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Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"

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Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"

#21

Post by altcognito »

js8 wrote: post #7
altcognito wrote: post #2

People 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…

I was bound to agree with you before I RTFA. The classification is useful for a psychiatrist, i.e. someone who wants to help the person. "Bad coworker" can have many causes. In prolific AI psychosis, I think the assumption (differential diagnosis) is, they became a "bad coworker" due to use of AI, so they were a "good coworker" before.

As someone else point out, the term is stigmatizing, psychosis is a very strong term, and as I very much noted, already being misused and abused.

Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"

#22

Post by piloto_ciego »

peab wrote: post #4

I 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…

I have literal quantifiable output that supports the claim when I make it. I've literally been building tools for a customer of mine since January, and while it started out kind of slow, it's now paying my bills entirely every month. I am so busy baby sitting the robots and adding new projects on that I don't really have any time to find new customers right now? But I'm thinking I should have most of the stuff they're going to need done here by the end of the year, so next up, I have to find more people and maintain their tooling...

I don't want to get into the nitty gritty, but I'm kind of at the nexus of tech and aviation with my experience in life. The result has been that I can build tools that directly apply to my customers' requirements and I know wtf I'm doing in the industry. I think if I was "just a dev" or "just a former pilot" I'd be kind of screwed because I wouldn't know what I was doing? But, the reality is that because I know how to do both I'm able to make money. I don't have to look up "what an IAP is" means or "what is the 1-4-1 rule and 2-2-1/2 rule" means or "what is an OpSpec?" frantically when I am figuring out what they need. That's quite helpful.

If you know what the hell you're doing, this is a game changer. Like, "oh, I need a custom CRM spooled up that covers things that aren't in typical CRM software" - if you're a developer you probably don't know what people actually want; if you're just an industry expert you don't know wtf sql is. But if you're kind of blend of both you can add real value.

Generalist > specialist right now. I doubt that holds for much more than about a dozen months or so.

Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"

#23

Post by altcognito »

datakan wrote: post #16
paimapi wrote: post #13

One - 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.

A bad business decision is not psychosis. Misjudging the value provided by a product is not psychosis.

Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"

#24

Post by tescreal »

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the popular use of the phrase relating to people who exhibited actual psychosis-like symptoms where the AI fed into a lowlevel but undeveloped delusion? Later people would appear to be experiencing a full blown episode which was fed and maintained by their interaction with AI?

Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"

#25

Post by jvanderbot »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #22
peab wrote: post #4

I 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…

I have literal quantifiable output that supports the claim when I make it. I've literally been building tools for a customer of mine since January, and while it started out kind of slow, it's now paying my bills entirely every month. I am so busy baby sitting the robots and adding new projects on that I don't really have any time to find new customers right now? But I'm thinking I should have most of the stuff they'r…

    Generalist > specialist.
No, my friend, if you are deeper than "just a pilot" and also capable of defining and building software (even with claude) that works and works well as extensions to industry tools like CRM, then you are not a generalist, you are an intersectional specialist of the kind Scott Adams used to talk about as "skill stacks" here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG3PcdTyZ6w

You have two good skills, median-level among those specializations probably, and combine them into a top-tier niche ability.

Also, did you voluntarily disclose that you thought that comment was about you? It feels like you are the friend they were talking about, lol

Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"

#27

Post by spudlyo »

peab wrote: post #4

I 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…

I agree that there are people who can see the potential of these tools, and are enthusiastic boosters, yet are still unable to realize the benefits for themselves for whatever reason. I feel like these people are somewhat rare, and labeling them has having a kind of psychosis strikes me as sneering elitism.

Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"

#28

Post by ethin »

altcognito wrote: post #20
beepbooptheory wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry but the pro-AI/AI boosters do the exact same thing when they say that people who don't use AI are "Luddites" and the like. And I'm pretty sure the Luddite thing has been going on for far longer than the AI psychosis labeling.

Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"

#29

Post by bigcat12345678 »

Nice article, putting names onto a wide spread symptom experience by a group of people.

Myself have a few realizations that I myself find very revealing of my own mental gap/blindness in retrospective:

1. The majority of socalled software engineers are destroyed/exposed by agentic coding tool. Among the reasons, one of them is that they are now addicted to disruption. I realized this through my own work where I utterly destroyed my own sense of software structure by overseeing close to 10 coding sessions across cursor cloud agents and multiple concurrent ones running on desktop. And, I noticed one of my team member becomes not able to make progress even he told me the clear plan, and during one in office work session, I noticed that he habitually browses his phone between cursor working sessions. And at that moment, I realized that person is no longer capable of solving nontrivial problems because his focus is utterly destroyed by the deprived thinking process by cursor.

2. Using AI coding agents to build conventional software is only meaningful for the top team. Put in other words, AI coding agents can only automate the parts of conventional software that is mundane and boring. Note that I am talking of building conventional software, not conventional software engineering. The conventional software engineering best practices still apply to agentic software engineering. Agentic software engineering appears necessary and fitting to building agents themselves, because that's guardrails are crucial, and manually putting guardrails are not a match to agents novel behaviors. And conventional software engineering really is not useful when reasoning and designing agents.

3. Speculatively, I am guessing we'll have some chances of really making breakthrough in designing an agentic safe programming language, which both serve as the constructs of ensuring alignment/safety/etc, and also allows reasonably simple understandability for humans to understand agents output. For one thing, it really makes sense to me that coding agents model CoT should be in the form of some semi/fully-formal (thinking of a better uml, but I don't know what shape it should be) languages that is more effective and precise than natural language, but is also machine verifiable.

4. It's very easy to get used to something that is reliably meeting my expectations. I was shocked by first sight of the unrecognizable but "working" code generated by Claude code by a team member. And when I tried to write an end to end feature myself on platform that I had no experience before, I suddenly become comfortable not looking at the code at all. The transition is as instinctively as how shocked I was at the beginning. And then it takes a long and conscious looking back to dial back the addiction to see that blindness and recover from that.

Re: Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"

#30

Post by jonas21 »

ActorNightly wrote: post #15
peab wrote: post #4

I 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 b…

> 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.

If that's your bar for reasoning, then most people can't reason either.

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