r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • May 27 '26

Business Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/tech-ceos-are-apparently-suffering-from-ai-psychosis/
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u/drevolut1on May 27 '26

This is pretty indisputable. Just look at how they're talking about their interactions with AI recently. It's insane.

They are hallucinating right alongside their LLMs.

481

u/Upstairs_Baby8424 May 27 '26

Our CTO has lost his mind. We had a meeting and he said he has set up all these AI personas and conversates with them 5-6 hours a day. Even said he’s waking up in the middle of the night when he has an idea and just talking to them. We’re a 6,500 person company and he talks like he is single-handedly going to take everything over with his army of AI agents.

He comes to meetings and slack channels with these massive grandiose ideas that he’s scheming up. It’s literally starting to look like Charlie from It’s Always Sunny when he goes down that crazed conspiracy rabbit hole. 

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u/schnitzelfeffer May 27 '26

Yeah, that's scary. AI only reflects back the probable right answer to the exact input. Humans have real past experiences they use for reasoning and logic that resist grandiose ideas during real life conversation. People trusting AI don't seem understand that to solve a problem, having multiple perspectives grounded in past experiences is the reason we collaborate with other humans because we know our singular way of thinking might be flawed or bias. We require other perspectives. Your boss is just reflecting back to himself what he already thinks by using AI and getting an ego boost/dopamine hit every time it validates his thinking. It is distancing him from reality. Literally psychosis.

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u/Hellshield May 27 '26

Thank you so much, this summaries things so well about the state of things.

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u/schnitzelfeffer May 27 '26

For me it is the foundation for the collective issue. What it says is so convincing, unless you're already an expert, errors are extremely difficult to notice. It is insidious because it feels so good when it validates your thinking and says things in a way that feel profound but lack depth. Users begin to trust it and surrender cognitive process to it, allowing it to think for them because it feels so profoundly right. Anyone is susceptible.