Vipin Gunda
Author directory2026
AI Psychosis: Does Conversational AI Amplify Delusion-Related Language?
Soorya Ram Shimgekar | Vipin Gunda | Jenny Jiwon Kim | Violeta J. Rodriguez | Hari Sundaram | Koustuv Saha
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Soorya Ram Shimgekar | Vipin Gunda | Jenny Jiwon Kim | Violeta J. Rodriguez | Hari Sundaram | Koustuv Saha
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Conversational AI systems are increasingly used for personal reflection and emotional disclosure, raising concerns about their effects on vulnerable users. Recent anecdotal reports suggest that prolonged interactions with conversational AI may reinforce delusional thinking—a phenomenon sometimes described as AI Psychosis. However, systematic empirical evidence on this phenomenon remains limited. In this work, we examine how delusion-related language evolves during multi-turn interactions with conversational AI. Using Reddit data, we construct simulated users (SimUsers) from users’ longitudinal posting histories and generate extended conversations with three model families (GPT, LLaMA, and Qwen). We develop DelusionScore, a linguistic measure that quantifies the intensity of delusion-related language across conversational turns. We find that SimUsers derived from users with prior delusion-related discourse (Treatment) exhibit progressively increasing DelusionScore trajectories, while those derived from users without such discourse (Control) remain stable or decline. We further find that this amplification varies across themes, with reality skepticism and compulsive reasoning showing the strongest increases. Finally, conditioning AI responses on the current DelusionScore substantially reduces these trajectories. These findings provide empirical evidence that conversational AI interactions can amplify delusion-related language over extended dialogue and underscore the importance of state-aware safety mechanisms to mitigate such risks.