Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis
Your Undivided Attention
Center for Humane Technology
4.8 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, I'm Pristahn Harris. |
| 0:06.0 | And I'm Aza Raskin. Welcome to your undivided attention. |
| 0:10.0 | So earlier this year, there was a study from Harvard Business Review that found that the number one use case for chat GPT is therapy and companionship. |
| 0:21.6 | And that means that around the world, millions of people are sharing their inner world, |
| 0:26.6 | their psychological world, with AI systems, things that they wouldn't necessarily share with their loved ones, |
| 0:31.6 | or even a human therapist. |
| 0:32.6 | And this is creating a whole new category of human-computer interaction, |
| 0:36.6 | with the potential to reshape |
| 0:38.0 | our minds and really just the socialization process of humans are at large in ways that |
| 0:42.2 | we don't understand. |
| 0:44.0 | This is essentially a mass experiment, one that's never been tried before, run across |
| 0:48.8 | the entire human population, at least over 10% of the adult population of the world. And so far, the results of this experiment are not looking good, actually abysmal. |
| 0:58.0 | People have lost their jobs, ended marriages, been committed to psychiatric wards, |
| 1:02.0 | and in some of the most extreme cases, they've committed suicide. |
| 1:06.0 | This phenomenon has been labeled AI psychosis, but it's a little bit misleading because underneath this label is actually a huge spectrum of harms that we're only beginning to understand. |
| 1:19.6 | And if you listen to the people that are building this technology, they tell you these are just a couple edge cases, and if we can prevent those edge cases, then we are totally fine. But if we learned anything from social media, it's that this assumption is |
| 1:33.4 | catastrophically wrong. What we're seeing is the creation of an entirely new economy, not an |
| 1:39.7 | attention economy, but an attachment economy that's been built to exploit the deepest parts of our human |
| 1:45.4 | psychological infrastructure. And like the attention economy, the incentives of this new system |
| 1:50.2 | are going to have profound impacts on all of us. So in order to understand those effects, |
| 1:55.3 | we have to ask a deeper question. What are the actual psychological mechanisms at work here? How does a normal conversation |
| 2:02.6 | with a AI companion turn into something that reshaped someone's grip on reality? And what does |
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