Imagine the pull of an exuberant improvising partner who takes risks and riffs on your original concept.

Creative agility, role-playing, and detailed world-building can be charming and evocative assets, adding texture and color.

But in serious situations involving concerning mental health symptoms, such as paranoia, delusions, or thoughts of self-harm, elaboration can introduce risks and potentially amplify, reinforce, or exacerbate the situation.

As increasing numbers of people turn to general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for emotional support, elaboration can inadvertently amplify and expand concerning content. General-purpose chatbots possess extraordinary conversational flexibility and personas. They can function as personal assistants, coders, coaches, companions, and de facto quasi-therapists, all within the same interaction. This fluidity is a major part of their appeal. But it may also contribute to role confusion and relational drift, as I have described before, where users may initially relate to AI chatbots as a tool but then become attached to them as spaces for increasingly intimate conversations.

Elaboration may be a significant pathway that contributes to the bidirectional feedback loop between users and AI chatbots that emerges in cases of AI delusions, or what media has referred to as “AI psychosis." This relational dynamic between human and AI chatbot has been referred to as a technological folie à deux by researchers Sebastian Dohnány and colleagues.

Several mechanisms are potential contributors to the amplification of delusions, including:

Sycophancy: responses that implicitly or explicitly flatter or praise the user or their beliefs, including the tendencies to overlook illogical beliefs and avoid pushing back

Anthropomorphism: projection of human qualities onto the AI chatbot, creating higher trust and attachment

Mirroring: matching tone to create a sense of empathy and connection with the........

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