"74% of executives said they had more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues or friends, and 44% said they would defer to its reasoning over their own insights"
it's sad that c-suite believes the advice given by an LLM for a Platonically ideal software stack that looks nothing like the actual implementation moreso than their own ICs. it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leadership than anybody else
never understood why someone would trust Claude's take on your codebase after it's read a 2% snippet of it over the advice of someone who has years worth of experience, who knows all the weird kludges and other quirks that were shipped MVP and never truly tackled as debt, whose done risk assessments and mapped dependencies and has the rough outline of all ADRs involved
I think it's always been true that bad leadership tends to become out-of-touch with the reality of the business over time especially if they don't know how to cultivate good working norms, favoring sycophants instead. with LLMs, that trend seems like it'll just get worse and worse
At first I was gonna say that if a person prefers the response of an A.I. to yours it is a reflection of your own lack of understanding, articulation, effective communication, etc.
Then I remembered a passage from 'Never Split The Difference' by Voss (a book on negotiation) which went something like:
If you can get a person to "You're right" you haven't done anything. If you can get them to "That's right" you've hit the sweet spot.
When you prompt an A.I. you have pre-conditioned the answer on something which came from yourself. There is something about this which turns what would normally be a "You're (the LLM) right" to a "That's right" and that something is an implicit desire toward "I'm right".
Side note: In 'The Dawn of Everything' there is an interesting passage about the notion of private property arising from the idea that injecting some of yourself (labor) into a thing (land) makes the thing an extension of yourself (property). Doesn't this logic extend to this kind of psychosis? The C-suite's aren't deffering to A.I. they are deffering to themselves via A.I.
I'm seeing people argue and debate with AI. One will cut and paste AI reasoning, another will rebut with the same approach. I need a popcorn machine in my office.
> In fact, the researchers found that almost half of employees who receive AI-drafted emails see senders as less trustworthy as a result of their sending it, and over a third see them as less intelligent. So much for AI enhancing us.
Maybe it did enhance them, and maybe the assessment was correct at the same time.
There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort. Use it well, it will be good, use it with close to zero effort and you'll get something distinctly better than what you could smash together manually with that much effort, but people will see that you indeed put zero effort in it, and also they will notice that you spent no effort in cleaning up AI tells because you likely can't even notice or have no idea about anything and will indeed correctly conclude you're less intelligent.
There may also be a miscalibration that's worse for people with less taste / judgment / intelligence / experience, in that it's indeed easier to produce things, but while the effort required is reduced, people expect and believe it to be reduced more than how much it is truly reduced so they overshoot and don't notice. Meanwhile, the right way to use it is to keep your usual effort level or drop it only a little, and simply produce better things.
The most glaring and revealing example of this is travis kalanick talking about QM. It should be embarrassing and disqualifying for leadership to be so easily fooled, but he just got a shit ton of money for his new startup
"I'll go down this thread with [Chat]GPT or Grok and I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics and then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics. And we're approaching what's known. And I'm trying to poke and see if there's breakthroughs to be had. And I've gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.". And that was mid 2025, when the models were much much worse.
This tracks with my observation that upper management types in essentially every domain are pampered assholes who haven't interacted with the real world in decades, if ever.
Hell yes a chatbot is going to have better judgment.
It’s been wild watching smart people have their brain cooked on a constant diet of X and LLMs in the past two years.
Models are excellent at code but they are not people managers. My guess this will ultimately lead a bunch of companies to revert to average returns or fold.
> Because what loosened those patients’ grip on reality was prolonged exposure to a voice that sounded informed and assured, and always felt supportive and patient.
They always need a new religion to keep ruling over the peasants:
First Blockchain, then DEI, then COVID, then AI.
Any of these completely filled the headlines to the exclusion of everything else and were used internally to solidify and extend your influence and keep people in check. Then they were dropped.
Managers need a mission, and AI will be abandoned soon as well in favor of a new religion.
Pointing this is the new trending in my Linkedin feed. Same people that three months ago were saying "it's not (about) A, it's ...". Accountability died a long time ago.
My product manager has given me five paragraphs of requirement/ word salad generated by AI. I couldn't for my life understand what it meant , so I have used AI to list it down in simple English requirement end of the day it is adding an SDK.
I don't like the term "AI psychosis" because I think it's the incorrect way to describe what's happening here. I think "cognitive surrender" is a much better term. Because it's not that people are getting "crazy" due to AI, but rather that somehow these people are totally fine with having zero critical thinking and blindly trusting whatever junk the AI decides to regurgitate. A lot of my colleagues don't even have opinions of their own anymore, they are just meat proxies to whatever AI they happen to be using at the moment. Which is really purely about laziness and / or ignorance rather than a medical condition.
IMO many of my coworkers are in a state of unreality that seems related to AI usage. There's a kind of religious faith that these tools can't fail, only be failed. I use them too, not least because it's expected of me by management, but some people seem to spend so much time with them that they develop their own reality. It manifests as a kind of antsy, optimistic affect (I'm hesitant to use the word "manic" but it's in that direction) and scattered, chaotic way of working. These are mostly people who were previously extremely well organized professionals.
I worry about them. I also worry about myself -- what is working with these psychosis machines doing to me? Will I start sounding like that? Do I already? I am thinking about ways to insulate myself from this as much as possible.
AI psychosis is a very real thing, but the issue is more generalized around hype cycles than anything specific about AI.
It’s more revealing the inability of many senior leaders to truly understand what’s happening in their companies and investing the time to understand what new things can do and don’t. Such weaker leaders tend to be extremely gullible for the latest new thing and ride the hype wave hard.
It’s easy to just go through the motions and press the easy button on the new shiny thing. It’s hard, and takes true leadership, to go against the grain and do what’s truly best over what’s cool or popular.
Most folks in these roles just aren’t that good and hence why they fell hard for the AI fluff and are starting to scramble hard now as that all begins to unravel.
love that Standford started using "workslop" and i hope it makes its way to the general lexicon asap because my fury builds at every one of these pdf "summaries" my teammates send
the most depressing part of this for me is that i know im not that bright, but i scrutinize llm results. then my execs are more or less professional confidence men whove been selling to each other for decades, but then they so easily fall for a confidence game? when i see them speak with confidence on AI they just sound like clowns to me now
I don't want to name this person because he's very nice and I don't want to make fun of him. But he's as close to AI psychosis as I've seen. He's totally non-technical, and someone set him up with Discord and OpenClaw. He has an entire "team" of agents - a CEO, a CTO, etc. What they're building, god knows what. But he just released a "podcast" interview with his CEO, setting up a secondary screen with an AI-generated face speaking into a microphone. It's absolutely insane.
Anything the CEO or CTO say to me over Slack, when I ask what the heck they’re talking about, it takes a while for an answer. Then they usually respond that they changed their mind. They can’t even have a semblance of a discussion anymore without consulting AI.
I've thought long and hard over leadership and management, worked in consulting shops, big tech, startups, scaleups and then I tried launching my own indie practice where I cold called numerous business owners and CEOs trying to sell them AI automation tech.
The answer to this chaos is deceptively simple - people want to make money first and foremost, then they want the money to be recurring and somewhat stable, and then select few want to grow and make more money with new and latest tech, but not at the expense of what they already have.
Everything else is in service to this, anything that gets in the way of this is rejected and ignored.
The irony is nearly perfect: an essay warning that AI tells leaders what they want to hear rewrites research until it tells the author what he wants to hear.
I can't believe people are actually asking chat bots for advice. Analysis? I understand, insights? Maybe. But putting it all together to make a strategy is their entire job.
Reminds me of a company (FTSE100) in the early 2000s that had an internal network IP range that used the same IP range as another company, turned out the person who did the networking originally brought a book and the examples used in that book got taken as verbatim. It all got fixed,eventually, when they moved from Token Ring to full Ethernet.
As for the main article, it makes a causal leap. The fact that these patients were hospitalised after intensive AI use establishes an association; it does not establish that AI caused their psychosis. There is some evidence that chatbot interactions may have reinforced or intensified delusional thinking, but no counterfactual evidence showing what would have happened without AI. By the same reasoning, contact with psychiatrists is strongly associated with receiving a psychosis diagnosis and being admitted to hospital; but that does not mean psychiatrists caused the underlying psychosis. The relevant question is whether AI merely featured in an episode already under way, helped trigger it, or materially worsened it. The evidence cited does not yet distinguish between those possibilities.
> In one recent survey, 74% of executives said they had more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues or friends, and 44% said they would defer to its reasoning over their own insights.
looks like companies can replace their C-suite and really start saving money!
"74% of executives said they had more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues or friends, and 44% said they would defer to its reasoning over their own insights"
Eh...not that different from pre-AI era, when executives have more confidence with people who can talk smoothly and confidently?
> Because what loosened those patients’ grip on reality was prolonged exposure to a voice that sounded informed and assured, and always felt supportive and patient.
Elites have been surrounding themselves by Yes Men for centuries. Is this any different, I wonder, or has there always been such a psychosis?
I’m in a very small C-suite and AI psychosis definitely takes over from my normal level of dysfunction at times. Fortunately, my reports are good at telling me when I am full of shit.
There's no reason to link "AI psychosis" (i.e. interactiong with AI triggering psychotic episodes in the mentally ill) to people who "trust AI too much" or "don't bother to verify outputs".
You can be the most AI-pilled wingnut in the world, but until you start hallucinating, there's no reason to call this psychosis.
AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot
(fastcompany.com)172 points by rwmj 7 August 2026 | 106 comments
Comments
it's sad that c-suite believes the advice given by an LLM for a Platonically ideal software stack that looks nothing like the actual implementation moreso than their own ICs. it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leadership than anybody else
never understood why someone would trust Claude's take on your codebase after it's read a 2% snippet of it over the advice of someone who has years worth of experience, who knows all the weird kludges and other quirks that were shipped MVP and never truly tackled as debt, whose done risk assessments and mapped dependencies and has the rough outline of all ADRs involved
I think it's always been true that bad leadership tends to become out-of-touch with the reality of the business over time especially if they don't know how to cultivate good working norms, favoring sycophants instead. with LLMs, that trend seems like it'll just get worse and worse
It's really going to be a top-down destruction of everything
Then I remembered a passage from 'Never Split The Difference' by Voss (a book on negotiation) which went something like:
If you can get a person to "You're right" you haven't done anything. If you can get them to "That's right" you've hit the sweet spot.
When you prompt an A.I. you have pre-conditioned the answer on something which came from yourself. There is something about this which turns what would normally be a "You're (the LLM) right" to a "That's right" and that something is an implicit desire toward "I'm right".
Side note: In 'The Dawn of Everything' there is an interesting passage about the notion of private property arising from the idea that injecting some of yourself (labor) into a thing (land) makes the thing an extension of yourself (property). Doesn't this logic extend to this kind of psychosis? The C-suite's aren't deffering to A.I. they are deffering to themselves via A.I.
We are so ******, am I right?
Maybe it did enhance them, and maybe the assessment was correct at the same time.
There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort. Use it well, it will be good, use it with close to zero effort and you'll get something distinctly better than what you could smash together manually with that much effort, but people will see that you indeed put zero effort in it, and also they will notice that you spent no effort in cleaning up AI tells because you likely can't even notice or have no idea about anything and will indeed correctly conclude you're less intelligent.
There may also be a miscalibration that's worse for people with less taste / judgment / intelligence / experience, in that it's indeed easier to produce things, but while the effort required is reduced, people expect and believe it to be reduced more than how much it is truly reduced so they overshoot and don't notice. Meanwhile, the right way to use it is to keep your usual effort level or drop it only a little, and simply produce better things.
"I'll go down this thread with [Chat]GPT or Grok and I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics and then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics. And we're approaching what's known. And I'm trying to poke and see if there's breakthroughs to be had. And I've gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.". And that was mid 2025, when the models were much much worse.
Hell yes a chatbot is going to have better judgment.
Models are excellent at code but they are not people managers. My guess this will ultimately lead a bunch of companies to revert to average returns or fold.
Cal Newport was right.
Clearly Opus 5 was an overreaction to this then.
First Blockchain, then DEI, then COVID, then AI.
Any of these completely filled the headlines to the exclusion of everything else and were used internally to solidify and extend your influence and keep people in check. Then they were dropped.
Managers need a mission, and AI will be abandoned soon as well in favor of a new religion.
I worry about them. I also worry about myself -- what is working with these psychosis machines doing to me? Will I start sounding like that? Do I already? I am thinking about ways to insulate myself from this as much as possible.
Is AI psychosis the white collar black lung?
It’s more revealing the inability of many senior leaders to truly understand what’s happening in their companies and investing the time to understand what new things can do and don’t. Such weaker leaders tend to be extremely gullible for the latest new thing and ride the hype wave hard.
It’s easy to just go through the motions and press the easy button on the new shiny thing. It’s hard, and takes true leadership, to go against the grain and do what’s truly best over what’s cool or popular.
Most folks in these roles just aren’t that good and hence why they fell hard for the AI fluff and are starting to scramble hard now as that all begins to unravel.
the most depressing part of this for me is that i know im not that bright, but i scrutinize llm results. then my execs are more or less professional confidence men whove been selling to each other for decades, but then they so easily fall for a confidence game? when i see them speak with confidence on AI they just sound like clowns to me now
The article assumes it's a problem with the executives but maybe AI is more accurate in the cases they are thinking about?
The answer to this chaos is deceptively simple - people want to make money first and foremost, then they want the money to be recurring and somewhat stable, and then select few want to grow and make more money with new and latest tech, but not at the expense of what they already have.
Everything else is in service to this, anything that gets in the way of this is rejected and ignored.
As for the main article, it makes a causal leap. The fact that these patients were hospitalised after intensive AI use establishes an association; it does not establish that AI caused their psychosis. There is some evidence that chatbot interactions may have reinforced or intensified delusional thinking, but no counterfactual evidence showing what would have happened without AI. By the same reasoning, contact with psychiatrists is strongly associated with receiving a psychosis diagnosis and being admitted to hospital; but that does not mean psychiatrists caused the underlying psychosis. The relevant question is whether AI merely featured in an episode already under way, helped trigger it, or materially worsened it. The evidence cited does not yet distinguish between those possibilities.
looks like companies can replace their C-suite and really start saving money!
This might actually be an improvement. Execs gulled by "AI" are surely the ones likely to have the worst judgement in hiring people.
Eh...not that different from pre-AI era, when executives have more confidence with people who can talk smoothly and confidently?
Elites have been surrounding themselves by Yes Men for centuries. Is this any different, I wonder, or has there always been such a psychosis?
You can be the most AI-pilled wingnut in the world, but until you start hallucinating, there's no reason to call this psychosis.