It’s more revealing the inability of many senior leaders to truly understand what’s happening in their companies and investing the time to understand what new things can do and don’t. Such weaker leaders tend to be extremely gullible for the latest new thing and ride the hype wave hard.

It’s easy to just go through the motions and press the easy button on the new shiny thing. It’s hard, and takes true leadership, to go against the grain and do what’s truly best over what’s cool or popular.

Most folks in these roles just aren’t that good and hence why they fell hard for the AI fluff and are starting to scramble hard now as that all begins to unravel.

It's really going to be a top-down destruction of everything

Clearly Opus 5 was an overreaction to this then.

First Blockchain, then DEI, then COVID, then AI.

Any of these completely filled the headlines to the exclusion of everything else and were used internally to solidify and extend your influence and keep people in check. Then they were dropped.

Managers need a mission, and AI will be abandoned soon as well in favor of a new religion.

As for the main article, it makes a causal leap. The fact that these patients were hospitalised after intensive AI use establishes an association; it does not establish that AI caused their psychosis. There is some evidence that chatbot interactions may have reinforced or intensified delusional thinking, but no counterfactual evidence showing what would have happened without AI. By the same reasoning, contact with psychiatrists is strongly associated with receiving a psychosis diagnosis and being admitted to hospital; but that does not mean psychiatrists caused the underlying psychosis. The relevant question is whether AI merely featured in an episode already under way, helped trigger it, or materially worsened it. The evidence cited does not yet distinguish between those possibilities.

This might actually be an improvement. Execs gulled by "AI" are surely the ones likely to have the worst judgement in hiring people.

Maybe it did enhance them, and maybe the assessment was correct at the same time.

There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort. Use it well, it will be good, use it with close to zero effort and you'll get something distinctly better than what you could smash together manually with that much effort, but people will see that you indeed put zero effort in it, and also they will notice that you spent no effort in cleaning up AI tells because you likely can't even notice or have no idea about anything and will indeed correctly conclude you're less intelligent.

There may also be a miscalibration that's worse for people with less taste / judgment / intelligence / experience, in that it's indeed easier to produce things, but while the effort required is reduced, people expect and believe it to be reduced more than how much it is truly reduced so they overshoot and don't notice. Meanwhile, the right way to use it is to keep your usual effort level or drop it only a little, and simply produce better things.

it's sad that c-suite believes the advice given by an LLM for a Platonically ideal software stack that looks nothing like the actual implementation moreso than their own ICs. it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leadership than anybody else

never understood why someone would trust Claude's take on your codebase after it's read a 2% snippet of it over the advice of someone who has years worth of experience, who knows all the weird kludges and other quirks that were shipped MVP and never truly tackled as debt, whose done risk assessments and mapped dependencies and has the rough outline of all ADRs involved

I think it's always been true that bad leadership tends to become out-of-touch with the reality of the business over time especially if they don't know how to cultivate good working norms, favoring sycophants instead. with LLMs, that trend seems like it'll just get worse and worse

I worry about them. I also worry about myself -- what is working with these psychosis machines doing to me? Will I start sounded like that? Do I already? I am thinking about ways to insulate myself from this as much as possible.

Is AI psychosis the white collar black lung?

Hell yes a chatbot is going to have better judgment.

You can be the most AI-pilled wingnut in the world, but until you start hallucinating, there's no reason to call this psychosis.