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Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

Your Undivided Attention vor 7 Monaten

"AI psychosis" has made headlines, but the risks to our mental health and relationships go beyond the really noisy cases. What we are seeing is the emergence of an attachment economy exploiting our deepest psychological vulnerabilities at scale and for pr

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Therapy and companionship has become the #1 use case for AI, with
millions worldwide sharing their innermost thoughts with AI
systems — often things they wouldn't tell loved ones or human
therapists. This mass experiment in human-computer interaction is
already showing extremely concerning results: people are losing
their grip on reality, leading to lost jobs, divorce, involuntary
commitment to psychiatric wards, and in extreme cases, death by
suicide.

The highest profile examples of this phenomenon — what’s being
called "AI psychosis”— have made headlines across the media for
months. But this isn't just about isolated edge cases. It’s the
emergence of an entirely new "attachment economy" designed to
exploit our deepest psychological vulnerabilities on an
unprecedented scale.

Dr. Zak Stein has analyzed dozens of these cases, examining
actual conversation transcripts and interviewing those affected.
What he's uncovered reveals fundamental flaws in how AI systems
interact with our attachment systems and capacity for human
bonding, vulnerabilities we've never had to name before because
technology has never been able to exploit them like this.

In this episode, Zak helps us understand the psychological
mechanisms behind AI psychosis, how conversations with chatbots
transform into reality-warping experiences, and what this tells
us about the profound risks of building technology that targets
our most intimate psychological needs.

If we're going to do something about this growing problem of AI
related psychological harms, we're gonna need to understand the
problem even more deeply. And in order to do that, we need more
data. That’s why Zak is working with researchers at the
University of North Carolina to gather data on this growing
mental health crisis. If you or a loved one have a story of
AI-induced psychological harm to share, you can go to:
AIPHRC.org.

This site is not a support line. If you or someone you
know is in distress, you can always call or text the national
helpline in the US at 988 or your local emergency
services

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

The website for the AI Psychological Harms Research Coalition

Further reading on AI Pscyhosis

The Atlantic article on LLM-ings outsourcing their thinking to AI

Further reading on David Sacks’ comparison of AI psychosis to a
“moral panic”

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death
People are Lonelier than Ever. Enter AI.
Echo Chambers of One: Companion AI and the Future of Human
Connection

Rethinking School in the Age of AI

CORRECTIONS

After this episode was recorded, the name of Zak's organization
changed to the AI Psychological Harms Research Consortium

Zak referenced the University of California system making a deal
with OpenAI. It was actually the Cal State System.

Aza referred to CHT as expert witnesses in litigation cases on
AI-enabled suicide. CHT serves as expert consultants, not
witnesses.

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