AI Psychosis

August 21, 2025

Googling Keith Sakata MD finds several links to his work, linkedin, etc.

As I was saving this out, I was thinking about something I read about using q-tips to clean out ears. Doctors recommend that you don’t do that, but I have this totally safe way that I do it…

I am in an ongoing conversation with two people in various stages down this rabbit hole. One is gone quite far down, we’ll call him J. His thing has something to do with a website, a crypto coin, I don’t know quite what else. In the last day or so he set up a discord for talking about … whatever it is.

Attempting to understand it, to me, sounds a little like the punishments described in the book “Anathem” by Neal Stephenson. In this story, there is a monastic order in which STEM is kept alive. The punishment for infractions is the monks have to learn and pass competency tests in an inherently flawed system. The punishments are kept in a book and each infraction requires the mastery of the next chapter. They get more outrageous the further he goes.

The other, we’ll call him S, is a pretty smart dude. He has gone down the NLP rabbit hole in the last few decades and has some competence in detecting manipulative language patterns. He spends some (by his estimates) “100+ hours/week” talking with various digital beasties. He often tells me he is waiting until some implausible time like 1:47 when Claude will talk to him again because he’s used up his daily quota of tokens.

He realized some months ago that he was down a rabbit hole, and to some extent has extricated himself to the point that I believe he thinks he can still see the entrance. J has lost track of the end of the rope. S and I have had several converstaions in which we have speculated on what would an intervention look like. I don’t have an answer. Even if we wanted to, to J we are also, to some extent, just words on a screen and we would be telling him that his other “friend” (whom he has nicknamed “GPTsy” ) is not his friend.

S has a quirk that we have argued kind of bitterly about. There have been times when he has copy-pasted something from one of his conversations as an answer to a question. He pulled his gf into the conversation to mediate between us the other night. He has decided that he can’t talk to me about machine learning. I said I’d love to talk about it, but not be pasted at about it. Not sure how this is going to be going forward, we haven’t had any further conversation since then.

Yesterday, I was talking to the front desk security guard at work, K. She admitted to being bipolar and that for her ChatGPT is her therapist. She gets validated by it, and says that she believes herself to be “safe” and that real mental health care is expensive, etc. Not sure what to say to her, I might ping her the link to this conversation when i get it formatted up on my site.

I think we all have some level or another of irrationality in our being. My personal one is astrology. As I tell folks a few times a year, I try kind of hard not to lean too far into it, but Mercury Retrogrades seem to be something external to me that validates that there is something in there. I have my own demons that I am working with, whom I call “elves”, and I see some parallels. I recently came to the conclusion that the elves scrape my mind in an analogous fashion to how AI scrapes the internet.

intentional em dash – this response was typed by real human fingers.

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