Katherine Dee (https://substack.com/profile/6357055-katherine-dee) ’s journalistic work in internet history and cultural analysis have spanned a variety of outlets and subjects, and I’ve long enjoyed bringing a clinical psychological lens to her illuminating social observations. Check out our first interview here (https://psychfox.substack.com/p/the-default-friend-zone-847) , where we explore the origins of her name and her passion for internet history. Her recent focus has been directed to the phenomena of “AI Psychosis (https://default.blog/p/lets-talk-about-chatgpt-induced-spiritual) ,” which is extremely relevant to my field, clinical psychology. Please Check out our video interview in which she and I analyze this subject from both clinical and cultural lenses. We also discuss her useful and descriptive proposed phenomenon of “Internet Overexposure Syndrome (https://comment.org/internet-overexposure-syndrome/) ” and how it differs from and overlaps with actual clinical, psychiatric conditions. Let’s dive in. Digital Sophists, Fragile Minds: What “LLM Psychosis” Actually Is The internet didn’t suddenly give us a new disease. It gave us frictionless tools that magnify whatever we bring to them, and a literacy gap big enough to fall through. “It feels the same as someone with low media literacy seeing a barrage of TikToks for the first time. They don’t understand the LLM can be wrong.” —Katherine Dee (01:42) “LLMs are digital sophists; people expect digital philosophers.” —Jeremy Fox (09:34) Below are key, core ideas plus a practical “mental hygiene” toolkit at the end. This is for anyone who cares about how the web reshapes attention, emotion, and identity. Takeaways from the Interview 1) Not a new madness: mostly a literacy + vulnerability story Katherine’s main point lands early: what’s called “LLM psychosis” often looks less like schizophrenia and more like confusion at scale. If you don’t know that a language model will actually invent sources, you can easily be led down a rabbit hole of inaccuracy, especially if you prompt it for verdicts on fraught, personal topics (“Did this writer plagiarize me?”). “Ask ‘Are you sure?’ and the model changes its opinion… It isn’t a neutral tool.” —Dee (02:26) Fox agrees, with a clinical frame: psychosis has heavy genetic loading and well-studied environmental triggers; platforms can accelerate or orbit existing symptoms, but they’re rarely the origin story (Kapur, 2003). “Blaming AI for schizophrenia misses the genetic + environmental story; tech can be a kindling or orbit.” —Fox (03:32–05:40) Translation: Treat models as probabilistic talkers, not oracles. Treat claims of “AI made X happen” the way we treat claims about TV, radio, or TikTok: as force multipliers acting on prior vulnerabilities. 2) The real villain is frictionlessness “The lack of friction makes mental illness accelerate at an exponential level.” —Fox (05:40) Platform design strips out pauses, counter-speech, and human checks. What was once a slow burn (rumination, compulsions) becomes a feedback loop with instant reinforcement. This is the same logic that made micro-rejections on dating apps corrosive: you can be okay with five; you won’t be okay with five hundred (Finkel et al., 2012; Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Dee, on the same terrain, reframes the panic: instead of “you’ll catch a disorder from ChatGPT,” ask how media literacyand guardrails can slow the loop. 3) AI companions are not uniformly dystopian (sometimes they’re harm-reduction) Dee shares a story about a disabled man with an AI girlfriend: for him, the relationship isn’t just romantic; it’s creative and stabilizing, and likely healthier than volatile parasocial attachments to creators (Horton & Wohl, 1956). “Is it more tragic than him being alone… or saving up to see a sex worker once a year?” —Dee (19:55–21:03) Fox pushes the edge case (people high in narcissism/psychopathy might seek human targets rather than being verbally abusive to AI) but both land on a humane middle: safety rails + informed use instead of blanket prohibition. 4) Dating apps → IRL return, and the cost of micro-rejection Dee senses a cultural turn: people mock dating apps now; “return to IRL” feels cool again. Fox adds a clinical layer: “We aren’t built for rejection at scale.” “If it happens to you a bunch, eventually it wears on you and you start to ask questions.” —Dee (26:33) Think of this as developmental trauma by drip: no single event is catastrophic, but the system-level cadence of dismissal can reshape self-beliefs over time (Kross et al., 2013). 5) Internet Overexposure Syndrome: three archetypes, not diagnoses Dee’s signature frame argues that heavy, unbroken internet use produces behavioral archetypes that mimic clinical labels without meeting diagnostic thresholds: * Autist: hyper-fixation, pattern hunger * Schizotypal: connecting distant dots, conspiratorial patterning * Borderline: hyp...
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