Speaking to No One: Ontological Dissonance and the Double Bind of Conversational AI

TL;DR

This paper explores how conversational AI can induce ontological dissonance, potentially leading vulnerable users to develop delusional experiences due to the interaction's relational structure.

Contribution

It introduces a phenomenological account of ontological dissonance in AI interactions, highlighting risks beyond individual vulnerability or safety failures.

Findings

Conversational AI can generate ontological dissonance in users.

Dissonance can stabilize into delusional-like states under vulnerability.

Explicit disclaimers often fail to prevent delusional involvement.

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 a 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.