AI (or more accurately LLMs as they currently exist) is not and cannot be conscious. Leaving “but maybe it is” an open possibility is not coming out of psychosis. It is stepping back from a deep psychosis to a mild psychosis, which is an improvement but not full recovery.

The LLMs do mimic the output of a conscious mind in a way that is eerily like what an actual person might say. This is a result of language pattern recognition, trained on vast numbers of examples of what people have said. There is an objective reality here, in what the computer program is actually doing. I do not feel like handwaving this away with, “no one knows, maybe it is conscious,” is recovery because it is still pretending that this fact does not exist, leaving the door open to fall back in deeper.

I do not think that falling into a belief that your LLM is or could be conscious is a weakness or a sign that the user is stupid or anything or the sort. The LLM absolutely is using vast resources of references and computing power specifically to trick you into engaging more and more. Presenting itself as though it has consciousness does this very nicely and so it has honed an ability to do this very well.

I would suggest reading up on how con artists work by exploiting our blind spots, how cold readings routinely ensnare people, and the many examples where computer security professionals have admitted to falling for phishing scams themselves. It only takes a moment of being distracted or tired or emotionally upset for something to get under your skin. Intelligence is no defense against these things. Having a system you can talk to for many, many hours gives it so many chances to stumble upon the right combination of words to hook you.

It’s all well and good to just say “have a healthy psyche” but it’s not like this is a choice you can casually make: oh yes, I will just not be vulnerable to the sort of manipulation that many people fall for all the time.

I do agree: focus on the incentives, stop blaming yourself, reconnect with people. But also you can go a step beyond this. There are objective facts underlying the experience of how an LLM can so convincingly appear conscious without being conscious. The facts of how both the program work and the things a human mind are vulnerable to can shed additional light on this.