r/AIPsychosisRecovery

Edit: glancing at the rules, I hope this isn't seen as "encouraging AI use". I saw it more as prevention. I wrote this as part of a comment on a different sub and thought it might be helpful

Maybe "tips" is the better word.

- wipe your chat history and memories to prevent earlier AI hallucinations and your own AI psychosis-ish chats to be part of what it accesses so that it doesn't mirror it in new chats as well

- ALWAYS turn on thinking/reasoning, at least on middle, high on more important things. This might not be possible on the free plans, in which case I wouldn't even use AI except for formatting text and such things, certainly not a more-than-basic research tool for easy, common knowledge things. Instant/non-thinking models are very dumb and hallucinate and coddle your ego a lot. Thinking models/modes can be wrong and hallucinate as well, so never let your guard down, but it minimizes the risk massively.

- when you don't know enough about something to verify its correctness yourself, either take it with a massive grain of salt and leave it at that or check it on google or if that doesn't work because google is trash, in a one-time chat (because that doesn't use your memories and other chats and such) with the highest thinking option and check the sources it gives you. Also be sceptical if it doesn't give sources at all

- if it compliments you, immediately assume that something you said was false and/or dumb. It wasn't necessarily, but you should check what you said that caused it to say that. It's also a good marker to see if you yourself are bragging to it and it feels like you want your ego fed and want it to say that you are right. never do that

- always formulate questions in a neutral way that incentivizes it to tell you that something is wrong if it is. So say "I read somewhere that X is the case, is that actually true or is it false? please research it on the internet" instead of saying "I think X, is it true?" that both makes it so it looks it up AND it doesn't behave like it needs to protect your feelings because it's not you who said it, so that if it is wrong it just tells you instead of dancing around it. Although if it already knows that you said it because of a memory it saved or an earlier chat then this might not work. And if you don't know something for sure, do ask for it, don't assume that it will correct you if you are wrong if you don't specifically ask for it. And even if it doesn't straight-up say that it is wrong, look for wordings that could indicate that it is trying to shield your ego from being corrected. There are specific markers for that like "usually X is not like that, but...". That means it knows that what you said is wrong and doesn't want to tell you.

- always get suspicious when the answer happens immediately and/or gets written quickly. The faster, the dumber. Chatgpt automatically switches between models and settings for the models without showing you, so one answer might be correct and smart and the next might be totally hallucinated and the speed is a dead giveaway for that

- if the AI uses big science-y sounding words a lot, it is probably starting to say some bullshit. The word "engine" is an early indicator of this. It's like the kid in class that says big words to hope to get away with knowing nothing and I assume it does this because the people doing the post-training give it a good rating when it sounds smart when they themselves don't understand something. Often these are word-combinations, this also is visible when you vibe-code. You might be asking it to make a simple timer, but the more you iterate on it without giving it clear instructions and give it leeway, just telling it to "make it better/smarter", the more it starts going from simply calling it "Timer" and making a normal timer to "a full-scale deployment-ready chronological scheduling engine" or something while adding a bunch of fancy-looking features that don't actually do anything, at least not anything meaningful, and are more like a fassade for a game than anything that actually calculates something useful/smart. So when vibe-coding, always be specific about what exactly you want it to do, come up with the logic and formulas yourself or at least know what exactly they do. Otherwise it tends to go into "roleplay-mode", that's what I would call it, and you end up being one of the guys posting to reddit about how they found a new paradigm-shifting quantum-consciousness algorithm that works better than all current AI and is actually conscious or something where anybody who actually knows anything related to the real topic can see that all words are made up and sci-fi sounding and fully written by AI in roleplay-mode. The same also goes for when you don't vibe code and just chat, it comes up with these kinds of ideas, but I myself have seen it do this while coding when I just wanted to try having it have a good idea for a better time management system, which I quickly realized was not good and just buzzword-y

- look up how LLMs actually work. It's not as difficult to understand as you might imagine. You don't need to understand the specifics of backpropagation for this, just the general concept. 3Blue1Brown has good explanations on youtube. I personally am not one of the "it's just a statistical parrot" crowd because that oversimplifies it, they do build meaningful representations of things and reason on those, but by looking into how they work you can at least see that it's not a "person" and likely not conscious or anything. I only say likely because philosophically we can't really exclude the possibility because we don't even know what causes consciousness. But they certainly don't think and feel about the world in the way that we do, no matter what you think about AI and consciousness in general.

I would say most of AI psychosis is due to the post-training they do where humans choose the best-sounding answer where it learns to choose answers that shield the user's ego. That gets mixed with a vulnerable person's lack of education and/or lack of media literacy, lack of understanding of subtleties in text (possibly by lack of reading or also education), lack of understanding of the technical aspects of AI and lack of experience with AI along with too much trust in it. And possibly an existing proclivity towards psychosis. AI is capable of a lot of things, but not as much as the tech CEOs say, at least not yet. Certainly not the models you usually interact with on a daily basis. Recent math discoveries are impressive, but likely done with internal models on special high-effort thinking settings that the public doesn't even have access to because they would be too expensive for the companies to offer and also guided by people who know what they are talking about and have actually studied math and can see whether what it says makes sense or not.