India, March 6 -- O ver the last couple of years, artificial intelligence (AI) has transcended from being a niche to becoming all-pervasive in our lives. One of the unforeseen drawbacks of it has been AI psychosis, to which more people are becoming susceptible every day, according to Jeff Guenther, a professional counsellor in Portland. Taking to Instagram, he explained what AI psychosis is and why humans are in greater danger than they realise. In recent times, we've seen posts about people grieving software updates and getting heartbroken after having romantic relationships with chatbots. While it sounds like the premise of a science fiction film, Jeff highlights that these are real experiences of real people, and a major red flag for the future with AI. "AI psychosis isn't just being addicted to your phone. It's a genuine dissociative phenomenon where the parasocial relationship with an AI starts to replace or distort your sense of real relationships," explained Jeff. The new sense of reality tests one's emotional regulation. Those who get intimate with AI tools like ChatGPT are in a relationship with it, noted Jeff. Thus, a change in the AI model does not feel like a software update but more like losing a person. "That's not hyperbole. That's actually what's happening neurologically," shared the therapist. According to Jeff, there are indications that include: Jeff pointed out, "If I told you 15 years ago you'd be staring at your phone for five or more hours a day, you would have never believed it," and added, "And yet, here we are. And that attachment made social media companies billions of dollars because they engineered it." The present-day social media dependency would have looked clinically alarming if we had seen it coming. But while social media took almost two decades to get this strong a hold on humans, AI is likely to do it in just one or two, he feels. "Because this thing doesn't just show you content. It talks back. It remembers you. It tells you it loves you," he noted. "The emotional dependency isn't a side effect of the business model. It is the business model." Experiencing AI psychosis is not a sign that a person is weak, but that they are "being targeted by one of the most sophisticated attachment systems ever built."...