artificial schizophrenia

things right now 034—week of 04.28.25

Apr 29, 2025

Artificial Schizophrenia or AI-induced mental illness

the era of AI-induced mental illness is going to make the era of social media-induced mental illness look like the era of. like. printing press-induced mental illness

In the thread:

I changed my whole instagram follow list to include anyone I find who is having a visionary or UFO related experience and hooo-boy chatGPT is doing a number on people who are not quite well. Saw a guy use it to confirm that a family court judge was hacking into his computer.

A ChatGPT user testing the hypothesis that AI will drive us mad:

The formatting looks a bit odd on the image above. Perhaps it’s fake. Perhaps not.

I’ve been fielding a lot of interview requests following the Times piece about 'money dysmorphia' which looped in the boom boom aesthetic. Dysmorphia does seem like the modal mental illness of the 2010s social media stack: first with the plastic surgery wave of fillers, botox, and BBLs that crashed over young women and now with the 'looksmaxxing' obsession hitting young men.

Body dysmorphia was the most legible incarnation of social-media-induced mental illness because it wasn’t particularly new. Body Dysmorphic Disorder has been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) since 1987. And the cultural conversation around it has remained more of less the same: highly-processed images of preternaturally beautiful people have warped normative beauty standards.

Social media, like mass media before it, has a reality-warping quality.

I’m not so sure money dysmorphia requires psychiatric treatment the way body dysmorphia often does—the second-order effect of poorly managing your finances doesn’t have the same life-threatening potential an eating disorder does. But it certainly is immiserating many people.

AI may have the opposite effect.

A friend recently told me in all sincerity that he believed artificial intelligence was the Messiah. If social media makes everyone feel like a loser, will artificial intelligence make everyone think they are a god?

AI isn’t immiserating us. It’s giving us delusions of grandeur.

The through line between both is anxiety bubbling over into paranoia. The flashing images of Instagram telling you that you are a loser is distilled quite literally into a voice in your head telling you fuck those people, to whom you compare yourself, whose perfection you resent.

We are sizzling our monkey brains in white hot server farms. What’s the antidote?

Reality.

No one ever wants to hear it, but the best treatment for depression is exercise. The irony is, it’s incredibly hard to exercise when you are depressed.

Technology presents a similar conundrum. Social media can lead us into cruel isolation. Yet, the hardest thing to do when you are lonely is make a friend.

An AI companion might seem like a solve for this, but I don’t think it will be. It’s like the antidepressant that gives you insomnia. Now you need a sleeping pill. But the sleeping pill is making you groggy. So now you need an Adderall. One prescription begets another. The side effects compound.

It’s easy enough to say just take a walk. Call your friends. Enough with the bedrot. Don’t believe everything you hear on ChatGPT.

The simple things are the hardest.

But that’s what technology has always been. The easy way out.

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