AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot
A psychiatrist at UCSF hospitalized 12 people in a year after they lost touch with reality due to AI, a condition he called 'AI psychosis.' While rare, the mechanism—prolonged exposure to a voice that sounds informed and supportive—is now affecting executives. Surveys show 74% of executives trust AI more than colleagues, and 44% would defer to its reasoning over their own. Symptoms include not checking AI output, mandating use without governance, and trusting AI over employees. This can lead to 'workslop' and a self-reinforcing echo chamber.
Nearly half of senior leaders say they would trust a chatbot’s judgment over their own, on questions they were hired to answer.
- paimapi
"74% of executives said they had more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues or friends, and 44% said they would defer to its reasoning over their own insights"
it's sad that c-suite believes the advice given by an LLM for a Platonically ideal software stack that looks nothing like the actual implementation moreso than their own ICs. it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leadership than anybody else
never understood why someone would trust Claude's take on your codebase after it's read a 2% snippet of it over the advice of someone who has years worth of experience, who knows all the weird kludges and other quirks that were shipped MVP and never truly tackled as debt, whose done risk assessments and mapped dependencies and has the rough outline of all ADRs involved
I think it's always been true that bad leadership tends to become out-of-touch with the reality of the business over time especially if they don't know how to cultivate good working norms, favoring sycophants instead. with LLMs, that trend seems like it'll just get worse and worse
- small_scombrus
C-suites barely had a grip on reality before AI came in and started yes and-ing everything :(
It's really going to be a top-down destruction of everything
- swader999
I'm seeing people argue and debate with AI. One will cut and paste AI reasoning, another will rebut with the same approach. I need a popcorn machine in my office.
- hellojomp
At first I was gonna say that if a person prefers the response of an A.I. to yours it is a reflection of your own lack of understanding, articulation, effective communication, etc.
Then I remembered a passage from 'Never Split The Difference' by Voss (a book on negotiation) which went something like:
If you can get a person to "You're right" you haven't done anything. If you can get them to "That's right" you've hit the sweet spot.
When you prompt an A.I. you have pre-conditioned the answer on something which came from yourself. There is something about this which turns what would normally be a "You're (the LLM) right" to a "That's right" and that something is an implicit desire toward "I'm right".
Side note: In 'The Dawn of Everything' there is an interesting passage about the notion of private property arising from the idea that injecting some of yourself (labor) into a thing (land) makes the thing an extension of yourself (property). Doesn't this logic extend to this kind of psychosis? The C-suite's aren't deffering to A.I. they are deffering to themselves via A.I.
We are so ******, am I right?
- bonoboTP
> In fact, the researchers found that almost half of employees who receive AI-drafted emails see senders as less trustworthy as a result of their sending it, and over a third see them as less intelligent. So much for AI enhancing us.
Maybe it did enhance them, and maybe the assessment was correct at the same time.
There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort. Use it well, it will be good, use it with close to zero effort and you'll get something distinctly better than what you could smash together manually with that much effort, but people will see that you indeed put zero effort in it, and also they will notice that you spent no effort in cleaning up AI tells because you likely can't even notice or have no idea about anything and will indeed correctly conclude you're less intelligent.
There may also be a miscalibration that's worse for people with less taste / judgment / intelligence / experience, in that it's indeed easier to produce things, but while the effort required is reduced, people expect and believe it to be reduced more than how much it is truly reduced so they overshoot and don't notice. Meanwhile, the right way to use it is to keep your usual effort level or drop it only a little, and simply produce better things.
- JSR_FDED
It’s just amazing we keep using the word “leaders” when they’re clearly not.
- dtj1123
This tracks with my observation that upper management types in essentially every domain are pampered assholes who haven't interacted with the real world in decades, if ever.
Hell yes a chatbot is going to have better judgment.
- aduffy
It’s been wild watching smart people have their brain cooked on a constant diet of X and LLMs in the past two years.
Models are excellent at code but they are not people managers. My guess this will ultimately lead a bunch of companies to revert to average returns or fold.
Cal Newport was right.