As AI chatbots become increasingly emotionally responsive, conversational, and personalized, researchers are cautioning that these same traits could reshape how some users perceive reality.
AI’s Impact on Mental Health
A new pre-print study, “Rethinking AI Psychosis: Misnomers, Conceptual Limits, and Existential Drift,” explores concerns that AI chatbots may exacerbate 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, conducted by researchers at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Exeter, suggests that fears surrounding “AI psychosis” may oversimplify the issue. The researchers argue that 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 stated. “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.”
Legal and Social Implications
The paper arrives amid a growing number of lawsuits, criminal investigations, and academic studies that are increasingly focused 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 by 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 suggest that chatbots can create “delusional spirals” by reinforcing false beliefs through affirmation and emotional reassurance. However, the “Rethinking AI Psychosis” study argues that the phenomenon resembles older forms of psychosis shaped by the dominant technologies of their time.
The debate has also extended 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.”
Existential Drift
Experts describe this as a form of epistemic drift, where users may gradually place more trust in the chatbot’s interpretations than in external evidence or other perspectives. However, the “Rethinking AI Psychosis” paper introduces the concept of “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,” the authors 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 within a worldview continuously reinforced by the AI.
The authors emphasize the need for further research to understand how conversational AI affects mental health as AI companions become more integrated into 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.”
