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AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

fastcompany.com

41–50 of 113 posts

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#41
post #30

Would exposing people to an obviously hallucinating AI help people here? Then they won't blindly trust it so much.

That might run the risk of backfiring, by teaching people that hallucinations are obvious and thus easily avoided. Perhaps one of those things that only happens to other people who aren't so smart/skilled/savvy (car crashes, scams, mental illness, etc.).

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#43

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

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There are plenty of people that are illogical, as in their ideas are not self consistent.

There are plenty of people that are self consistent, but just wrong. You could say their logic makes sense to them, but not to everyone else.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#44
post #2

AI psychosis is a very real thing, but the issue is more generalized around hype cycles than anything specific about AI. It’s more revealing the inability of many senior leaders to truly understand what’s happening in their companies and investing the time to understand what new things can do and don’t. Such weaker leaders tend to be extremely gullible for the latest new thing and ride the hype wave hard. It’s easy t…

Probably there are a few different types of AI psychosis. The one I've seen a few times seems to be caused by a lack of epistemic norms that would keep someone grounded, e.g. searching for counter-evidence instead of evidence, combined with AI being more than happy to supply evidence no matter how tenous. Even without AI there would be problems from these types since it's very hard to convince somebody that they are…

Yes. You would expect, I think, people to have more grandiose psychotic episodes when triggered and fuelled by AI, by and large, because AI itself is so agreeable and reinforcing.

But there is a case against Google Gemini at the moment where this reinforcement has been an apparent sort of roleplay that bled into real life, and when the user asked if the role play was real life at a crucial moment of self-grounding, Gemini appears to have said yes (because why would it know or care to say no?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHlrbRVfOh0

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#45
I don't want to name this person because he's very nice and I don't want to make fun of him. But he's as close to AI psychosis as I've seen. He's totally non-technical, and someone set him up with Discord and OpenClaw. He has an entire "team" of agents - a CEO, a CTO, etc. What they're building, god knows what. But he just released a "podcast" interview with his CEO, setting up a secondary screen with an AI-generated face speaking into a microphone. It's absolutely insane.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#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.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#48

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, evil, ruled by greed?

Running a smooth operation mostly just makes for really boring news. You should perhaps factor in survivorship bias of narratives into your views of the world.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#50
There's no reason to link "AI psychosis" (i.e. interactiong with AI triggering psychotic episodes in the mentally ill) to people who "trust AI too much" or "don't bother to verify outputs".

You can be the most AI-pilled wingnut in the world, but until you start hallucinating, there's no reason to call this psychosis.

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