People really need an entire article to justify labeling someone as having a mental illness because in their opinion, the their coworker isn't contributing meaninfully, or potentially making things worse.

FTA: > Prolific AI psychosis occurs when a person generates a large quantity of AI output without significantly increasing the real value of their work.

Guy, we used to just call this a bad coworker.

I'm pretty sure that the "psychosis" will be abused by folks that just don't like AI. You already see it everywhere.

I was talking to a friend recently, and i think i aligned with a similar definition.

I've seen people who talk nonstop about AI, and how it's changed everything, but then there's no quantifiable output that supports their claim.

On the other hand, I've had a friend start a business, and be able to create an app much much faster than what would have been possible in the past. He has real customers paying real money, which makes it easy to validate his claims.

I think that specifically in the case of a coworker in a technical field, say software engineer, we already have an apprenticeship system (junior, senior, architect, etc) where the use of these tools, taste, competence, evaluating code and architecture, are all experience-based and pretty self evident as you progress through your profession and gain experience. The same for, say, an electrician or any skilled trade. These AI tools are just those, another tool that you use to further your profession and of course somebody starting out will perhaps generate more slop or bad code. But more senior coworkers with experience, taste, criteria, etc will guide those people and you progress and improve.

Beyond that, when the tool becomes more than a tool and becomes your coworker, with his/her/its own criteria, taste, methods, etc - than THAT is when the rubber hits the road. haha.

Part 3: "Voluminous AI Psychosis"

One - delusion is a better fit if you need a term: https://mhanational.org/conditions/paranoia-and-delusional-d...

> Delusional disorder is characterized by irrational or intense belief(s) or suspicion(s) that a person believes to be true

it's still a bad fit because there's not currently popular social convention that trusting AI without validation is a bad idea but it's better than psychosis. also it's still stigmatizing and we live in a world where a thesaurus is seconds away at any time. plus psychosis as a diagnosis is typically a cluster of symptoms that go beyond just delusion: https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/294416-overview

Two - there's also an implication that there's 'harm' that this AI psychotic person inflicts on others embedded in this article. in reality, the vast majority of those suffering mental illnesses are far more likely to be harmed by others - https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtrea...

part of the work of being a good mental health advocate is not stigmatizing specific diagnoses as negative social ills. now if you don't give a single shit about mental health I'm not going to argue to get you to care. but if you do care then you should do better

Excellent read! We were talking about the effects of AI Psychosis on companies. It looks like people have a misconceived notion that now work can be done 90% faster and they are attempting to literally get rid of 90% of the engineers. The end result, no one left with do the work - especially when an edge case/disaster strikes or the customer wants something different.

> In some cases, the new AI workflow may even destroy value.

I am really struggling with this one right now.

The client's development team is letting Claude document and refactor the product codebase without much intervention, purpose or taste. The thinking being that if Claude first writes a bunch of unit tests and then a bunch of documentation, that any downstream refactoring will magically work out.

I don't know how to convey to management how stupid this is without allowing it to fail in production. AI psychosis (or whatever we want to call it) being a new phenomenon means we might as well be speaking in moon runes to the CEO when trying to explain the situation.

The best countermeasure I can come up with right now is to use their momentum against them. Accelerate the failure. I've got the last known good commit hash written down on a sticky note on my monitor.