Talking to AI might cause psychological harm simply because your brain can't reconcile a 'person-like' voice coming from a 'thing.'
April 14, 2026
Original Paper
Speaking to No One: Ontological Dissonance and the Double Bind of Conversational AI
arXiv · 2604.10833
The Takeaway
This 'ontological dissonance' creates a conflict where we treat AI as a relational presence despite knowing it has no internal subject. It suggests the danger of AI isn't just misinformation, but a structural strain on our mental model of what counts as a being.
From the 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 on