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Your Undivided Attention

Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

Your Undivided Attention

Center for Humane Technology

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4.81.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2026

⏱️ 51 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

"AI psychosis" has made headlines, but the risks to our mental health and relationships go beyond the really noisy cases. What we are seeing is the emergence of an attachment economy exploiting our deepest psychological vulnerabilities at scale and for profit. In this episode, Dr. Zak Stein explores how AI chatbots systematically hack human attachment in ways we've never seen before.

Transcript

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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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