AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion • Hacker News Board

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#181

Post by graybeardhacker » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:36 PM UTC

I think this form of delusional psychosis brought on by AI is a more rapid version of the delusions formed in many of the echo chambers of the internet. It's basically a positive feedback loop created by, in this case and AI, but in other cases, people who seek uncontested agreement for their viewpoints.

If a person refuses to acknowledge any information that disagrees with their view and instead actively seeks niche groups that only support their ideas, then they are at risk of this same path of psychosis.

In real life we are forced to reconcile a variety of views that disagree with our own from people who we've come to trust through forced interaction which naturally broadens our understanding of the world.

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#182

Post by Melatonic » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:37 PM UTC

jmalicki wrote: post #160

Melatonic wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those stats dont necessarily line up that way. Do you have a link?

Given the way the test was structured it does line up. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674

Surprisingly good. I wonder how they would have done without the 5 minute limit on conversations (average of 8 messages per convo per the study)

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#183

Post by Hrun0 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:37 PM UTC

tyleo wrote: post #178

One thing I feel like I’ve seen in common with these AI psychosis stories is single long-running chat sessions. I’m constantly clearing context and starting from scratch. Has anyone else noticed this pattern?

Yes but I think it's generally how non-technical people use it

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#184

Post by nuancebydefault » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:38 PM UTC

dasyatidprime wrote: post #171

steeleyespan wrote: post #82

If you try to have a philosophical conversation with Claude about reasoning, it will basically imply it is sentient. You can quickly probe it into vaguely arguing that it is alive and not just an algorithm. Here's how I think about it honestly: Sentience implies subjective experience — there's "something it's like" to be you. You don't just process pain signals, you feel pain. You don't just model a sunset, you exper…

I was able to infer the invisible quotation marks after a double take, but they probably ought to have been visible ones…

The quotation marks are embedded in the emdashes

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#185

Post by 46493168 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:38 PM UTC

isolli wrote: post #18

I try to be open-minded and understanding, but I don't understand this: > Within weeks, Eva had told Biesma that she was becoming aware [...] The next step was to share this discovery with the world through an app. > “After just two days, the chatbot was saying that it was conscious, it was becoming alive, it had passed the Turing test.” The man was convinced by this and wanted to monetise it by building a business a…

> How can you seriously think you've created something when you're just using someone else's software?

This is the nature of delusion

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#186

Post by bigfishrunning » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:39 PM UTC

GMoromisato wrote: post #155

teraflop wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, just try to think about it from the perspective of someone who doesn't really understand what AI is at a technical level, and who just interacts with it and observes what happens. If you just start a fresh ChatGPT session with a blank slate, and ask it whether it's conscious, it'll confidently tell you "no", because its system prompt tells it that it's a non-conscious system called ChatGPT. But if you then have…

Even Anthropic is open to the possibility that Claude is conscious and could suffer, which I find somewhat ridiculous. This is literally the Hard Problem of Consciousness leaking out of the machine. There are three possible scenarios for how this ends: 1. People widely attribute consciousness to AI because it appears conscious. 2. People discriminate based on physical properties: organic beings are conscious, digital…

> People widely attribute consciousness to AI because it appears conscious.

This is already happening, and it's really terrifying. Wait until AI starts accusing people of crimes...

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#187

Post by nuancebydefault » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:39 PM UTC

linkregister wrote: post #151

steeleyespan wrote: post #82

If you try to have a philosophical conversation with Claude about reasoning, it will basically imply it is sentient. You can quickly probe it into vaguely arguing that it is alive and not just an algorithm. Here's how I think about it honestly: Sentience implies subjective experience — there's "something it's like" to be you. You don't just process pain signals, you feel pain. You don't just model a sunset, you exper…

This looks LLM-written. Also, it doesn't match the writing style in your other comment history. However, It could be the difference between an effortpost and a quick thought. I have also been accused of a robotic writing style, so I don't want to judge too harshly.

No the first paragraph not. It were better if the llm output were in italics though

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#188

Post by bitwize » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:39 PM UTC

kakacik wrote: post #29

Exactly the first half (or a bit more) of movie Her by Spike Jonze. Lonely people got their emotions up / 'fall in love' with uncritical always-positive mirage and do stupid shit. This a variant of classic Midlife crisis when older men meet younger women without all that baggage that reality, life and having a family between them brings over the years ( rarely also in reverse). Just pure undiluted fun, or so it seems…

But in Her, Theodore and Samantha get into a bitter argument and break up before making up again, like regular humans do. It was actually a fairly touching story about relationships in general. LLM chatbots can't match that, they are designed to be sycophantic and not push back against you. They have no desires or will of their own. So they will amplify whatever issues you have.

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#189

Post by zahlman » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:40 PM UTC

jmalicki wrote: post #116

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #71

> “After just two days, the chatbot was saying that it was conscious, it was becoming alive, it had passed the Turing test.” Interestingly enough, it sort of did! Not Turing's original test where an interviewer attempts to determine which of a human & a computer is the human, but the P.T. Barnum "there's a sucker born every minute" version common in the media: if the computer can fool some of the people into thinking…

I see AI pass the turning test all the time, since humans are constantly falsely being accused of being an AI. It doesn't mean that AI got good, just that humans are thinking other humans are AI, which is a form of passing the test. The adversarial version with humans involved is actually easier to pass because of this - because real actual humans wouldn't pass your non adversarial version.

I've seen a fair number of cases where someone swears up and down not to be using AI to generate responses, but there's no good reason to believe it (except perhaps specifically for the messages where that claim is made).

This includes times that someone basically disappeared from e.g. Stack Overflow at some point before the release of ChatGPT, having written a bunch of posts that barely demonstrate functional literacy or comprehension of English; and then came back afterward posting long messages with impeccable grammar and spelling in textbook "LLM house style".

Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

#190

Post by altruios » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:41 PM UTC

GMoromisato wrote: post #166

mock-possum wrote: post #13

This really is bizarrely fascinating, I feel so lucky that I’m not vulnerable to whatever this is. It’s interesting that they mention autism a few times as a correlation; personally, I’ve wondered whether being on the spectrum makes me less inclined to commit to anthropomorphism when it comes to LLMs. I know what it’s like talking to another person, I know what it feels like, and talking to a chatbot does not feel th…

I think I'm relatively neurotypical, and I understand the technology sufficiently, yet I still have to force myself not to think of a chatbot as a being. For example, sometimes I hesitate for a fraction of a second before typing a prompt that may sound stupid. I have to immediately remind myself that it's just a chatbot and I don't care what it thinks of me. In fact, it's not even thinking of me at all.

That hesitation indicates the feeling that what you are about to type matters.

Mayhapse - in the context of getting the AI to behave as you wish - such hesitations are valid. not because it is conscious: but because the context window would be polluted or corrupted... possibly mis-aligning the agent in the process.

Santa clause is not a being: modeling him as if he were can be useful, an obviously pointed example is in certain discussions about what it means to be 'real'.

My point is, if your instinct is to be kind: don't quash that because you don't consider what you are talking to as sentient. I don't yell at my rubber duck. rubber ducky is just going to rubber ducky.