You know exactly who I’m talking about. The coworker who won’t shut up about ChatGPT. The one who floods your Slack with half-baked AI-generated reports, claiming he’s “10x’d his output” while the rest of the team quietly fixes his broken code.
It’s infuriating. But watch what happens next. Instead of just telling this guy his work is bad, the team starts whispering that he has “AI psychosis.”
Calling your coworker “psychotic” because they generate too much AI slop isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a defense mechanism for your own irrelevance.
Let’s be brutally honest: “AI psychosis” is not a clinical condition. It’s a workplace boundary-policing mechanism. It’s a convenient label invented by people who are threatened by the noise, allowing them to pathologize a peer’s behavior without ever having to define what “meaningful work” actually looks like.
The tension is everywhere right now. The exact same behavior—using AI to generate a massive volume of work—can be celebrated as “hyper-productivity” by management, or pathologized as “delusion” by peers. The deciding factor isn’t the output itself. It’s who is doing it, and who is judging it.
If the junior dev does it, he’s having a psychotic break with reality. If the senior architect does it, she’s “leveraging agentic workflows.”
When the definition of “meaningful work” is vague, mental health labels become the easiest way to silence the competition.
We see this play out in technical fields every day. A software engineer talks nonstop about how AI has changed everything, but there’s no quantifiable output to back up the claim. It’s frustrating. But the response shouldn’t be to armchair-diagnose them with a mental illness. That’s lazy, and it’s toxic.
The ambiguity of “AI psychosis” is the point. By keeping the definition fuzzy, you get to weaponize therapy-speak to discredit a peer without ever having to establish your own standard for value. You don’t have to prove your worth; you just have to prove they’re crazy.
But here is the fear you need to sit with: in any workplace adopting AI, this term can be used against you. Whether you’re the overzealous enthusiast or the skeptical colleague pushing back, the label is a loaded gun. If you’re too loud, you’re psychotic. If you’re too quiet, you’re obsolete.
The next time someone tries to write off a coworker’s AI use as a mental health issue, don’t nod along. Recognize the social move for what it is. Demand actual metrics. Define what “meaningful contribution” means in your team.
If you want to know who is actually contributing, look at the output. If you want to know who is threatened, look at who is playing doctor.
FAQ
Q: Isn't 'AI psychosis' just a joke term for people who are annoyingly obsessed with AI?
A: Maybe it started as a joke, but language shapes reality. Once you label an annoying coworker as 'psychotic,' you're dodging the actual problem: bad management and undefined metrics.
Q: How do I deal with the coworker who talks about AI but produces nothing?
A: Demand metrics. Don't attack their mental state; attack their output. Force the team to define what a 'meaningful contribution' looks like, rather than relying on vague mental health labels.
Q: So the AI-obsessed coworker producing slop is actually the victim here?
A: Not exactly. They are still producing low-quality work. But the person labeling them 'psychotic' is playing an equally dangerous game of weaponizing mental health to win an office argument.