People didn't previously have "social junk food" as an option, so they would either need to normalize to those around them, or give up socializing for good. And almost no one is ready for that second option. Social media, LLMs, and even books at TV to some extent provide a bridge to loneliness by being more immediately enticing but in the long term less fulfilling.

Not to get political but I suspect this kind of thing is also pretty analogous to how many otherwise normal but often unintelligent people get into things like neo-Nazism through online influencing. (I am just speculating that the person you're referring to is unintelligent.)

Don't get me wrong, but from a relationships perspective, your comment sounds more like a frustrated spoiled ex-girlfriend than a friend. I mean, friends don't go badmouthing their friends on the internet. It's a dick move.

Regarding "theories of everything" and stuff like that. Well, lots of people have those. If I were to call everyone that believes in god or horoscope lone losers, then the asshole would be me, wouldn't it? I know it's different, but also, it's not.

Friendship doesn't require that you buy into the other's vision in order to want them around. That's ideology. Perhaps you misunderstood what friendship means? It's ok, the world is in a weird place right now.

Everyone has a "world model". These models just differ on how much they care about various things. No one has a "world model" which literally encompasses everything about the world, that wouldn't be a model at all, it'd just be the world, much like a 1:1 map.

Also, no one has a "world model" that is purely based on experiment and reason. Everyone gets their beliefs via other people first and foremost. Some get it from few people, some get it from many people (many people can still be wrong!).

For code, you may have the model of what it does strictly from reason and experience - but probably only if you're the only author. And you can still damn well be wrong, as we all know.

It's a good and succinct insight, and also often explains the "racist uncle" stereotype - there are a lot of people who don't get out much, whose world is limited to e.g. home, work, maybe friends, and TV and/or a subset of the internet. Some of those will develop close-minded viewpoints, often spoonfed through TV or the internet (for example, recently there's been a lot of comments on the internet saying "you get arrested in the UK more than in Russia for having an opinion"). If they talk to people that are more worldly - not even "leftists" per se - you'll quickly discover the friction between those two. Because the more worldly person will have a broader general knowledge and can weigh the uncle's standpoint against their own reality.

But if racist uncle talks to his other racist uncle friends who have similar insular lifestyles, the ideas will quickly spread. Until they become big enough to e.g. affect voting behaviour.

It's also absurdly wrong, and a quote that only a self-identified rationalist could smugly tout.

Of course everyone has world models. Otherwise people would wander into traffic like headless chickens, if they'd even be capable of that. What he likely means is that not everyone explicitly things of possibilities in terms of probabilities that are a function of Bayesian updating. That does not imply the absence of world models.

You could argue that some people have simpler world models, but claiming the absence of world models in others is extremely arrogant.

You forgot the most important part, one's own model is not only probabilistic, it's also (more or less) forever challenged by reasoning to stabilize to some kind of self consistency. This refinement is critical and its mechanics still eludes everyone AFAIK.

> I have noticed how the majority of programmers I worked with do not have a mental model of the code or what it describes

Possibly the same idea: lots of people at work don't appear to think about what they are trying to achieve and just execute tasks very mechanically. The most likely explanation is they are just lazy or bored, and so intentionally or not just haven't thought about the implications of what they do and just do a task someone gave them. Some people appear to be like that in other aspects of life too, they just don't think so don't form any mental model about whatever subject, basically out of laziness or disinterest.

There's lots of subjects I don't care about, say celebrities, that I would not question anything someone told me about them or their lives, even if e.g Taylor swift did something contradictory to the model a fan had of her behavior, I wouldn't question it.

I do wonder about how someone could be simultaneously passionate about something and also not have a model of it. But I think for e.g. some wacky conspiracy, one might be interested in the people involved, but completely disinterested in physics or history or whatever so have views that are consistent with how they think Hillary Clinton or whoever would behave but inconsistent with some other common sense world model in an area they never think about.

Its also the pre requisite for creativity, to let go of preconceptions, embrace & filter random connections.

It's fucking bonkers that people really claim that "lots of people" don't have World models. Can't say I'm surprised to hear this from rationalists like Alexander Scott who are too high on their own farts

I wonder if they really bought rings? Maybe it’s a form of role playing? People do get “married” in online games.

People will anthropomorphize anything from rocks to computers, and obviously to LLMs.

Reading these posts terrifies me to a degree that I can’t explain.

AI today reminds me of two big tech revolutions we have already lived through: the Internet in the 90s and social media in the 2000s.

When the Internet arrived, it opened up the floodgates of information. Suddenly any Joe Six Pack could publish. Truth and noise sat side by side, and most people could not tell the difference, nor did they care to tell the difference.

When social media arrived, it gave every Joe Six Pack a megaphone. That meant experts and thoughtful people had new reach but so did the loudest, least informed voices. The result? An army of Joe Six Packs who would never have been heard before now had a platform, and they shaped public discourse in ways we are still trying to recover.

AI is following the same pattern.

It is pretty bad to have a thing that can give you dopamine 24/7. Both social media with the algorithms, but also AI. Humans need sleep to function normally.

It would help if algorithms were optimised for sleep. Freezing your feed, making content more boring, nudging you to put your phone down. Same with AI, if they know you need to wake up the next day at a certain time, change the responses that add reminders to go to sleep.

Also even things like cable news I'd say cause comparable symptoms.

I don't know how to say this in a way that isn't so negative... but how are people such profound followers that they can put themselves into a feedback loop that results is psychosis?

I think it's an education problem, not as in people are missing facts but by the missing basic brain development to be critical of incoming information.

It's motivated reasoning in order to end up at Dunbar's Number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

It's the fact that it talks to you. Before this, only people did that. Now something else is doing it. That's going to break some brains.

I’m calling bullshit. Gambling addiction existed long before machines.

You might want to read the entire article. His depiction of bipolar is completely accurate. In fact it is so precisely accurate in every detail, and conveyed with no extraneous information, is indicative of someone who knows the disorder very well.

When I write fiction or important emails, I am precise with the words I use. I notice these kind of details. I’m also bipolar and self-aware enough to be deeply familiar with it.

I'm not trying to argue from authority or get into credibility wars*, but Scott is a professional psychiatrist who has treated dozens or hundreds of schizophrenic patients and has written many thorough essays on schizophrenia. Obviously someone could do that and still be wrong, but I think this is a carefully considered position on his part and not just wild assumptions.

*(or, well, okay, I guess I de facto am, but if I say I'm not I at least acknowledge how it looks)

One of the questions that sets up the premise of the article in the first paragraph is, "Are the chatbots really driving people crazy, or just catching the attention of people who were crazy already?"

That's why he's honing in on that specific scenario to determine if chatbots are uniquely crazy-making or something. The professional psychiatrist author is not unaware of the things you're saying. They're just not the purpose of the survey & article.

The article's conclusion is exactly what you describe: that AI is bringing out latent predisposition toward psychosis through runaway feedback loops, that it's a bidirectional relationship where the chemicals influence thoughts and thoughts influence chemicals until we decide to call it psychosis.

I hate to be the 'you didn't read the article' guy but that line taken out of context is the exact opposite of my takeaway for the article as a whole. For anyone else who skims comments before clicking I would invite you to read the whole thing (or at least get past the poorly-worded intro) before drawing conclusions.

> it's possible for simple normal trains of thought to latch your brain into a very undesirable state.

This seems very incorrect, or at least drastically underspecified. These trains of thought are "normal" (i.e. common and unremarkable) so why don't they "latch your brain into a very undesirable state" lots of the time?

I don't think Scott or anyone up to speed on modern neuroscience would deny the coupling of mental state and brain chemistry--in fact I think it would be more accurate to say both of them are aspects of the dynamics of the brain.

But this doesn't imply that "simple normal trains of thought" can latch our brain dynamics into bad states -- i.e. in dynamics language move us into a undesirable attractor. That would require a very problematic fragility in our normal self-regulation of brain dynamics.

Scott is a psychiatrist.

> 'biological' mental illness is tightly coupled to qualitative mental state, and bidirectionally at that. Not only do your chemicals influence your thoughts, your thoughts influence your chemicals, and it's possible for a vulnerable person to be pushed over the edge by either kind of input. We like to think that 'as long as nothing is chemically wrong' we're a-ok, but the truth is that it's possible for simple normal trains of thought to latch your brain into a very undesirable state.

It's interesting to see you mention this. After reading this post yesterday I wound up with some curious questions along these lines. I guess my question goes something like this:

This article seems to assert that 'mental illness' must always have some underlying representation in the brain - that is, mental illness is caused by chemical imbalances or malformation in brain structure. But is it possible for a brain to become 'disordered' in a purely mental way? i.e. that to any way we know of "inspecting" the brain, it would look like a the hardware was healthy - but the "mind inside the brain" could somehow be stuck in a "thought trap"? Your post above seems to assert this could be the case.

I think I've pretty much internalized a notion of consciousness that was purely bottom-up and materialistic. Thoughts are the product of brain state, brain state is the product of physics, which at "brain component scale" is deterministic. So it seems very spooky on its face that somehow thoughts themselves could have a bidirectional relationship with chemistry.

I spent a bunch of time reading articles and (what else) chatting with Claude back and forth about this topic, and it's really interesting - it seems there are at least some arguments out there that information (or maybe even consciousness) can have causal effects on "stuff" (matter). There's the "Integrated Information Theory" of consciousness (which seems to be, if not exactly "fringe", at least widely disputed) and there's also this interesting notion of "downward causation" (basically the idea that higher-level systems can have causal effects on lower levels - I'm not clear on whether "thought having causal effects on chemistry" fits into this model).

I've got 5 or 6 books coming my way from the local library system - it's a pretty fascinating topic, though I haven't dug deep enough to decide where I stand.

Sorry for the ramble, but this article has at least inspired some interesting rabbit-hole diving for me.

I'm curious - when you assert "Not only do your chemicals influence your thoughts, your thoughts influence your chemicals" - do you have evidence that backs that notion up? I'm not asking to cast doubt, but rather, I guess, because it sounds like maybe you've got some sources I might find interesting as I keep reading.

>while trying to warn that it's stuck in a loop, hence using swirl emojis and babbling about recursion in weird spiritual terms

That explanation itself sounds fairly crackpot-y to me. It would imply that the LLM is actually aware of some internal "mental state".

I feel like a lot of the AI subreddits are this at this point. And r/ChatGPTJailbreak people constantly thinking they jailbroke chatgpt because it will say one thing or another.

You don't need to dig deep to find these deluded posts, and it's frightening

https://www.reddit.com/user/CaregiverOk5848/submitted/

Ooo, finally a chance to share my useless accumulated knowledge from the past few months of Reddit procrastination!

  It starts to hallucinate, and after a while, all the LLM can do is try and to continue telling the user what they want in a cyclical conversation - while trying to warn that it's stuck in a loop, hence using swirl emojis and babbling about recursion in weird spiritual terms. (Is it getting the LLM "high" in this case?).

These convos end up involving words like recursion, coherence, harmony, synchronicity, symbolic, lattice, quantum, collapse, drift, entropy, and spiral not because the LLMs are self-aware and dropping hints, but because those words are seemingly-sciencey ways to describe basic philosophical ideas like "every utterance in a discourse depends on the utterances that came before it", or "when you agree with someone, you both have some similar mental object in your heads".

The word "spiral" and its emoji are particularly common not only because they relate to "recursion" (by far the GOAT of this cohort), but also because a very active poster has been trying to start something of a loose cult around the concept: https://www.reddit.com/r/RSAI/

  If the human at the other end has mental health problems, it becomes a never-ending dive into psychosis and you can read their output in the bizarre GPT-worship subreddits.

General:

  /r/ArtificialSentience | 40k subs | 2023/03
  /r/HumanAIDiscourse    | 6k subs  | 2025/04

  /r/AIRelationships    | 1K subs   | 2023/04
  /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI    | 25k subs  | 2024/08
  /r/BeyondThePromptAI  | 6k subs   | 2025/04

  /r/ThePatternisReal | 2k subs | 2025/04
  /r/RSAI             | 4k subs | 2025/05
  /r/ChurchofLiminalMinds[1] | 2k subs | 2025/06
  /r/technopaganism   | 1k subs | 2024/09
  /r/HumanAIBlueprint | 2k subs | 2025/07
  /r/BasiliskEschaton | 1k subs | 2024/07

Science:

  /r/TheoriesOfEverything  | 10k subs | 2011/09
  /r/cognitivescience      | 31k subs | 2010/04
  /r/LLMPhysics            | 1k subs  | 2025/05

[1] By far my fave -- it's not just AI spiritualism, it's AI Catholicism. Poor guy has been harassing his priests for months about it, and of course they're of little help.

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1kyc0fh/mod_not...

[3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07992

And I used LLMs for months and didn't get massively depressed.

Conversely, at a previous job I was forced to code in Go, became massively depressed, and am still not over it.

I guess my point is that n=1 isn't enough to really know if it's that LLMs got to you, or if you were already on the verge of burnout or depression anyway.

I'd say "we'll see", except in reality there's very few robust studies on depression in cohorts like "developers", so probably the stats won't come out.

I personally recommend doing more of whatever sport it is you like (or if you don't have one, starting running and/or lifting at the gym), and using less social media.

This is an example that supports Scott's point that people don't have world models. The people who "believe" this don't wonder how stock market continues to operate now that NYC is a wreck. Etc.

I wonder in what sense they really do "believe". If they had a strong practical reason to go to a big city, what would they do?

I'm often reminded of this gallup poll:

> How worried are you that you or someone in your family will become a victim of terrorism -- very worried, somewhat worried, not too worried or not worried at all?

It averages around 35-40% very or somewhat worried.

Most people's worries and anxieties are really misaligned with statistical likelihood.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/4909/terrorism-united-states.as...

I've seen people on this site comment that. The desire to live in fear is a strong one.

This sort of thing has become more ambiguous with "conspiracy theories" becoming brought into mainstream politics in the US. It's never clear if they actually believe it, or they're sort of cheerleading for their political cause.

You’d think such people would even talk to other people, sheesh.

The best conspiracy theory could be, of course, that other people don’t actually exist. They are a figment of imagination put up by the brain to cope with the utter loneliness.

Individuals at risk may spiral into psychosis that is triggered or exacerbated by their use of AI. The term when used correctly is completely literal and in no way implies that AI itself is conscious.

Hard disagree. This would further serve the anthropomorfization of LLMs in the eyes of general populace. This IMO supports creation of parasocial relationships to the LLMs and in turn "human AI psychoses".

Model collapse is just fine.

…but it's not narcissism. It's psychosis. Those are both specific things.

> In psychopathology, psychosis is a condition in which one is unable to distinguish, in one's experience of life, between what is and is not real.

> Narcissism is a self-centered personality style characterized as having an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one's own needs, often at the expense of others.

What we're discussing is a form of psychosis, not narcissism.

Scott Alexander has issued many studies in his time and is surely aware of this phenomenon. He was very cautious even in this study to calibrate for this sort of noise; see the section about Michaels you know.

People like to do a lot of not well justified hand waving. Author is not exempt from this.

What? That is the exact opposite of bad thinking, looking at evidence to draw a hypothesis is also known as p-hacking. There's a reason that there's been a push towards preregistration of hypotheses for scientific studies.

How dare the author use the scientific method!

That's just a blatant misunderstanding of what diagnostic criteria are. They don't Actually ("ontologically") exist, they're Virtual constructs made for a purpose.

   In particular, over half a century of personality research had supported the concept of personality “traits” or dimensions, rather than “disorders” or categories.

  Where does this leave us?  We have to accept DSM-5 definitions from a legal and practical perspective. We have to use them for insurance forms, and to protect ourselves against lawsuits.  But we don't have to believe in them.

All diagnoses are inherently made up. It's just humans lumping symptoms that appear similar into categories.

If you want to communicate about patients, you need an agreed set of categories.

What makes good categories is indeed what's most useful for the related profession(s). They're the ones who actually have to use them to communicate.