Ashleigh Golden, adjunct clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford School of Medicine, said the term was “not in any clinical diagnostic manual.” But it was coined in response to a real and “pretty concerning emerging pattern of chatbots reinforcing delusions that tend to be messianic, grandiose, religious, or romantic,” she said.
The term AI psychosis is being used to refer to a range of different incidents. One common element is “difficulty determining what is real or not,” said Jon Kole, a board-certified adult and child psychiatrist who serves as medical director for the meditation app Headspace.
That could mean a person forming beliefs that can be proved false, or feeling an intense relationship with an AI persona that does not match what is happening in real life.
Keith Sakata, a psychiatrist at the University of California San Francisco, said he has admitted a dozen people to the hospital for psychosis following excessive time spent chatting with AI so far this year.
Sakata said most of those patients told him about their interactions with AI, showing him chat transcripts on their phone and in one case a print out. In the other cases, family members mentioned that the patient used AI to develop a deeply-held theory before their break with reality.
Psychosis is a symptom that can be triggered by issues such as drug use, trauma, sleep deprivation, fever or a condition such as schizophrenia, Sakata said. When diagnosing psychosis, psychiatrists look for evidence including delusions, disorganized thinking or hallucinations, where the person sees and hears things that are not there, he said.
