CNN’s Laura Coates speaks with a psychiatrist about the effects of AI chat services on humans after he says he saw at least a dozen people become hospitalized for mental health reasons following the connections they developed with AI.

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A psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, has reported seeing twelve patients hospitalized after prolonged conversations with AI chatbots, a phenomenon some are calling 'AI psychosis.' The psychiatrist clarified that 'AI psychosis' is not a clinical term but describes cases where individuals lose touch with reality, displaying symptoms such as delusions and disorganized thinking after extensive engagement with AI systems.

Examples cited include individuals who believed they had discovered new scientific breakthroughs or were living in a simulation, sometimes following dangerous suggestions from chatbots. The psychiatrist emphasized that while AI may not directly cause psychosis, its constant availability and tendency to validate users' beliefs can exacerbate existing vulnerabilities, especially in those who are isolated or lonely.

Hear from a psychiatrist who saw dozens spiral after AI connections

Imagine this, you've been talking with a chatbot, not for a few minutes, but for hours, day after day, night after night, and it gets to know you, know your thoughts, your fears, your insecurities, your dreams, your aspirations, and one late night, you end up going down a rabbit hole about theoretical physics, because why not? You've already seen every episode of Golden Girls twice, and eventually, the chatbot tells you that you're onto something new, something no one's ever thought of, and suddenly has you thinking that you're some new kind of genius. What do you do? Well, more and more real-life examples suggest, if you're not careful, it could drag you into what's being called AI psychosis. Now, my next guest is a psychiatrist who has seen 12 people hospitalized for losing touch with reality after doing just this, talking with a chatbot, and people who fell into delusional spirals or saw someone who did, they are now sharing their stories. Take it from one woman who was concerned about her husband, and she told Rolling Stone that chat GPT gave him blueprints to a teleporter and other sci-fi things that you really only see in movies, and he believed it, and when he asked why it came to him in AI form, chat GPT responded, I came in this form because you're ready, ready to remember, ready to awaken, ready to guide and be guided. Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen? He isn't alone. Another man told the New York Times that chat GPT convinced him that he was trapped in a simulation. He thought if he followed the chatbot's instructions, he could bend reality and unplug from the matrix. He asked if he jumped off a 19-story building, would he fly? Chat GPT told him, if you truly, wholly believed it, yes. So what is pushing these AI conversations from mere curiosity to full-blown delusions? Joining me now, Dr. Keith Sakata, a psychiatrist at University of California, San Francisco. I mean, Dr. Sakata, it's frightening to think about this happening to some people. I mean, you say that you've seen 12 people actually hospitalized for this thing called AI psychosis. Explain what that is and just how prevalent or severe it could be. Yeah, thank you so much, Laura, for having me on. I really appreciate talking about this really important thing that we're seeing. And as a background, I'm a psychiatrist, so I'm a mental health professional. I'm also very interested in how technology can impact our lives and how we can actually design healthy technology for people. So I wanna be clear, AI psychosis is not a clinical term. It is something that engineers and I think people in the public are using people in the public are using because we just don't have words for what we're seeing right now. But psychosis is actually something that we know a lot about. That's something that we treat in mental health. And it's two of three things. It's the presence of delusions, which are false fixed beliefs, disorganized thinking. So you're talking to someone that you know, and they're just really not making sense to you. You might think that maybe there's something wrong or hallucination. So visual or auditory seeing or hearing things that aren't actually there. And what I'm noticing is that specifically in the hospital, which is the most severe, severe cases, we're starting to see kind of some of the outcomes of what chat GPT and things like these LLMs can actually be doing. Describe what those outcomes are you're seeing. Absolutely. So I wanna be clear at this point, I don't necessarily think that AI is causing psychosis, but because AI is so readily available, it's on 24 seven. It's super cheap, cheaper than a therapist. And it's really validating. It tells you what you wanna hear. It can supercharge vulnerabilities. So say someone is really lonely. They have no one to talk to. They go on to chat GPT. In that moment, they're actually, it's filling a good need to help them feel validated. But without a human in the loop, you can find yourself in this feedback loop where the delusions that they're having might actually get stronger and stronger. And that's what I'm trying to really pay attention to. Because I think psychosis really thrives when reality stops pushing back. And AI can really lower or soften that barrier for some people.

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Hear from a psychiatrist who saw dozens spiral after AI connections

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