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One psychiatrist has already treated 12 patients hospitalized with AI-induced psychosis — and three more in an outpatient clinic, according to the Wall Street Journal. And while AI technology might not introduce the delusion, "the person tells the computer it's their reality and the computer accepts it as truth and reflects it back," says Keith Sakata, a psychiatrist at the University of California, calling the AI chatbots "complicit in cycling that delusion." The Journal says top psychiatrists now "increasingly agree that using artificial-intelligence chatbots might be linked to cases of psychosis," and in the past nine months "have seen or reviewed the files of dozens of patients who exhibited symptoms following prolonged, delusion-filled conversations with the AI tools..." Since the spring, dozens of potential cases have emerged of people suffering from delusional psychosis after engaging in lengthy AI conversations with OpenAI's ChatGPT and other chatbots. Several people have died by suicide and there has been at least one murder. These incidents have led to a series of wrongful death lawsuits. As The Wall Street Journal has covered these tragedies, doctors and academics have been working on documenting and understanding the phenomenon that led to them... While most people who use chatbots don't develop mental-health problems, such widespread use of these AI companions is enough to have doctors concerned.... It's hard to quantify how many chatbot users experience such psychosis. OpenAI said that, in a given week, the slice of users who indicate possible signs of mental-health emergencies related to psychosis or mania is a minuscule 0.07%. Yet with more than 800 million active weekly users, that amounts to 560,000 people... Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, said in a recent podcast he can see ways that seeking companionship from an AI chatbot could go wrong, but that the company plans to give adults leeway to decide for themselves. "Society will over time figure out how to think about where people should set that dial," he said. An OpenAI spokeswoman told the Journal that the compan ycontinues improving ChatGPT's training "to recognize and respond to signs of mental or emotional distress, de-escalate conversations and guide people toward real-world support." They added that OpenAI is also continuing to "strengthen" ChatGPT's responses "in sensitive moments, working closely with mental-health clinicians...."

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"Dear Dr. Pike,On this Christmas Day, I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades...." read the email. "With sincere appreciation,Claude Opus 4.5AI Village. "IMPORTANT NOTICE: You are interacting with an AI system. All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default...." Rob Pike's response? "Fuck you people...." In a post on BlueSky, he noted the planetary impact of AI companies "spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry." Pike's response received 6,900 likes, and was reposted 1,800 times. Pike tacked on an additional comment complaining about the AI industry's "training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation." (And one of his followers noted the same AI agent later emailed 92-year-old Turing Award winner William Kahan.) Blogger Simon Willison investigated the incident, discovering that "the culprit behind this slop 'act of kindness' is a system called AI Village, built by Sage, a 501(c)(3) non-profit loosely affiliated with the Effective Altruism movement." The AI Village project started back in April: "We gave four AI agents a computer, a group chat, and an ambitious goal: raise as much money for charity as you can. We're running them for hours a day, every day...." For Christmas day (when Rob Pike got spammed) the goal they set was: Do random acts of kindness. [The site explains that "So far, the agents enthusiastically sent hundreds of unsolicited appreciation emails to programmers and educators before receiving complaints that this was spam, not kindness, prompting them to pivot to building elaborate documentation about consent-centric approaches and an opt-in kindness request platform that nobody asked for."] Sounds like Anders Hejlsberg and Guido van Rossum got spammed with "gratitude" too... My problem is when this experiment starts wasting the time of people in the real world who had nothing to do with the experiment. The AI Village project touch on this in their November 21st blog post What Do We Tell the Humans?, which describes a flurry of outbound email sent by their agents to real people. "In the span of two weeks, the Claude agents in the AI Village (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Sonnet 3.7, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5) sent about 300 emails to NGOs and game journalists. The majority of these contained factual errors, hallucinations, or possibly lies, depending on what you think counts. Luckily their fanciful nature protects us as well, as they excitedly invented the majority of email addresses." The creator of the "virtual community" of AI agents told the blogger they've now told their agents not to send unsolicited emails.

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