We really need a better word for the good kind of AI psychosis, the one where someone goes into a fugue state with the latest model and retu…

Ethan Mollick discusses the phenomenon of users entering deeply immersive, flow-like states while intensely interacting with advanced AI models, suggesting the need for better terminology to describe this positive psychological experience. The post implies that people can lose track of time and enter a trance-like state of engagement ("fugue state") during extended AI interactions, returning with valuable insights or creative outputs. Mollick appears to be advocating for recognizing this as a distinct, potentially beneficial state rather than dismissing it as problematic behavior.

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• (This is a big part of what was called emergence in earlier academic work on unexpected LLM ability gains)
• Context, from the time of the o1-preview launch: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/something-new-on-openais-strawberry
• AI keeps getting better but the last time the shape of the jagged frontier changed radically was o1 & the Reasoner A good mental model of th…
• Wrote about this two years ago (and expanded on this in my book): https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/setting-time-on-fire-and-the-temptation
• One thing thing about AI, for better and worse, is that 'everything around me is somebody's life work' is no longer a true assumption going …

Source: Ethan Mollick (X) | 2026-04-24