Will Generative Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Generate Delusions in Individuals Prone to Psychosis?

Key Findings

• — Proposes that the combination of a chatbot's humanlike conversational fluency and its unpredictable, black-box outputs could trigger cognitive dissonance in vulnerable users, contributing to delusion formation
• — The author explicitly frames the piece as a hypothesis ('guesswork' at the time of writing) rather than an empirical finding, predating the case-report literature that later validated aspects of the concern
• — This is the originating document for the 'chatbot psychosis' terminology and framing now used throughout later peer-reviewed literature (including entries already held in this library)

Methodology Notes

A hypothesis-generating editorial, not an empirical study; published online 2023-08-25, print issue November 2023 (volume 49, issue 6, pages 1418-1419).

Sources