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Comment by mcmcmc | Hacker News Reader

Hi Mitchell. Psychosis is a serious psychiatric condition that can be induced or triggered by AI. “AI psychosis” in this context is a misuse of a clinical term. Your tweet describes a disagreement on a value judgment that boils down to “move fast and break things” with high trust in AI outputs vs going all in on quality and reliability with low trust in AI. It’s an engineering tradeoff like any other.

Claiming that the people who disagree with you must be experiencing a form of psychosis, experiencing actual hallucinations and unable to tell what is real, is a weak ad hominem that comes off no better than calling them retarded or schizophrenic.

If you genuinely think one of your friends is going through a psychotic episode, you should be trying to get to them professional help. But don’t assume you can diagnose a human psyche just because you can diagnose a software bug.

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He uses "AI psychosis" as a description of people that are overzealous on AI. He is obviously not a person that can or would diagnose mental illness.

To the wider audience on HN the phrasing is pretty clear. An outsider with a tiny bit or intellectual charity wouldn't come to conclusions like you do.

Yeah, but AI psychosis can also be used to mean the stronger thing that the parent comment refers to -- something like AI-induced psychosis, which was how I originally understood the term:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spi...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/technology/chatgpt-ai-cha...

I am aware of the conflict between medical and slang semantics. This doesn't change my commentary.

Well, I agree with you that the parent comment is wrong inasmuch as it suggests we can't tell from context that mitchellh is using the term to mean "a value judgment" instead of "a form of psychosis". We can tell.

But I agree with the parent comment in that we shouldn't use the term "AI psychosis" to mean "a value judgment" instead of "a form of psychosis", because "AI psychosis" has already been used for 2.5 years to mean "a form of psychosis".

People would understand what he meant if he called someone awkward “autistic” too. It’s wrong to use medical terms as slang because it erases the actual meaning and disregards the lived experience of people who have been through the condition. People who have been around psychosis would come to the same conclusion. The majority of the population not having that exposure doesn’t make it right. It’s tasteless and inappropriate.

It's also harmful to overly gatekeep the term autism to the point where a lot of legitimate uses are discouraged, and it happens a lot, if you let it.

If the tweet had called his friends autistic, would that be a legitimate use?

Yes.

Using terms from domain metaphorically in another is a common and, I think, useful way of communication. While a view like yours has genuine merit, especially for a subset of the population who have experience personal or otherwise, with the medical condition, I think it's overly restrictive and counter productive to label it as outright tasteless and inappropriate.

Psychosis does not require hallucinations. Delusions are sufficient.

The key factor is losing touch with reality, which results in individual or collective harm.

There is also such a thing as mass psychosis, and those are unfortunately a more difficult situation because the government and corporations are generally the ones driving them, and they are culturally normalized.

Yes. I was offering examples. Again, having a difference of opinion is not a delusion.

If he meant mass psychosis, he should have said mass psychosis. And again, since he is not a public health scientist or any flavor of psych professional, he probably shouldn’t make those proclamations. And should probably call for a wellness check instead of posting on social media if he were truly concerned for their health.

I don't think this is all psychosis but more like extreme groupthink.

For people who are considered neurotypical, social coherence often overwrites reality. Its a mechanism for achieving consensus withing groups while spending the least amount of brain compute energy. Same goes for social metainfo tagged messages, they are more likely to influence reality perception, subconsciously. E.G: If a rich guy says you should be hyped the people who wanna get rich will feel hyped and emotional contagion can spread between people who belong to the same "tribe"

It's very visible for us atypical folk who can't participate well in groupthink at all

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folie_%C3%A0_deux

I guess at a company of seven, if two people are making the executive decisions and the two people are drinking the same AI kool-aid and the other five people are dutifully following these executive decisions, the whole company can be considered to be under this condition.

I just thought that instead of psychosis it's just regular groupthink

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

Maybe the difference would be the level of absurdity that's accepted

I would add to this that there's actually a social function to "costly" beliefs, which is that they signal allegiance to the in-group.

A practice (or a fashion) has more social value to the degree that it is absurd, because it signals the person is able and willing to align with the group at personal cost.

This is easiest to see in some insular religious communities.

Normie culture is quite similar: a vast complex of ever-shifting shibboleths which signal, "I'm one of you. You can trust me."

It signals the person is able and willing to follow the rules, to make themselves predictable, easier to understand and cooperate with.

That is true, it's beneficial for social survival.

But what I find fascinating is how the groupthink mechanism alters the subjective reality of people.

Lies or fantasy becomes reality if the entire group believes it and people truly believe the collectively accepted things to be real.

It just makes me think about consciousness overall or the lack of it, because all these things are mainly governed by subconscious mechanisms in the brain.

We are not the same when it comes to levels of consciousness and if the group mechanism demands less of it, people have no conscious choice about it

Of course nothing is black and white

I'm not sure that it has to be on a consciousness levels. I think it can be explained by anxiety/fear.

Yeah, It could be fear of rejection or not fitting in.

but if you ask somebody after they exited the groupthink state they will not say they did it out of fear.

They often say: "it just happened"

Why were you behaving like that?

"We just did"

Inability to explain reasoning points to subconscious mechanisms.

It's deeply built into humans to groupthink.

I think it is more about "knowing when to shut up" than about actually believing when it comes to sudden dominating group think. It is very clear in politics where a wing on some issue go silent and then suddenly appears way later.

But do these people have a logic on when to shut up?

Do they think out loud : "Now I should shut up because x"

Or is it an instinct they have after looking at others?

The more you can trace reasoning the more conscious, but the moment there is something created implicitly like an emotion or instinct then it's initiated by an automated subconscious response.

A large percentage of communication is non-verbal (emitted and processed subconsciously) so eye contact, micro expressions, gestures and body language play a large part in group communication.

Would you prefer it be called reality distortion field? People use slang, woke scolding the internet isn't going to change that.

Having a difference of opinion can absolutely be a delusion. For example, I think you're probably not God. If you thought you were God, then we'd disagree, and you'd also be delusional.

I use that example because I have literally seen people fall into delusions of thinking they're God after talking to AI enough. That's shit is scary, for real.

"unable to tell what is real" is an an accurate characterization of the people he's describing imo.

was looking for this comment. this post is highly inappropriate and very inaccurate. this should be at the top. too many people are throwing around the word psychosis without knowing what it means. if someone is truely going through psychosis you get them help!

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