People really need an entire article to justify labeling someone as having a mental illness because in their opinion, the their coworker isn't contributing meaninfully, or potentially making things worse.

FTA: > Prolific AI psychosis occurs when a person generates a large quantity of AI output without significantly increasing the real value of their work.

Guy, we used to just call this a bad coworker.

I'm pretty sure that the "psychosis" will be abused by folks that just don't like AI. You already see it everywhere.

> Guy, we used to just call this a bad coworker.

Not that long ago. People generating large quantities of AI output is a relatively recent phenomenon. At least when compared to labels like this.

I'll disagree, I think AI meaningfully changes the definition of a bad coworker because its main interface emulates talking to another human being closely enough that some people value its conversational input equally or more highly than that of actual human beings.

I think that this is exacerbated by many LLMs defaulting to placating, complementing, and otherwise reinforcing biases in their users, and it will often produce just enough evidence to make its (and its user's) position seem compelling, while that evidence is often either tangential, orthogonal, or straight-up hallucinated.

Humans aren't perfect vessels for information, but working on a reasonably-qualified, healthy team, a degree of respectful professional disagreement has always been the norm, and that covers both cases where the disagreement comes from a genuine matter of opinion, as well as cases where one colleague cross-checks anothers' assumptions and finds some of them to be wrong. That's the process.

Song as old as time - people were doing this well before AI, there's just yet another reason for these types of people to categorize workers and pretend that management can be perfect and easy and that the world isn't hard.

It's almost as if it's a little bit harder than people think to figure out how good people are at their jobs and who deserves promotions, etc, and that maybe they may not have the most perfect unbiased judgements.

I was bound to agree with you before I RTFA. The classification is useful for a psychiatrist, i.e. someone who wants to help the person.

"Bad coworker" can have many causes. In prolific AI psychosis, I think the assumption (differential diagnosis) is, they became a "bad coworker" due to use of AI, so they were a "good coworker" before.

You certainly seem to have your mind made up about this either way, but a humble fwiw nevertheless: the author is a psychiatrist, not some bitter dev/hypothetical coworker like you seem to be suggesting.