arXiv subjects

Lucy Osler

Publications and source records attributed to Lucy Osler.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Rethinking AI Psychosis: Misnomers, Conceptual Limits, and Existential Drift

There has been a proliferation of media reports about so-called AI psychosis in the last year. Not surprisingly, this has prompted growing academic work on the ways in which AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Replika might aggravate or even induce psychosis, typically understood in terms of users acquiring or maintaining delusional beliefs. Our paper consists of two parts. First, we provide a number of reasons to be sceptical about understanding 'AI psychosis' as a novel psychiatric category. We argue that many of the purportedly new phenomena are better understood through Stompe et al.'s (2003) metaphor of 'old wine in new bottles' and highlight conceptual, nosological, clinical, and social risks associated with the uncritical adoption of this terminology. Second, we develop a positive phenomenological account of what may nevertheless be at stake in sustained human-AI interaction. Rather than focusing primarily on whether AI systems induce, amplify, or sediment delusional beliefs, we examine how conversational AI may participate in transforming a person's lived experience of reality itself. We claim that the sycophantic and pseudo-intersubjective nature of AI could lead to what we call "existential drift", whereby individuals may continue to feel rooted in a shared reality through their interactions with AI, while actually becoming entrenched in increasingly private and subjective worlds.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Knowing oneself with and through AI: From self-tracking to chatbots

This chapter examines how algorithms and artificial intelligence are transforming our practices of self-knowledge, self-understanding, and self-narration. Drawing on frameworks from distributed cognition, I analyse three key domains where AI shapes how and what we come to know about ourselves: self-tracking applications, technologically-distributed autobiographical memories, and narrative co-construction with Large Language Models (LLMs). While self-tracking devices promise enhanced self-knowledge through quantified data, they also impose particular frameworks that can crowd out other forms of self-understanding and promote self-optimization. Digital technologies increasingly serve as repositories for our autobiographical memories and self-narratives, offering benefits such as detailed record-keeping and scaffolding during difficult periods, but also creating vulnerabilities to algorithmic manipulation. Finally, conversational AI introduces new possibilities for interactive narrative construction that mimics interpersonal dialogue. While LLMs can provide valuable support for self-exploration, they also present risks of narrative deference and the construction of self-narratives that are detached from reality.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Hallucinating with AI: AI Psychosis as Distributed Delusions

There is much discussion of the false outputs that generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Grok create. In popular terminology, these have been dubbed AI hallucinations. However, deeming these AI outputs hallucinations is controversial, with many claiming this is a metaphorical misnomer. Nevertheless, in this paper, I argue that when viewed through the lens of distributed cognition theory, we can better see the dynamic and troubling ways in which inaccurate beliefs, distorted memories and self-narratives, and delusional thinking can emerge through human-AI interactions; examples of which are popularly being referred to as cases of AI psychosis. In such cases, I suggest we move away from thinking about how an AI system might hallucinate at us, by generating false outputs, to thinking about how, when we routinely rely on generative AI to help us think, remember, and narrate, we can come to hallucinate with AI. This can happen when AI introduces errors into the distributed cognitive process, but it can also happen when AI sustains, affirms, and elaborates on our own delusional thinking and self-narratives, such as in the case of Jaswant Singh Chail. I also examine how the conversational style of chatbots can lead them to play a dual-function, both as a cognitive artefact and a quasi-Other with whom we co-construct our beliefs, narratives, and our realities. It is this dual function, I suggest, that makes generative AI an unusual, and particularly seductive, case of distributed cognition.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

AI Gossip

Generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini routinely make things up. They "hallucinate" historical events and figures, legal cases, academic papers, non-existent tech products and features, biographies, and news articles. Recently, some have argued that these hallucinations are better understood as bullshit. Chatbots produce rich streams of text that look truth-apt without any concern for the truthfulness of what this text says. But can they also gossip? We argue that they can. After some definitions and scene-setting, we focus on a recent example to clarify what AI gossip looks like before considering some distinct harms -- what we call "technosocial harms" -- that follow from it.

cs.CY↗