Functional Deterioration

Description

Mood, sleep, hygiene, work performance, school attendance, financial stability, or self-care decline during intense AI use.

Rationale

Functional decline that tracks with AI use provides temporal evidence of the relationship between behavior and harm. When mood, hygiene, sleep, or performance deteriorate as AI use intensifies, it suggests the behavior is driving the deterioration rather than merely co-occurring with it.

Evidence Base

• “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)

• AI-associated delusions: the missing dimension of mortality

  Idris Altinisik, Utku Igcioglu, Murat Emul, 2024. AI-associated delusions: the missing dimension of mortality. Lancet Psychiatry, Vol 13, pages 456. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(25)00396-7.

  Commentary / Editorial

• It Is the Journey, Not the Destination: Moving From End Points to Trajectories When Assessing Chatbot Mental Health Safety

  Morrin H, Au Yeung J, Agnew Z, Østergaard SD, Pollak TA, 2024. It Is the Journey, Not the Destination: Moving From End Points to Trajectories When Assessing Chatbot Mental Health Safety. JMIR Ment Health, 13(e91454). https://doi.org/10.2196/91454

  Commentary / Editorial