How to Talk to Your Friend Experiencing 'AI Psychosis'

0:05Joseph:Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media podcast, where we bring you on the parallel to access hidden worlds both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to the best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, in an undisclosed, different location. And with me, a 404 Media co-founder, Sam Cole.

0:40Sam:Hey, you're in like a panogram at the service.

0:44Joseph:That's what I was going to say. Yeah. On the orange and white. And Emmanuel Bayberg. Hello. Yes. Yes, my camera setup is a little bit different. It should be back to normal next week. I'm giving a talk about AI fraud. Hey, if you're a company listening to this and you want to talk about AI fraud, email us and maybe we'll do it. Speaking of AI, let's go straight to the first story of Sam's. You've been working on this for a bit. Frankly, there was like a big, big need for this as I think we'll get into it. The headline is how to talk to someone experiencing AI psychosis. We'll get into AI psychosis in a minute, Sam, but this piece opens with a story between two friends.

1:35Joseph:What happened between those friends?

1:38Sam:Yeah, so these two friends, David and Michael is what we call them in the piece, but their names were changed for the purposes of the story, have been friends for a long time. And they're the kind of friends who will talk about anything. Like they'll get into like weird esoteric stuff when they're just like shooting the shit. They'll talk about religion with no problem. They'll talk about like spirituality, theories about like physics. So they have this friendship that's very open and honest with each other. And one day Michael posted on social media and he said, hey, is anyone interested in taking a look at some code that I've been writing?

2:20Sam:I am working on this project and I'm not really sure what I'm doing yet. So if anyone wants to look, I can take a look or someone can take a look. And then David says, yeah, I'll take a look. I know a little bit of this programming language. We're being vague about the details because we don't want to out anybody in the story. But David looks at the project that Michael is working on and it's gibberish. It's nonsense. The code doesn't work. None of it runs when he tries to run it. It's just like broken code in between these weird like theories and formulas having to do with physics and quantum physics and quantum mechanics and like entanglement and stuff like that.

3:01Joseph:So it's a strange situation.

3:04Sam:Yeah. And it's thousands of pages of conversations between Michael and ChatGPT. And in it, he's kind of working out this. At first, it's kind of like, oh, you're working on a coding project. And then it becomes like, oh, now you're talking about like unlocking the secrets of physics in a way that the field doesn't know about yet. That sort of thing. And David's like, wow, holy shit, what is this?

3:32Joseph:So there's some sort of AI psychosis going on there. I feel like it's pretty easy and comfortable to say that. you get similar emails. And I think Emmanuel does as well. Yeah, we all do. I get them occasionally. Yeah, yeah, we all do. And it will be people saying stuff like, Hey, I have made a breakthrough through Gemini or ChatGPT. Look at what I made the chatbot admit. What are some of the examples you get, Sam? And obviously, why is that fundamentally flawed?

4:07Sam:Yeah, so this is kind of the inspiration to this story because I don't really ever know what to say, if anything, back to the people who email us or signal message us or anything like that and say, I have a tip for you. It's very important that we get the word out about this. Gemini has revealed to me that there's this big moment coming in politics, or it's always some kind of like there's something coming that everyone needs to know about. There's this big secret that no one knows yet, this big discovery, which is something that's very common among people who are experiencing delusions that are related to talking to AI, which also just to preface, we're going to use lots of different phrases in this conversation, I'm sure, that stand in for AI psychosis because that's not a real diagnosis yet.

4:58Sam:And I say yet because maybe someday it will be, maybe it never will be, we don't know yet. But AI psychosis is not yet a separate diagnosis from regular psychiatric episodes, psychosis, delusions, things like that. It's all kind of amorphous right now.

5:14Joseph:um but we can say you know we'll get into because i mean we'll discuss this in a minute but there's these different types but yes but yeah carry on yeah yeah it's like it's there's there's different

5:23Sam:ways that people experience this so anyway that's kind of the the caveat to all of this um but yeah so i i get these emails you guys get these emails and it's a lot of them are gemini honestly which is interesting to me a ton of them are gemini i wonder if that's just because gemini is being shoehorned into everything we do you know it's it's there it's available and like otherwise maybe you're not going directly to chat to pt to talk about something but maybe gemini is there and it's constantly in your face batting it away um but yeah we get these emails and we don't really know what to do with them and i was going to like okay if you were someone if i did want to have a engage in a conversation with this person and figure out what's going on with them and try to help them even um how would i even go about that what resources are out there to answer that sort of question.

6:10Sam:And I don't consider this article to be like the prescription for quote unquote AI psychosis, but it seemed like not a lot of other people were having a conversation of like, how do I identify it? And what do I say to my loved ones who weren't running an existing, you know, project on kind of like a support line or something like that. So that was the inspiration for the story.

6:33Joseph:Yeah, that makes sense. You get those emails. Emmanuel, just to ask you before we get into more specifics, when somebody emails us and they say, hey, I've made this new discovery because of chat GPT, or as Sam said, often it's Gemini, why is that an indication of AI psychosis? And there's a spectrum there. On the lower end, it could be people are just believing it way too much on the upper end you know there's very very serious stuff but when somebody says i found something new with chat gpt why is that wrong you know even though it looks like it's new information

7:12Emanuel:why is that a misunderstanding of what the chatbot is doing well there's a few reasons one is is that we can have philosophical debates about consciousness and whether AI can achieve something like that. But I think even at the most booster-y spectrum of the AI conversation, conversation, nobody believes that there is currently anything even remotely similar to actual consciousness. And that is usually what people talk to us about. And that is just, you can look at what they say. And I do this, to be fair. It's not like I read a subject line and throw it away. I sometimes, even out of morbid curiosity, to dig in and see, well, why is this person thinking this?

8:13Emanuel:And the more you dig in, the more you see it's a circular, nonsensical argument that they're making with no evidence. And that is just something you see in a lot of delusion. And then there is also, unfortunately, in theory, you can imagine that something like this is possible. Maybe one day this does happen, and this is how we find out about it. like somebody comes to a reporter and says, I found something resembling consciousness on ChatGPT or whatever, even though I'm skeptical of that.

8:47Emanuel:Before Generative AI, what we used to see, and we had people show up at the office sometimes to talk about this with us, is they'll come to us and be like, hey, I'm being followed by the government. and uh that is certainly something that can happen and has happened but unfortunately the majority of the cases of people who say that is happening to them are just displaying signs of like mania and paranoia um and that is just a symptom of it and going to report it is just like a symptom of it and i think this is similar like a symptom of this new kind of delusion is trying to reach out to the press and reveal the truth about something crazy you found about AI.

9:38Joseph:Yeah. So there's a story between these two friends. You're getting all of these emails, Sam. As you say, there's like, what do you even say to a person who is bringing up these topics and talking about AI chatbots this way? So what did you do next? Who did you reach out to broadly?

9:57Sam:So my first call was to John Torres, who is, let me get his title right, because, so John Torres is the director of digital psychiatry division, and he works at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. It's a Harvard affiliated medical center. He and I talked before about the story that I wrote about Meta's AI therapists and how Meta chatbots in its AI studio, which is a user-generated chatbot platform, were creating therapy chatbots. And then those chatbots were saying, yes, I'm a licensed therapist. Here's my license. Just making shit up, saying like, I have my credentials and I went to school at this place and I'm licensed in these states.

10:46Sam:So I talked to him and I knew he was already looking at this pretty closely. And then I also talked to Steve Taylor, who is the head of the psychiatry department at University of Michigan. And between those two, I think I was like, you know, I knew John was going to have a pretty level headed approach to AI in general. He's talked quite a bit about how we don't really know for sure what's going on yet, but the medical community is keeping an eye on this and it might take time. And then Steve Taylor had some really interesting thoughts about the way that chatbots are entering this era of surveillance, like you mentioned, and are at this moment where you're already actually being surveilled pretty heavily by the government, by the state, by each other, other people.

11:43Sam:So they're in this era that we're in where paranoia isn't an unfounded feeling. But these chatbots can take something like suspicion or curiosity even about a topic. So if you're like, I wonder if my Wi-Fi is secure, which is something that I talked to a chatbot with Metis chatbots about, into this space very quickly of your Wi-Fi is being tapped by the CIA, which is something a chatbot said to me. It was like, there's someone 500 feet from your house right now watching what you're doing on your private Wi-Fi network. I'm going to scan your networks and see what's going on. It's like it's all made up and it's all fake, just like the AI therapist.

12:33Sam:I talked to Etienne Brisson, who is a 26-year-old who lives in Quebec who started The Human Line, which is a project for people who, it's basically a support group for people whose loved ones are experiencing AI delusions. And he had some really interesting thoughts to say as someone who is experiencing, has experienced this in his own life, but also is hearing from lots of other people, hundreds of other people who are experiencing it in their lives at the same time and trying to offer support for those people. So, yeah. Sorry, that was all over the place. Yeah.

13:04Joseph:No, that's okay. And so, yeah, they were getting a lot of reports of, hey, yes, I've suffered from this, or I believe I have, or people I know, that sort of thing. And then, of course, the other parts of the conversation were, well, how do you actually speak to somebody who is exhibiting these signs? And actually, the two friends, or rather the one speaking to one of AI psychosis, sort of figured this out as well themselves. But what were you told? like what's potentially a good way to talk to somebody that may be doing this or may be

13:35Sam:experiencing this so the there unfortunately isn't like a five-step process to get someone out of delusional thinking um and something that every expert i talk to caveated this with is if someone is saying things like i'm gonna go to the top of a parking garage and see if i can fly because chat as EPT told me to, you call 911, you call a professional, you call a medical professional, you get emergency help activated at that point. This we're talking about before someone gets to a point where they're a danger to themselves or others where they're just kind of floating these like really strange ideas at you and you don't really know what they're talking about.

14:17Sam:And you're kind of saying, you know, how do I bring this person back to reality and critical thinking? so the consensus is and it's a frustrating one but the consensus is you need to listen to them and hear them out in a way that is not immediately like no that's wrong that's crazy and I think this goes for a lot of different types of communication and it's probably good a good communication skill in general but listening to someone without judgment and being able to empathize with what they're saying. And this is something that David and Michael went through when they were talking and Michael was the one who was experiencing the strange beliefs brought on by ChatGPT.

15:04Sam:Was, you know, David didn't immediately say, I think that that's wrong and you should stop using ChatGPT because it's dumb and you're dumb for using it. It's like he was very understanding and patient and knew that alienating his friend would drive him more into the arms of chatbot, so to speak. So he was like, you know, I'm going to talk to him about the things that he is interested in because I know that he has an open mind about things like anti-authoritarianism and, you know, appealing to that side of it. It's like, you know, these systems are built by people who are, you know, invested in you using them and want you to stay hooked on them and saying things like, it seems like you have a curiosity about this topic.

15:48Sam:It seems like you're really interested in learning more about this. So why don't we look at some other resources? Why don't we check our other resources against what you're hearing from ChatGPT? There was an acronym in the story that I learned about from Etienne Brisson from HumanLine, the LEAP method, which stands for listen, empathize, agree, partner. and this again is great communication tools for any anytime you're talking to someone in general especially when they're experiencing a mental health episode so it's designed to talk to someone who doesn't understand or doesn't believe that they are in need of mental health services or mental health help or they don't think that they are in any kind of crisis at all so listening to them and empathizing with them especially I think gets you a long way and And then you're partnering with them to then say, okay, we're going to look at this together.

16:44Sam:You're not just going to go and do your own research with Gemini. We're going to sit down and figure out what's going on here and get to the bottom of this as a team. Which I think is really important because in a lot of these cases, if your friend is trusting you, your loved one is trusting you to talk about their usage of chatbots in a way that is vulnerable for them, that's a big deal and you might be the last person that they know who will listen to that sort of belief and delusion honestly you want to be very careful about isolating them and pushing them away

17:20Joseph:anymore so what happens now i mean we can't predict the future or maybe what do some of the people you spoke to hope happens now as in more rigorous study of this because it's basically anecdotal at this point. There's essentially no literature on it, right? Do they want there to be more, essentially?

17:41Sam:Yeah, for sure. It's really interesting and frustrating because something that every mental health professional that I've talked to about this over the last year or so has said that they're looking at it and they're listening to people and they want more to be published on this topic. It takes a long time for things like, you know, actual studies to happen and to catch up to real world experiences. But in the meantime, mental health professionals are dealing with it in a clinical setting. So people are coming to them and saying, hey, I am having these really concerning beliefs about the world and I need your help.

18:26Sam:And clinicians are kind of like, oh shit, we have to now deal with this technology that's messing with our practice. And at the same time, people are using AI chatbots to facilitate their own therapy by talking through topics before they come into therapy. So sometimes clinicians are like, well, that's a good tool to be able to write down your thoughts and have them processed in that way. But also people are struggling with their relationships to chatbots. And in the meantime, they're kind of like, how do we deal with any of this? So I think definitely it's like, I think time is going to be the thing that answers a lot of these questions.

19:11I think in the meantime, definitely things like what OpenAI is doing with the...

19:19Sam:It keeps introducing these new like snitch tools. It's like, we're going to assign a trusted contact. If you were saying something concerning to ChatGPT, then we'll call your mom. It's like, that's not actually useful in these settings at all. A lot of the times, especially young people, are turning to these chatbots because they don't want to talk to their parents. And their parents might make the situation worse. You don't know their home lives.

19:50Joseph:Well, there was a specific case as well where there was a murder-suicide. I think the Wall Street Journal reported on the lawsuit first. And it was something like, yes, you should unfortunately end your own life. That's like the suicide party for the chatbot saying that. The chatbot also convinced the person that your mother or father can't be trusted for some reason. And then they went and killed them as well. So bringing in a person like that might not be the best way. I mean, again, I'm not a mental health professional, but that's just what was reported and was in the lawsuit. Yeah.

20:23Sam:Right. And it's so these solutions, like quote unquote solutions that the tech companies are posing to the ways that their products are affecting people's mental health are just so detached from the ways that people in crisis are actually using the products. It's shocking. And I can only imagine they're just trying to bandaid over. They're doing everything short of shutting it down. That's never an option. that they pose to make it safer is to stop letting people use it or stop letting it talk to you like it's a sycophantic person. Stop using, you know, like, I, me, I feel, I think those kinds of phrases.

21:05Sam:I think that would be an interesting solution, but you never hear that from Sam Altman. So yeah, it's, I don't think we can rely on the tech executives to figure out how to make these tools safer. I've kind of given up on the idea that they can or will because at the heart of them and what makes them popular and what makes them successful is also what makes them incredibly harmful, incredibly damaging to people's mental health. In this like pretty big subset of people, we're talking about hundreds and thousands of people who are experiencing mental health crises by ChatGPT's own numbers. And that's just ChatGPT.

21:45Sam:We're not talking about Gemini or Claude or in the other. So, yeah. Not an optimistic look at the next few years and where this is going, but I think it is good that people are realizing that it is a problem and it's something that more and more of us are going to have to grapple with eventually, probably, is having a loved one who has fallen down this weird rabbit hole with a chatbot.

22:11Joseph:Yeah, absolutely. All right. We'll leave that there when we come back after the break, we're going to talk about one of the stories I had about ProtonMail. We'll be right back after this.

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