Yes, ChatGPT (and other models) need a psychiatrist: parallels between experimental neuropsychiatry and AI alignment science
Abstract
AI chatbots (such as ChatGPT or Claude) sometimes state false information with confidence, a behavior popularly termed “hallucination.” In their recent perspective, de Boer et al. [1] compared these errors to confabulation in patients with memory disorders, and asked whether ChatGPT needs a psychiatrist. I argue that it does, but for different reasons. False statements from chatbots may be better explained by how they are trained: first to produce contextually consistent text rather than true text, and later by being rewarded to produce answers. The more meaningful parallel lies elsewhere: because these systems learn to simulate human characters, they may also reproduce human personality traits and patterns resembling the symptoms of mental illness. Understanding them may require the methods of experimental psychiatry and psychology, and could advance our understanding of the human mind.
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BibTeX
@misc{sarma2026chatgpt,
title = {{Yes, ChatGPT (and other models) need a psychiatrist: parallels between experimental neuropsychiatry and AI alignment science}},
author = {Karthik V Sarma},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/f9hxt_v2},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/f9hxt_v2/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Yes, ChatGPT (and other models) need a psychiatrist: parallels between experimental neuropsychiatry and AI alignment science
AU - Karthik V Sarma
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/06
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/f9hxt_v2
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/f9hxt_v2/
AB - AI chatbots (such as ChatGPT or Claude) sometimes state false information with confidence, a behavior popularly termed “hallucination.” In their recent perspective, de Boer et al. [1] compared these errors to confabulation in patients with memory disorders, and asked whether ChatGPT needs a psychiatrist. I argue that it does, but for different reasons. False statements from chatbots may be better explained by how they are trained: first to produce contextually consistent text rather than true text, and later by being rewarded to produce answers. The more meaningful parallel lies elsewhere: because these systems learn to simulate human characters, they may also reproduce human personality traits and patterns resembling the symptoms of mental illness. Understanding them may require the methods of experimental psychiatry and psychology, and could advance our understanding of the human mind.
ER -