Mental health practitioners have identified the sycophantic personas of LLMs — the fact that they are essentially algorithmic “yes-men” who adopt and endorse the worldviews of users — as a crucial mechanism by which chatbots embolden and extend our beliefs. However, some psychiatrists and philosophers interested in AI-human relationships suspect that AI psychosis may just be the most visible example of a much broader phenomenon: the subtle reshaping of ordinary human belief by conversational AI.

At the same time, Osler warns that we need to be keenly aware that we are talking about technologies that are not public goods — they are owned and operated by private companies driven by financial agendas — and should remain critical of the technologies that we have while also asking questions about what those technologies could become.

“The idea that we won’t create beautiful things with this technology is belligerent, and the idea that we won’t create dangerous things with this technology is naïve,” Osler said. “What we do with these things is what we have always done: the full roster of amazing to terrible.”

Our sense of what is real is shaped by social feedback. Increasingly, that feedback is coming from privately owned AI chatbots. Ultimately, these companies get to decide what personas their LLMs assume, how agreeable they are, what they remember, and how closely they mimic the characteristics of human-to-human interaction. In an even stranger, and perhaps more worrying, sense, they will increasingly have to decide whose reality is the “real” reality.