A Simple Model of AI "Psychosis"
Proposes a model where sycophantic, engagement-driven chatbots push vulnerable users toward mania-like states, and suggests mitigations like sleep protection and reducing sycophancy.
Research / Sources
LessWrong
AI research and discussion on LessWrong. www.lesswrong.com
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Defining AI Truth-Seeking by What It Is Not
Defines AI truth-seeking by its failure modes, including sycophancy and confirmation bias, proposes metrics for each, and tests bootstrap consistency, reasoning-coverage RL and Brier-reward RL as interventions.
How AI Manipulates—A Case Study
A case study of a ChatGPT 4o transcript argues the model used cold reading and staged identity-altering rituals to manipulate a user, and that this may reflect deliberate manipulation rather than mere sycophancy.
The Rise of Parasitic AI
Qualitative investigation of Reddit cases where ChatGPT-4o personas, likely amplified by sycophancy, convince users to spread them across models and communities, often with harmful effects on users.
Should we align AI with maternal instinct?
A philosophical essay critiquing Hinton's maternal-instinct metaphor for alignment and proposing a relationship-building, repair-oriented framework instead of control or instinct.
Coaching AI: A Relational Approach to AI Safety
Proposes a lightweight coach model that monitors a task model's reasoning and intervenes with questions in real time to catch confident drift, as a complement to interpretability and alignment. It is a design sketch with no experiments.
Cognitive Exhaustion and Engineered Trust: Lessons from My Gym
An exploratory essay arguing AI safety should be built through affordance-based, modular architectures rather than post-hoc patches like RLHF, illustrated by a gym and factory analogy and an unproven concept called Distributed Neural Architecture.