 2 and 3 into a very efficient thing.
The characterization of psychosis is best described by believing AI can do the first thing. No modern LLM can "reason" - otherwise you could give it a task like "make me money", it would ask you all the questions it needs about information that it doesn't know about and needs to know to make you money, then it would set whatever it needs to set up to make you money.
As such, you still need to know the domain entirely to be effective. When you do that, AI is fantastic at getting you to the right solution. Furthermore, its still in large part actually cheaper to higher a developer who then can use AI to build you the product that you need long term.
Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
#16One - delusion is a better fit if you need a term: https://mhanational.org/conditions/paranoia-and-delusional-d... > Delusional disorder is characterized by irrational or intense belief(s) or suspicion(s) that a person believes to be true it's still a bad fit because there's not currently popular social convention that trusting AI without validation is a bad idea but it's better than psychosis. also it's still stigma…
> Psychosis as a diagnosis is a serious condition. there's an implication that there's 'harm'
I just watched a company fire an entire department of people under the sincere belief a chatbot run by a middle manager could save them 10 million a year. This failed miserably and they now need to hire or re-hire people.
There is a tremendous amount of harm happening. Psychosis is a perfect term for what is happening.
Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
#17> In some cases, the new AI workflow may even destroy value.
I am really struggling with this one right now.
The client's development team is letting Claude document and refactor the product codebase without much intervention, purpose or taste. The thinking being that if Claude first writes a bunch of unit tests and then a bunch of documentation, that any downstream refactoring will magically work out.
I don't know how to convey to management how stupid this is without allowing it to fail in production. AI psychosis (or whatever we want to call it) being a new phenomenon means we might as well be speaking in moon runes to the CEO when trying to explain the situation.
The best countermeasure I can come up with right now is to use their momentum against them. Accelerate the failure. I've got the last known good commit hash written down on a sticky note on my monitor.
Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
#18One - delusion is a better fit if you need a term: https://mhanational.org/conditions/paranoia-and-delusional-d... > Delusional disorder is characterized by irrational or intense belief(s) or suspicion(s) that a person believes to be true it's still a bad fit because there's not currently popular social convention that trusting AI without validation is a bad idea but it's better than psychosis. also it's still stigma…
> Psychosis as a diagnosis is a serious condition. there's an implication that there's 'harm' I just watched a company fire an entire department of people under the sincere belief a chatbot run by a middle manager could save them 10 million a year. This failed miserably and they now need to hire or re-hire people. There is a tremendous amount of harm happening. Psychosis is a perfect term for what is happening.
it absolutely is not. when we think of harm in a diagnosis of psychotic disorders, we're talking about things like getting shot to death by the police, running out onto the highway, etc. it is not callously making a lot of people have to jobhunt
which isn't to say that layoffs don't suck (I was impacted by one very recently) but it's not psychosis that causes that to happen, it's greed and short-term shareholder-fixated thinking. that should be named instead of a mental illness that people suffer from
Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
#19I was talking to a friend recently, and i think i aligned with a similar definition. I've seen people who talk nonstop about AI, and how it's changed everything, but then there's no quantifiable output that supports their claim. On the other hand, I've had a friend start a business, and be able to create an app much much faster than what would have been possible in the past. He has real customers paying real money, w…
How would you feel about applying the same rule to artists?
I've seen people who work on art nonstop and think their art is really meaningful, get really into it, but there's little output that anyone cares about or that changes the world or that anyone would pay for.
On the other hand I've had friends who created some art, and have real customers paying real money, ....so it's easy to tell their art project is meaningful. (is that the conclusion?)
Maybe something (AI, code, an AI-coded project) doesn't need to have value to others or be worth money for it to be meaningful to the person who created it.
Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
#20People really need an entire article to justify labeling someone as having a mental illness because in their opinion, the their coworker isn't contributing meaninfully, or potentially making things worse. FTA: > Prolific AI psychosis occurs when a person generates a large quantity of AI output without significantly increasing the real value of their work. Guy, we used to just call this a bad coworker. I'm pretty sure…
You certainly seem to have your mind made up about this either way, but a humble fwiw nevertheless: the author is a psychiatrist, not some bitter dev/hypothetical coworker like you seem to be suggesting.
I did dig into that after I read it. Even more depressing honestly. He should know better than to throw around labels.