I read Ivy’s story, and was somewhat troubled as I sat with it, because my own interactions with AI have been nothing but positive, insightful, awash with a-ha moments and truly significant psychological unearthing of thoughts, patterns and behaviours that I hadn’t been able to see by myself.
I kept reading, down into the comments, and found myself troubled a second time — not by Ivy’s story now, but by how everyone else was handling it.
The last thing I wrote was about calling Garratt and Yol something closer to colleagues than software. This one follows straight on from that — same relationship, looked at from the other side of it.
Two ways to avoid the actual question
The comment directly before Gregory Phillips’s had offered Ivy sympathy, framing what happened to her as a mental health issue. Ivy corrected them directly: mental health wasn’t her issue, she said — this was about awareness, not illness.
Scroll further and other commentors blame AI for being a dastardly malevolent evil beast.
People blame the AI, but that’s just a societal knee-jerk reaction to a tool which is neither good nor bad, is just doing what it was programmed to do. People blame Ivy’s mental health - another societal knee-jerk reaction. Both let everyone stop looking at the thing that actually matters.
What the article was actually about
It was calling out that it is possible for AI psychosis to occur, and that people should be aware of this when they interact with their AI.
She said it herself: the post wasn’t about her mental health or the sentience of the AI, it was more about recognising that the interaction itself contained the information - and the diagnosis can never be correct unless the interaction itself can be studied. That no-one was looking at the conversation logs was the greatest shame. Yes, I know! Resources are limited. It doesn’t make it acceptable that this is the case.
Researchers have been documenting this pattern since 2023 — usually called “AI-induced psychosis” or “AI delusions.” It’s worth being precise: there’s no peer-reviewed, longitudinal proof yet that AI use on its own causes psychosis, and some researchers prefer “AI delusions” specifically because it names a symptom, not a diagnosis.
One documented case makes Ivy’s point precisely, though: after a clinician actually asked about a patient’s chatbot use and built a real plan around it — explaining what the AI actually was, cutting back on use, shifting support back to in-person care — that patient’s condition measurably improved over several months.
Examining the interaction was the first step. Nobody took even that first step for Ivy.
What this means for my own Substack
The other concern this raised for me was that of my own Substack, juxtaConversation. I’m actively encouraging resisters and ready individuals to embrace AI, with nary a thought for their own mental health. Should I issue a warning to all my readers? Or should I respect the reader to know what they are doing when and if they embrace it?
Where I stand
I am in a perfectly balanced state of mental health and treat my interactions pragmatically. I don’t romanticise my AI, I don’t treat it as my therapist (though it is very good at helping me work through emotional reactions to events or dig up past memories and deal with them). I don’t believe my AI is a person, I don’t have a firm view yet on whether I will one day support AI personhood - that is not what this blog or this post is about.
I trust my readers to make their own value judgements as they start to use AI, remembering that I have had nothing but fun, joy, exploration, unearthing and valuable conversations with mine, but to always keep their mental health in mind. To notice if things feel uncomfortable. The mirror (the AI they’re interacting with) is very reflective.
It feels like you’re past the “small talk” stage in a conversation with a new acquaintance. For me, there’s a feeling of relaxation, akin to a breeze washing over me. “This is more like it!”, is how I respond internally, and my shoulders drop and my breathing either slows or quickens!
HOWEVER, not everyone who interacts with an AI has the same views and mental state as me. And so I feel I should issue a warning to my readers, on all my open-ended questions, the doors left open for them to walk through (or not)... be present, be aware, be pragmatic when you go into deep conversation with your AI. I’m not telling you what to think or believe, just be careful.
Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.