In Search of AI Psychosis • Hacker News Board

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#191

Post by anon84873628 » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 3:23 PM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #136

anon84873628 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So it seems very spooky on its face that somehow thoughts themselves could have a bidirectional relationship with chemistry. There's no scientific reason to believe thoughts affect the chemistry at all. (Currently at least, but I'm not betting money we'll find one in the future). When Scott Alexander talks about feedback loops like bipolar disorder and sleep, he's talking about much higher level concepts. I don't re…

Sure the thoughts can influence your chemical state. Scott even provides an example. Suppose you become so engrossed in your weird idea you start to lose sleep over it... Or start to feel anxious about it. At some point, your induced stress will cause relevant biological changes. Not necessarily directly. PTSD indeed is likely an overload of a normal learning and stress mechanism.

The core thing is, am I really in control of my brain, at a fundamental level? If my thoughts are the result of electrochemical reactions, which everywhere else in the universe follow normal deterministic (even if stochastic) physics... How does thinking actually change their result? The unsettling conclusion is that it doesn't. The thoughts are the result of the reactions continuously in progress, and any sensation that we are a actively making decisions and guiding the process is simply an illusion created by that very same process. I.e. there is no free well.

Under that view, the bipolar feedback loop example disappears. The engrossing or psychotic thoughts are not driving the chemistry, they are the chemistry. The whole thing is just a more macro view where you see certain oscillations play out. If the system ultimately damps itself and that "feels like" self control, it was actually a property built into the system from the start.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#192

Post by bccdee » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #88

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NYT wanted to doxx him NYT wanted to report on who he was. He doxxed himself years before that (as mentioned in that article). They eventually also reported on that (after Alexander revealed his name, seeing that it was going to come out anyway, I guess), which is an asshole thing to do, but not doxxing, IMO.

> NYT wanted to report on who he was. They wanted to report specifically his birth/legal name, with no plausible public interest reason. If it wasn't "stochastic terrorism" (as the buzzword of the day was) then it sure looked a lot like it. > He doxxed himself years before that Few people manage to keep anything 100% secret. Realistically private/public is a spectrum not a binary, and publication in the NYT is a pret…

> They wanted to report specifically his birth/legal name, with no plausible public interest reason.

Siskind is a public figure and his name was already publicly known. He wanted a special exception to NYT's normal reporting practices.

> Realistically private/public is a spectrum not a binary

IIRC his name would autocomplete as a suggested search term in the Google search bar even before the article was published. He was already far too far toward the "public" end of that spectrum to throw a tantrum the way he did.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#193

Post by anon84873628 » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 3:30 PM UTC

bccdee wrote: post #190

anon84873628 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the questions that sets up the premise of the article in the first paragraph is, "Are the chatbots really driving people crazy, or just catching the attention of people who were crazy already?" That's why he's honing in on that specific scenario to determine if chatbots are uniquely crazy-making or something. The professional psychiatrist author is not unaware of the things you're saying. They're just not the…

Well yeah, that's a false dichotomy. If you're vulnerable and a chatbot sends you into a spiral of psychosis, your pre-existing vulnerability doesn't negate the fact that a harm has been done to you. If you have a heart condition, and I shoot you with a Taser, and it kills you… I've killed you. You weren't "already dead" just because you were vulnerable.

Yes but "what is the effect of tasers on hearts" is an interesting question when tasers are brand new. If it kills people with obvious pre-existing risks then that is not very surprising. If it kills 50% of otherwise healthy people in a way we didn't anticipate, that is alarming and important to distinguish.

Imagine someone does a quick survey to estimate that tasers aren't killing people we don't expect, and some readers respond saying how dare you ignore the vulnerable heart people. That's still an important thing to consider and maybe we should be careful with the mass scale rollout of tasers, but it wasn't really the immediate point.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#194

Post by vintermann » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 3:36 PM UTC

Mallowram wrote: post #157

Lambdanaut wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how this comment chain goes directly from > Humans don't have world models To > Of course humans have world models To > You fools , there is no such thing as a "world model" and you are all hamsters! Classic Socratic dialogue.

The problem is, neurobiology proves there are no world models. Silicon Valley bet on the wrong cognition model, a psychological version trapped in 20th C bunk, and everyone pays the price listening to cult leaders like Scott Alexander worm their way out of consciousness. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7415918/

It takes a pretty damn complicated model of the world to start explaining things with neurobiology.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#195

Post by numpad0 » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 3:38 PM UTC

I don't get the skepticism. Sure it needs more data to be certain, but apparent phenomenon is easily observed - just look at AI generated images, of any subject or type or size.

It drives you crazy. Triggers primal fear for shape mimics and corpses. If you weren't the one looking, it gets people visibly agitated just looking at one. Stick them into fMRI and double blind them with images. It'll probably show up in the data.

It won't take much imagination to suspect same could happen with text.

Is that a transitional issue or fundamental flaw? Is this end of the world? idk. That'll be the open question.

Why does it have to be "it's because they're clinically insane and/or backwards thinking" ? Just because you can't tell apart doesn't mean nobody can't - are those people who are keen to spot AI generated data even a minority, not the majority?

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#196

Post by anon84873628 » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 3:40 PM UTC

vintermann wrote: post #130

phreeza wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is a psychiatrist so it would make sense that he is familiar with the subject.

And as I recall, he used to be a lot more clear that mental illness isn't always clear cut. I was surprised at the "obviously, we all know what mental illness is" attitude coming from him.

I imagine he's been doing this so long that taking a sober, delicate, appeal-to-every-reader approach to every article just isn't fun or practical. He wants to get down his thoughts for his core reader base and move on. What fraction goes viral anyway? And so what if some people misunderstand or don't like it? You're always going to have those people anyway no matter what :shrug:

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#197

Post by N_Lens » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

suddenlybananas wrote: post #129

kaibee wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes everyone with my political beliefs has a well-structured world model As nice as that would be, its only marginally less true. > everyone without my political beliefs is a model-free slop machine that just goes by vibes. Nah, some of them are evil on purpose. but like, in all seriousness. Politics is downstream of a world-model right? And the two predominant world models are giving very different predictions, ri…

Politics are largely a function of self-interest rather than world model per se.

Different people have different conceptions of “self”, sometimes vastly different.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#198

Post by bccdee » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 3:44 PM UTC

epiccoleman wrote: post #189

lukev wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is entirely uncontroversial that mental states affect the physical body. You've probably observed this yourself, directly, if you've ever had headaches or muscle tightness related to mental or emotional stress. We can use MRIs to directly observe brain differences due to habitual mental activities (e.g. professional chess players, polyglots, musicians.) It would be extremely odd if our bodies did not change as a r…

I think my question is more a question of how whether than whether , if that makes sense. There is something about "thought" affecting "matter" that feels spooky if there is a bidirectional relationship. If thought / consciousness / mind is purely downstream of physics, no spookiness. If somehow experienced states of mind can reach back and cause physical effects... that feels harder to explain. It feels like a sort…

You've struck at the essential problem of dualism. If thoughts are nonphysical, how can thoughts influence our physical bodies? If consciousness does not interact with the physical world, but merely arises from it, then how can we possibly discuss it, since anything we describe is causally linked to our description of it?

Descartes thought the soul was linked to the body through the pineal gland, inspiring a long tradition of mystic woo associated with what is, in fact, a fairly pedestrian endocrine gland.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#199

Post by N_Lens » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 3:51 PM UTC

Flowzone wrote: post #102

colechristensen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also even things like cable news I'd say cause comparable symptoms. I don't know how to say this in a way that isn't so negative... but how are people such profound followers that they can put themselves into a feedback loop that results is psychosis? I think it's an education problem, not as in people are missing facts but by the missing basic brain development to be critical of incoming information.

I was in psychosis for about a month a few years ago. Before it happened, I didn't really understand what psychosis was. I had heard about people having paranoid delusions, and thought something like that could never happen to me, because the delusions all sounded so irrational. I thought I was too much of a critical thinker to ever be susceptible to something like that. What I experienced was that psychosis isn't a…

I’ve experienced psychosis and it definitely leans more towards a hardware issue. The reason I think this is apophenia - seeing connections where none exist - is a particular state of the mind where neural connection making is highly elevated. In my lay experience it’s as though dopamine, acetylcholine, and norepinephrine are all chronically elevated and create internal feedback loops, which causes a spiral/cascade of accelerated meaning making and increased neural connectivity. This is also experienced physically and mentally as mania, paranoia, anxiety.

This is probably why antipsychotics usually work by damping down on these neurotransmitters really hard, and by preventing that accelerating cascade they interrupt the illness process.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#200

Post by bccdee » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 3:52 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #182

testdelacc1 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading these posts terrifies me to a degree that I can’t explain.

Pornography should also be taken seriously and in my opinion, a more serious problem.

Why? I haven't heard any credible accounts of "pornography psychosis."

Moral panic narratives about pornography have become popular in recent years, but though many critiques of mainstream pornography are valid (that it's pervasively misogynistic, for example), pornography hasn't actually been linked to any concrete harms. "Pornography addiction," the poster child for anti-porn narratives, is not recognized as a condition by any major medical organization, and self-reported pornography addiction correlates much more strongly with conservative views on sexuality than with actual quantity of pornography consumed.