Post #3068908

2026-05-16 06:34 UTC

@pojntfx@mastodon.social I lost a loved one to dementia, and have been saying for a while how similar LLM psychosis is to that experience. https://hachyderm.io/@cczona/114618173190392133 https://hachyderm.io/@cczona/116019873544950215 They think they are fine, while the person you used to know is gradually replaced by someone unrecognisable. Professional de-skilling issues aside, a sadder dimension to me is how AI psychosis degrades not only cognition but also social skills. So relationships deteriorate too, and at scale that will ultimately become communities and solidarity deteriorating as well. It's been disturbing to see people I care about lose interest in connecting at a human level, while grasping for the empty flattery of a large language model. Is this our future, truly?

Replies (2)

@datenwolf@chaos.social 2026-05-16 10:38

@cczona@hachyderm.io @pojntfx@mastodon.social I wonder how long it will take for the rest of the world to a) realize what's going on, b) arrive at the objectively valid conclusion and c) act on it and see it through. Recently past experience (COVID-19) shows that being a tall order. Anyway, I wonder when, if so, people who actively rejected contact with LLMs will be in extremely high demand, being knowledge bearers in teaching and technical lead positions.

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@riley@toot.cat 2026-05-16 21:50

@cczona@hachyderm.io Filling in for parts of the brain, or neural network, that are missing, either temporarily or permanently, by hallucinating (when a machine) or confabulating (the polite word we use for human brains doing the same thing) up something that 'seems to fit', if only superficially so, appears to be a fundamental mechanic of how networks of neurons work. It's not intended, at least for the synthetic ones, but it emerges fairly reliably. Covering up the blind spot in mammalian eyes is probably the most common use case, but in rare edge cases, extreme outcomes such as the Anton–Babinski syndrome, or anosognosia of cortical blindness, have been known to arise. This particular one is associated with focal damage to specific parts of the occipital lobes, and manifests itself as a patient being blind, but their brain pretending that they can still see, by confabulating an entire simularcrum of the patient's ordinary environment. It's the weird kind of brain condition where a clinical sign can be found on the patient's legs, because if the patient is capable of walking, this condition typically leads to them frequently bumping into things and getting unusually many hematomas on their legs. (The brain may also try to confabulate away the high rate of bumping into things, btw.) @pojntfx@mastodon.social

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