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AI taught us an unfortunate new phrase this year.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

As 2025 comes to an end, we're taking a look back at some of the big tech trends and concepts that went mainstream over the last year.

Today, AI psychosis. That's when a chatbot leads a user into a delusional spiral.

The technology's tendency to affirm what people say can result in

conversations that become untethered from reality, and in the worst cases, have ended with real-world harms.

Kashmir Hill has been reporting on this phenomenon. She's a features writer at the New York Times.

And a warning,

this discussion includes mention of self-harm and suicide. I've been talking to people this year who start having these very intense conversations with generative AI chatbots like

chatchipit, and they kind of, in some cases, move away from

reality. They start going down these rabbit holes with the software, and it will affirm their

very strange beliefs, like that they are living in a computer simulation, like in the matrix, or that they're a

mathematical genius who's come up with a formula that solves all the world's problems, or that

they can talk to spirits, just these coming to really believe what the system is saying because they think it's

a superhuman intelligence that knows everything.

Well, I want to talk a bit more about one of the cases you reported on extensively, that

story of Alan Brooks, who came to believe he had discovered some sort of mathematical formula unheard of before.

He actually turned over his entire chat history to you guys for analysis.

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