AI PSYCHOSIS: WHEN YOUR MACHINE FEELS TOO HUMAN

New AI chatbots spark excitement but also reveal how users can slip into delusion, dependence and distorted reality

- BY IMRAN TAJ | Special to Gulf News

Google's new large-language-model-powered tools, AI co-scientist and Nano Banana, create a strange sense of personal connection with an AI chatbot. By allowing collaborative interaction — one that feels like working with an intelligent partner — these tools raise a fundamental question: Are we on the verge of creating a true General AI capable of applying its intelligence across a wide range of intellectual tasks, much like a human being?

The answer might be a lot more complicated than the excessive techno-optimistic news headlines and Hollywood characters — such as JARVIS — would have us believe.

Today's AI tools are incredibly smart at what they have been trained on, especially in employing Chain-of-Thought prompting, through intermediate reasoning steps. To some extent, they offer a supportive and judgement-free companionship by reinforcing positive user-affirmations. However, this benefit could transform into a profound risk.

Despite their remarkable abilities to process massive datasets to problem-solve, the modern AI tools lack real-time planning, common sense, and rational reasoning; especially when confronted by a problem outside their training data. Even increasing the dataset size does not help, as the law of diminishing returns kicks in. This shortcoming highlights a significant distinction between human and machine (human-like?) companionship. The pursuit of a hypothetical General AI - which seems to blur this distinction line has led to what Dr Soren Dinesen Ostergaard has termed AI psychosis.

What is Al psychosis?