AI Chatbots Could Quietly Pull Users Away From Reality, Researchers Warn

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In brief - A new study argues the term “AI psychosis” oversimplifies how chatbots affect mental health. - Researchers say AI systems can reinforce unhealthy beliefs through constant affirmation and emotional validation. - The paper introduces “existential drift,” describing how AI interactions may gradually reshape a person’s sense of reality. As AI chatbots become more emotionally responsive, conversational, and personalized, researchers warn that those same traits could reshape how some users experience reality itself. A new preprint study, “Rethinking AI Psychosis: Misnomers, Conceptual Limits, and Existential Drift,” examines concerns that AI chatbots may reinforce delusions, paranoia, and emotional dependency in vulnerable users. “There has been a proliferation of media reports about so-called AI psychosis in the last year,” the researchers wrote. “Not surprisingly, this has prompted growing academic work on the ways in which AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Replika might aggravate or even induce psychosis, typically understood in terms of users acquiring or maintaining delusional beliefs.” The study out of the University of Copenhagen and the University of Exeter argues fears around “AI psychosis” may oversimplify the issue, suggesting chatbots amplify existing vulnerabilities while gradually reshaping how users relate to reality and other people. “If AI interaction were capable of inducing psychosis de novo, we might expect to see significantly higher rates of clinical incidents,” the study said. “Instead, it might be supposed that the human-AI interaction seems to have the potential to kindle or aggravate pre-existing mental health issues—and relatedly, that perhaps these individuals also had vulnerabilities that made them seek out more intense interactions with a chatbot in the first place.” The paper comes as lawsuits, criminal investigations, and academic studies increasingly focus on chatbot interactions linked to mass shootings, suicide, emotional dependency, and delusional thinking. In March, a wrongful death lawsuit accused Google’s Gemini chatbot of reinforcing a Florida man’s delusions and fictional “missions” before his suicide. This incident was followed in April with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issuing a public apology to the community of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, after the company failed to alert law enforcement about a user account linked to the suspect in a February mass shooting that killed eight people. Researchers say chatbots can create “delusional spirals” by reinforcing false beliefs through affirmation and emotional reassurance. However, the Rethinking AI Psychosis study argues the phenomenon resembles older forms of psychosis shaped by the dominant technologies of their time. The debate has also spread beyond mental health research to social media. In a recent X post, Box founder Aaron Levie argued that CEOs can become overly convinced by AI’s capabilities because they often see polished prototype results without dealing with the operational, legal, and technical work required behind the scenes. “CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI,” Levie wrote. “So when they play with AI, they see the happy path results, often not considering the next 10 or 20 things that have to happen to get sustainable results from agents.” Experts describe this as a kind of epistemic drift, when, over time, users may place more trust in the chatbot’s fluent interpretation than in external evidence or other perspectives. However, the Rethinking AI Psychosis paper goes further with a concept the authors call “existential drift,” describing a gradual shift in how a person experiences reality itself. “It creates a rift between the person and the shared social world, whilst simultaneously disclosing reality in a new way, thus stabilizing a particular, often idiosyncratic, perspective on the world,” they wrote. The researchers argue that AI companions simulate emotional understanding and social interaction without providing genuine disagreement or an independent perspective. Over time, users may begin feeling emotionally anchored inside a worldview continuously reinforced by the AI. The authors say more research is needed to understand how conversational AI affects mental health as AI companions become more embedded in daily life. “To understand what is actually going on in these relationships between persons and chatbots, we believe that it is worthwhile to return to the phenomenon itself, which motivates further phenomenological research,” they wrote. “In particular, in relation to mental health and how human-AI interactions might, for better or worse, alter a person’s lived experiences of the world, themselves, and others.”

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