Comment by impulser_

I thinking that it’s quite a different experience going all Jackson Pollock with AI in your own studio on your own terms, compared to the sorry state of affairs of having 100s of Pollocks throwing paint around wildly within a corp to meet a paint quota.

I’ve had to do a ton of SQL stuff lately, which I haven’t really worked with since the late 90s. ChatGPT has been a godsend, not just for me, but for our only coworker who knows SQL well, whom I’d probably be bugging several times a day at my wits’ end.

But no one cares about those kinds of productivity gains. Just the ones that will completely replace us.

> outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself

> I use AI a ton and I'm having more fun every day than I ever did before

With respect, this is what makes me worry.

If someone is a user of AI, can they really tell the difference between "outsourcing" and "using"? I worry that a lot of people will start out well-intentioned and end up completely outsourced before they realise it.

Hi Mitchell. Psychosis is a serious psychiatric condition that can be induced or triggered by AI. “AI psychosis” in this context is a misuse of a clinical term. Your tweet describes a disagreement on a value judgment that boils down to “move fast and break things” with high trust in AI outputs vs going all in on quality and reliability with low trust in AI. It’s an engineering tradeoff like any other.

Claiming that the people who disagree with you must be experiencing a form of psychosis, experiencing actual hallucinations and unable to tell what is real, is a weak ad hominem that comes off no better than calling them retarded or schizophrenic.

If you genuinely think one of your friends is going through a psychotic episode, you should be trying to get to them professional help. But don’t assume you can diagnose a human psyche just because you can diagnose a software bug.

I have a friend that is a junior in a security-oriented sys-admin/network engineer type role. They have been doing the job for only a bit over a year. No background in programming.

Their entire organization has been handed Codex/Claude and told to "go all in on AI" and "automate everything". So the mandate is for people that do not know how to code and have the keys to the castle to unleash these things upon their systems.

This is at a large organization with tens of thousands of employees.

I am waiting with bated breath for the ultimate outcome!

this is exactly what is happening. instead of building true AI culture around thoughtful adoption of AI strengths while defending against weaknesses, they're coming up with bullshit heuristics like "every repo has a CLAUDE.md", watching private token usage dashboards, and terrorizing everyone into doing it (or lose your job).

this leads to naive AI adoption, which is the worst of both worlds (no real speedup, out sourcing thinking, ai slop PRs, skill rot).

I suspect we're going to see this in many corporate environments soon, if we aren't already

> your coworkers who disagree with it, but those people are going to leave or be fired.

Personally I expect that I will be this person soon, probably fired. I'm not sure what I will do for a career after, but I sure do hate AI companies now for doing this to my career

The way I phrase this to others is: Language models produce linguistically valid sentences, not factually correct sentences.

It’s simpler than that - it’s a guessing machine that has superior access to a whole load of information and capacity to process at a speed at which we humans cannot compete.

Does it make it better than us? No because ultimately the thing itself doesn’t ‘know’ right from wrong.

Yeah, very often the issue is that some context is missing. It'll say something true, but which misses the bigger point, or leads to a suboptimal result. Or it interprets an ambiguous thing in one specific way, when the other meaning makes more sense. You have to keep your wits about you to catch these things.

It's an incredible tool but it's also very derpy sometimes, full of biases, blind spots etc.

> Probably they copy and paste my reply to their bots.

You must not give in to the temptation to mention pirate talk, Klingon, or goblins.

But now that I've put the seed in your mind, you probably (hopefully) will. :)

Can concur. I would say I am doing 3 things per day now instead of 1.

> find ways to let the agent make the boring decisions, like how to loop over some array, or how to adapt the output of one call into the input of another.

Those kind of advice ultimately don't matter. If you're familiar with a programming project, you'll also be familiar with the constructs and API so looping over an array or mapping some data is obvious. Just like you needn't read to a dictionary to write "Thank you", you just write it.

And if you're not, ultimately you need to verify the doc for the contract of some function or the lifecycle of some object to have any guaranty that the software will do what you want to do. And after a few day of doing that, you'll then be familiar with the constructs.

> make the real decisions ahead of time. encode them into specs. define boundaries, apis, key data structures. identify systems and responsibilities. explicitly enumerate error handling. set hard constraints around security and PII.

The only way to do that is if you have implemented the algorithm before and now are redoing for some reason (instead of using the previous project). If you compare nice specs like the ietf RFCs and the USB standards and their implementation in OS like FreeBSD, you will see that implementation has often no resemblance to how it's described. The spec is important, but getting a consistent implementation based on it is hard work too.

That consistency is hard to get right without getting involved in the details. Because it's ultimately about fine grained control.

If there's one thing I know about users is that they're never certain about whatever they've produced.

> Is "AI said it was a good idea" and worse than "we were following industry trends"?

Based on the stuff I've seen, yes it seems a lot worse.

this author suggest its essentially the same risk https://www.poppastring.com/blog/what-we-lost-the-last-time-.... i feel its heightened because execs and leaders are absolutely salivating over the opportunity to fire thousands of humans with no regard for the cognitive debt that comes from outsourcing thinking to ai.

“Toked out” is really, really good, thank you for this

I wouldn’t say they have an undefined truth value. Their source of truth is their training data. The problem is that human text is not tightly coupled to the capital T truth.

share the prompt!

I'm curious how to best define what AI psychosis actually is.

My understanding is that regular psychosis involves someone taking bits and pieces of facts or real world events and chaining them into a logical order or interpolating meanings or explanations which feel real and obvious to the patient but are not sufficiently backed by evidence and thus not in line with our widely accepted understanding of reality.

AI psychosis is then this same phenomenon occurring at a more widespread scale due to the next-word-prediction nature of LLMs facilitating this by lowering the activation energy for this to happen. LLMs are excellent at taking any idea, question, theory and spinning a linear and plausibly coherent line of conversation from it.

> friends I’ve had who have done things like have a full on mourning session when a model updates because they lost a friend/lover

I mean, isn't that the natural and expected response? An AI company sold them a relationship with a chatbot and at least some their social/romantic needs were being met by that product. When what they were paying for was taken from them and changed without warning into something that no longer filled that void in their life why wouldn't they morn that loss?

The fact that they were hurt by that sudden loss is totally healthy. It's just part of moving on. The real problem was getting into an unhealthy relationship with a fictitious partner under the control of an abusive company willing to exploit their loneliness in exchange for money.

Hopefully they now know better, but people (especially desperate ones) make poor choices all the time to get what's missing in their lives or to distract themselves from it.

How do you have so many crazy friends?

It’s almost as if we haven’t learned anything from Hans the horse, Ouija boards, "facilitated communication", or the countless examples of the folly of surrounding yourself with yes men. The point about improv is spot on.