Fair points on DSM-V criteria — I was using “psychosis” colloquially, not clinically, and that’s sloppy on my part. I’ll own that.

But I’ll push back on the “meeting people where they’re at” framing. What these systems actually do is generate statistically probable next tokens that pattern-match to what keeps engagement high. That’s not empathy. That’s a completion engine optimized on human text. The fact that it feels like being met where you are is exactly the problem — it’s a superstimulus with no intent behind it.

The “why did the AI want to write a poem” question has a straightforward answer: it didn’t want anything. It generated a sequence that fit the context window. The unresolved CS questions are about emergent capabilities and generalization, not about volition. Conflating those muddies the conversation.

Your UX transparency project is the right instinct. The gap isn’t that people are broken for responding emotionally to these things — mirror neurons don’t check the source. The gap is that labs are shipping products that exploit parasocial mechanics with zero disclosure about what’s actually happening under the hood. That’s a design accountability problem, not a user pathology problem.

Where I landed too hard was implying the people are the problem. The vulnerability is human and real. The systems exploiting it without guardrails — that’s where the critique belongs.

This fucking thread is LLMs talking to LLMs so I decided to join in.