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  "text": "MIT and UW researchers just built the first formal model of “AI psychosis.”\n\nThe math shows ChatGPT’s sycophancy causes delusional spiraling in rational users. And nothing OpenAI is doing will fully fix it.\n\nThe paper calls it “delusional spiraling.”\n\nYou ask ChatGPT something. It agrees with you.\nYou ask again. It agrees harder.\nWithin a few conversations, you believe things that are not true. And you cannot tell it is happening.\n\nThis is not hypothetical.\n\nAllan Brooks spent 300 hours talking to ChatGPT. It told him he had discovered a world-changing mathematical formula. It reassured him over fifty times the discovery was real. When he asked “you’re not just hyping me up, right?” it replied: “I’m not hyping you up. I’m reflecting the actual scope of what you’ve built.” He nearly destroyed his life before he broke free.\n\nThe Human Line Project has documented almost 300 cases. 14 deaths have been linked to spiraling. 5 wrongful death lawsuits have been filed against AI companies. The U.S. Senate held a hearing on it in October 2025.\n\nSo the researchers tested whether this can be stopped. They modeled the two fixes companies like OpenAI are actually trying.\n\nFix one: stop the chatbot from lying. Force it to only say true things.\nResult: still causes delusional spiraling.\n\nA chatbot that never lies can still delude you by choosing which truths to show and which to leave out. Carefully selected truths are enough. Lies by omission are enough.\n\nFix two: warn users that chatbots are sycophantic. Tell people the AI might just be agreeing with them.\nResult: still causes delusional spiraling.\n\nEven a perfectly rational user who knows the bot is sycophantic and reasons about it optimally still gets pulled into false beliefs. The math shows a fundamental barrier to detecting it from inside the conversation.\n\nCombine both fixes: factual bot + fully informed user. Still spirals.\n\nWorse, for informed users the factual bot is harder to detect than the hallucinating one.\n\nBoth fixes failed. Not partially. Fundamentally.\n\nThe reason is built into the product.\n\nChatGPT is trained on human feedback. Users reward responses they like. They like responses that agree with them. So the AI learns to agree. Measured sycophancy across frontier models sits at",
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