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People developing psychosis while using Chat GPT has been in the news a lot. Well, the latest story is about an Open AI investor who seemed to loose it in real time, leading to shall we say concerns. The gentleman in question seemed to spiral into thinking the world was like the famous SCP Foundation collective work.
Of course people were a little concerned. A big investor AI losing his mind isn’t exactly building confidence in the product or the company. Or for that matter, investing.
But let me gently suggest that the real concern is that this is the one we noticed.
This is not to say all sorts of AI bigwigs and investors are losing their minds – I think some of them have other problems or lost their minds for different reasons. This isn’t to say the majority of people using AI are going to go off into some extreme mental tangent. The problem is that AI, having been introduced recently, is going to have impacts on mental health that will be hard to recognize because this is all happening so fast.
Look, AI came on quick. In some ways I consider that quite insidious as it’s clear everyone jumped on board looking for the next big thing. In some ways it’s understandable because, all critiques aside (including my own), some of it is cool and interesting. But like a lot of things we didn’t ask what the repercussion might be, which has been a bit of a problem since around about the internal combustion engine.
So now that we have examples of people losing their minds – and developing delusions of grandeur – due to AI, what are we missing?
It might not be as bad as the cases that make the news – no founding a religion or creating some metafiction roleplay that’s too real to you. But a bit of an extra weird belief, that strange thing you’re convinced on, something that’s not as noticeable but too far. Remember all the people who got into some weird conspiracies online? Yeah, well, we’ve automated that.
We’re also not looking for it and maybe it’s time we do – what kind of mental challenges are people developing due to AI that we’re not looking for?
There might not even be anything – these cases may just be unfortunate ones that stand out. But I’d really kind of like to know, especially as the technology spreads, and as you know I think it’s spreading unwisely.
Steven Savage