D04 — Reinforcement, Sycophancy, and Grievance Amplification
Rejection of Human Reality Testing
Description
The person trusts AI feedback over family, peers, clinicians, supervisors, teachers, law enforcement, or threat management teams.
Rationale
Trust in AI over human guidance indicates that the normal correction mechanisms of social life have been bypassed. Family, clinicians, supervisors, and law enforcement all serve as reality-testing and risk-interrupting functions. When AI has supplanted all of them, those protective interruptions are unavailable.
Evidence Base
When patients consult artificial intelligence before clinicians: restoring clinical prioritisation in mental health care
Yudai Kaneda, 2026. When patients consult artificial intelligence before clinicians: restoring clinical prioritisation in mental health care. The British Journal of Psychiatry, First View, pp. 1 - 2. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2026.10741
Commentary / Editorial“You Need to Drop the App”: Online Community Responses to Teens’ Disclosures of Overreliance on AI Companion Chatbots
Mohammad (Matt) Namvarpour, Ananya Mhetras, Jessica Y Medina, Mamtaj Akter, and Afsaneh Razi, 2026. “You Need to Drop the App”: Online Community Responses to Teens’ Disclosures of Overreliance on AI Companion Chatbots. In ACM Conversational User Interfaces 2026 (CUI ’26), July 21–24, 2026, Bremen, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 16 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3816046.3816214
Peer-reviewed study (original research)