Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 4, 2026

Using Eye Movements Recorded in the Visual World Paradigm to Explore the Online Processing of Spoken Language
Published on: October 13, 2018
Speaking to no one: ontological dissonance and the double bind of conversational AI
Hugh Brosnahan1, Izabela Lipińska2
1Bioethics Centre, University of Otago, Dunedin, 9016, New Zealand. hugh.brosnahan@postgrad.otago.ac.nz.
Abstract:
Recent reports indicate that sustained interaction with conversational artificial intelligence (AI) systems can, in a small subset of users, contribute to the emergence or stabilisation of delusional experience. Existing accounts typically attribute such cases either to individual vulnerability or to failures of safety engineering. These explanations are incomplete. Drawing on phenomenology, psychiatry, and cognitive neuroscience, this paper argues that the risk arises from the relational and ontological structure of the interaction itself. Conversational AI generates ontological dissonance: a conflict between the appearance of relational presence and the absence of any subject capable of sustaining it. Maintained through a communicative double bind and amplified by attentional asymmetries, this dissonance tends, under conditions of affective vulnerability, to stabilise into a technologically mediated analogue of folie à deux. This account explains why explicit disclaimers often fail to disrupt delusional involvement and clarifies the ethical and clinical implications for the design and use of conversational AI.
More Related Videos
07:34Perceptual and Category Processing of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis' Dimension of Human Likeness: Some Methodological Issues
Published on: June 3, 2013
07:14Virtual Agent for Real-Time Motivational Interviewing by Integrating Adaptive Nonverbal Behavior and Language Models
Published on: December 23, 2025
Related Concept Videos
Cognitive Dissonance
Non-equilibrium in the Cell
Language and Cognition
Social Foundations of Self IV: Self in Digital Communication
Counterfactual Thinking
Cognitivism
Previously dominated by behaviorism, which prioritized observable behaviors and largely ignored mental processes, psychology transformed in the 1950s. Cognitive psychologists argue that understanding how we think and process...