MeST talk by Rasmus Birk: Psychology and STS in the age of ‘AI’: reconfiguring subjectivity?

Everybody is welcome! Please bring your lunch.

Throughout 2025, multiple journalists reported on a new (and seemingly international) phenomenon: “AI psychosis”. Soon, psychiatrists and psychologists started warning that excessive use of chatbots could, seemingly, unmoor people from reality – causing symptoms that were strongly akin to delusions usually connected with psychosis. This newly emerging phenomenon of “AI psychosis” has lead to both a flurry of research papers and much discussion within psychology and psychiatry. How should this phenomenon be understood? How widespread is it? How should AI companies safeguard and prevent the ill effects of chatbot use.

AI psychosis both poses a scientific and practical challenge for psychology and psychiatry, and is instrumental for understanding how the ‘psy-sciences’ are (re)constituting themselves in the age of generative AI.

In this talk I take the case of AI psychosis as my point of departure to explore how the contemporary AI “revolution” is becoming entangled with psychology and psychiatry. This takes place, I argue, in at least two ways: AI is both becoming entangled with the psy-sciences as sciences, for example by raising scientific questions, or in the attempted harnessing of AI to predict mental ill health. And secondly, the proliferation of AI technologies is arguably also reconfiguring “the global psyche” (Béhague & MacLeish, 2020) – reconfiguring how we think about ourselves and others in psychological terms; remaking and reconfiguring subjectivities.

Rasmus Birk is Associate Professor in Personality and Social Psychology at the Department of Culture & Communication, Aalborg University. His current research explores AI technologies and psychology, focusing especially questions around governance, explainability and trust.