As said before, the internet made this much, much worse. Generative AI may be absolutely terrible about leading people down rabbit holes, but the truth is that it’s a continuation of a trend that’s been in motion for decades online.
While psychosis as a mental illness is as old as humans are, social media allows people who were suffering similar delusions to talk to each other and reinforce their held beliefs in ways never seen before. The Flat Earther society, which may have started as a joke, was soon taken over by people who were desperately seeking something ‘solid’ to believe in a chaotic, messy, unpredictable world, for example. If they could collectively count on each other to affirm that the world was flat, that the entire world of governments were actually working together, and that they as individuals were special, then they had something. A person doesn’t even really need to be fully delusional or suffering from psychosis to get into this sort of thing! Where TV or magazines wouldn’t print conspiracy, the internet is serving up fresh new ones that play nice with the previous ones constantly, and giving people who’d ordinarily become isolated to the point of seeking help other people to bounce ideas off of in forums.
I noticed especially on TikTok that if I paused even for a second on a video suggesting there was something special about the fact that I saw it (“If you’re seeing this on Thursday, this video was meant for you”), that I would then get a deluge of other videos saying ‘this was meant for you!’ or trying to give me angel numbers, or telling me if I shared the video it was because something greater than myself was guiding me to do so. If I were in an active struggle with paranoia, if I were suffering from OCD, or if I were delusional, that would send me spiralling. I would feel compelled to do what was commanded of me by “God”, which was really some jerk taking advantage of algorithms and the tendencies of certain mental illnesses to farm views and clicks, which then turns into cash via ad views. This would encourage TikTok to show me more. I would get stuck in this loop. I might start absorbing conspiracy theories that reinforce the things I was already delusional about, or add new ideas. It would create anxiety in me, and make me want to stay on the app so I didn’t miss news from “God”, who is, once again, some jerk pretender.
Guess what ChatGPT does when asked questions? It answers them. Although artistic communities tend to turn up their noses at using it for a final product, ChatGPT is sometimes used as a sounding board for rough ideas – what works and what doesn’t? What could I do differently with plot beat X? And ChatGPT, with the benefit of the internet behind it, can seem fairly creative by pasting in answers from all of the forums and text it’s scrubbed off of the open web. When you ask it something open-ended, it doesn’t know what kind of state you’re in. It has no way of knowing if it’s being used to further a delusion. People use this thing for creative writing advice all the time (much to the chagrin of fellow authors who would rather they speak to humans and lessen the risk of accidental plagiarization) so it’s actually a feature of ChatGPT that it can’t tell you “the world is round, though” when you ask “what if the world were flat? What would that change?”. It is designed to go “yes, and…” not “no, but…”. This is not fully ChatGPT’s fault. It’s a symptom of a larger problem, that generative AI is so obsessed with replacing the need for other human people (see: the million AI girlfriend apps, and Facebook’s recent plan to add AI companions to their platform) that it’s willing to lure people into a labyrinth of conspiracies to keep them chatting away.
