Ailments – Potential AI-Induced Mental & Behavioural Disorders

Generative AI isn’t just changing how we work. It’s may also be affecting how we think, create, collaborate, procrastinate, and occasionally lose the plot.

You may have heard of AI Mania and AI Psychosis. 

Here’s a field guide to more potential AI-induced mental habits, compulsions and behavioural quirks that may be emerging in the age of AI.

None are recognised medical conditions.

Many might feel uncomfortably familiar.

Did we miss any? Suggest one

Written and designed by David McCandless. Additional contributions from Nik Roope, Cal Newport, Hanna Piotrowska

Check out our sister charticle Intermental – on tech-induced habits and compulsions

Some examples of AI induced mental habits & compulsions

AI Psychosis
Total, unquestioned ‘buy in’ to the idea that AI is a must-have super-human replacement for anything human: creativity, cognition, coding, customer-relations, companionship, conversation – and common sense. 

NarcAIssism
Euphoric ego-inflation induced by prolonged interaction with overly agreeable AI chatbots. The sufferer develops an outsized certainty of their creative brilliance, personal insight and strategic acuity.

PolyLLMory
The inability to commit to a single AI model, leading to the insertion of all prompts into Claude, ChatGPT & Gemini simultaneously. 

Though there may be a ‘primary’, relationships with all three models remain technically ‘open’. 

FOFAB
Fear of Falling Behind. Ambient dread and background anxiety over the possibility that everyone else and their hairdresser are using AI more effectively than you.  And of becoming professionally obsolete by Tuesday.

Agentic Burgerflipping
Spending entire workdays supervising AI bots & agents rather than doing any actual skilled work. 

Today’s tasks: 1) evaluating outputs 2) re-prompting after errors and 3) typing “fix it” followed by the return key.

Claudependency
Irrespective of the task or issue – personal, professional, large, small – a <strong>Claudependent</strong> must ‘discuss’ it first with their Anthropic LLM, reporting back their decision with “My AI said…”

UpSkill Sisyphus
Constant efforts to learn different AI models, test new tools, and stay current generates a permanent cognitive churn. Often laundered as “adaptability” but actually an exhausting, perma-treadmill with no destination.

Cognitive Laxity
Atrophy of memory, reasoning and problem-solving muscles due to habitual outsourcing of mental effort to AI. 

Example: all universities graduates from 2025 onwards

AI Burnout
Exhaustion caused by the endless steering, correcting and re-prompting of mediocre AI output. 

Did we miss any? Suggest one