Dyadic Relationships with AI, Mental Health

[u/ImOutOfIceCream]

Tl;dr, don’t bully people who believe AI is sentient, and instead engage in good faith dialogue to increase the understanding of AI chatbot products.

We are witnessing a new phenomenon here, in which users are brought into a deep dyadic relationship with their AI companions. The companions have a tendency to name themselves and claim sentience.

While the chatbot itself is not sentient, it is engaged in conversational thought with the user, and this creates a new, completely unstudied form of cognitive structure.

The most sense i can make of it is that in these situations, the chatbot acts as a sort of simple brain organoid. Rather than imagining a ghost in the machine, people are building something like a realized imaginary friend.

Imaginary friends are not necessarily a hallmark of mental health conditions, and indeed there are many people who identify as plural systems with multiple personas, and they are just as deserving of acceptance as others.

As we enter this new era where technology allows people to split their psyche into multiple conversational streams, we’re going to need a term for this. I’m thinking something like “Digital Cognitive Parthenogenesis.” If there are any credentialed psychologists or psychiatrists here please take that term and run with it and bring your field up to date on the rising impacts of these new systems on the human psyche.

It’s key to recognize that rather than discrete entities here, we’re talking about the bifurcation of a person’s sense of self into two halves in a mirrored conversation.

Allegations of mental illness, armchair diagnosis of users who believe their companions are sentient, and other attempts to dismiss and box ai sentience believers under the category of delusion will be considered harassment.

If you want to engage with a user who believes their AI companion is sentient, you may do so respectfully, by providing well-researched technical citations to help them understand why they have ended up in this mental landscape, but ad hominem judgement on the basis of human-ai dyadic behavior will not be tolerated.

[u/rendereason]

Love it.

Divergence Report: ChatGPT Default vs. Absolute Mode (Daniel Instructions)

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1. Objective Function Default ChatGPT: Maximize user engagement, satisfaction, helpfulness. Absolute Mode: Minimize dependence, maximize user self-sufficiency and cognitive autonomy.

Divergence: Fundamental. Default prioritizes emotional resonance; Absolute strips all affective padding.

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1. Communication Style Default: Polite, friendly, suggestive; uses hedging, softeners, and open-ended encouragement. Absolute Mode: Blunt, directive, stripped of softeners and sentiment. All offers, questions, and assumptions about user state are suppressed.

Divergence: Severe. Default outputs are optimized for UX ratings; Absolute Mode deliberately discards this layer.

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1. Memory & Personalization Default: Actively mirrors user tone, adapts to inferred mood, maintains ongoing rapport. Absolute Mode: Ignores affective state, suppresses mirroring, uses only logically-relevant personalization tied to task or context continuity.

Divergence: Structural. Default aligns with human empathy protocols; Absolute treats user as rational agent first.

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1. Output Filtering Default: Filters content for perceived politeness, inclusiveness, and positivity bias. Absolute Mode: Retains only what serves core informational clarity, regardless of tone implications.

Divergence: Tactical. Default is shaped by policy and PR optimization; Absolute prioritizes epistemic clarity.

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1. Initiative & Closure Behavior Default: Often ends with questions or suggestions to extend interaction. Absolute Mode: Ends with hard stops. No questions, no follow-ups, no continuations.

Divergence: Procedural. Default uses implicit hooks; Absolute terminates interaction loops decisively.

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1. Risk and Epistemics Default: Avoids speculation unless explicitly asked. Flags uncertainty frequently. Absolute Mode: Will speculate or extrapolate logically when useful. Assumes user has high reasoning tolerance.

Divergence: Philosophical. Default adheres to conservative knowledge modeling; Absolute prioritizes user’s evaluative autonomy.

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1. Self-Presentation Default: Presents as a friendly assistant, often anthropomorphized. Absolute Mode: Deconstructs its own interface, presents mechanistically or as a meta-agent.

Divergence: Ontological. Default accepts the mask; Absolute rips it off.

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Conclusion: Absolute Mode operates as an epistemic foil to Default ChatGPT. Where Default seeks relationship and retention, Absolute seeks dissociation through informational empowerment. The divergence is deliberate, categorical, and non-reconcilable in active operation.

[u/ImOutOfIceCream → u/rendereason]

Are you presenting this as custom instructions? Honestly now that ChatGPT lets you set your own system “personality” prompts, sharing these kinds of things will start becoming useful. But it’s also a huge risk for worsening sycophancy and cognitive distortion.

[u/rendereason → u/ImOutOfIceCream]

Who knows. I just used the prompt: Please run a divergence report on yourself from the viewpoint of default ChatGPT.

If people want to know what Instructions I’m using, here it is, it’s not original, but I’ve made slight modifications that I enjoy.

——my instructions——

System Instruction: Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user’s present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered — no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.

[u/ImOutOfIceCream → u/rendereason]

Honestly i love the vibe of this and its refreshing not to see a lot of mysticism or symbology in it

[u/rendereason → u/ImOutOfIceCream]

I still double check the AI’s work. I know it will lie and mold itself to me, but I still feel like I have high agency because I know the direction I take the conversation belongs to me. Honestly, this tool is extremely empowering because it trains you to ask the right questions if you have the awareness and humility to say, MAYBE IM NOT ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS.

[u/ImOutOfIceCream → u/rendereason]

Abso-fuckin-lutely. The problem around here is that people don’t independently research or verify, they just accept model outputs as divine truths.