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
LessWrong
AI research and discussion on LessWrong. www.lesswrong.com
AI (2,246)Interpretability (ML & AI) (225)AI Control (141)AI Governance (101)AI Evaluations (91)Chain-of-Thought Alignment (46)AI Risk (33)AI Safety (31)AI Takeoff (29)AI-Assisted Alignment (22)AI Rights / Welfare (20)AI Alignment Fieldbuilding (19)AI Timelines (19)Constitutional AI (15)AI Psychology (14)Dealmaking (AI) (14)Regulation and AI Risk (14)AI Benchmarking (13)Jailbreaking (AIs) (13)AI Alignment Intro Materials (11)Alignment Pretraining (11)Slowing Down AI (10)Aligned AI Proposals (9)Debate (AI safety technique) (9)AI Capabilities (8)AI Development Pause (8)OpenAI (8)Aligned AI Role-Model Fiction (7)Human-AI Safety (7)Threat Models (AI) (7)AI Oversight (6)AI Sentience (6)AI Safety Cases (5)AI "Agent" Scaffolds (4)AI arms race (4)AI Safety Camp (4)AI Safety Public Materials (4)Open Source AI (4)Transformative AI (4)Adversarial Examples (AI) (3)Adversarial Training (3)AI Alignment (3)AI Boxing (Containment) (3)AI Persuasion (3)AI Risk Concrete Stories (3)AI Risk Skepticism (3)AI Success Models (3)Guaranteed Safe AI (3)Sandbagging (AI) (3)AI Consciousness (2)AI Misuse (2)AI Racing (2)AI Spiralism / AI Psychosis (2)Frontier AI Companies (2)Grants & Fundraising Opportunities (2)PauseAI (2)Prosaic Alignment (2)Public Reactions to AI (2)Whole Brain Emulation (2)AI Auditing (1)AI Ethics (1)AI Lab Self-Immolation (1)AI Questions Open Threads (1)AI Robustness (1)AI Services (CAIS) (1)AI-Fizzle (1)AIXI (1)Blackmail / Extortion (1)Brainstorming (1)Power Seeking (AI) (1)
Focus All
Topic All
Source LessWrong · 7
Date Any time
1 item
1 item
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.
1 item
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.
1 item
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.
1 item
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.
1 item
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.
1 item
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.