Our experience of the first research in a project incubator: much more than you wanted to know

This project was done as part of the Project Incubator 2026 at Monoid AI Safety Hub. Slava Meriton was our mentor. The project also has a Git Hub repository.We would like to thank @Heramb, and @Commissar Neutrino for proofreading the text and giving feedback. Epistemic status: This is our first attempt to do an AI Safety-related pet project. We started this project because the question seemed interesting to us, and because we thought that at least some of the ideas were worth checking. We think that writing up this experience may be useful both for our future selves and for people who are just starting their own pet projects and might learn from our mistakes. Some of the conclusions we reached may be useful as a starting point, but the work we managed to do did not fully answer the questions we began with. We do not treat this post as a source of final answers.We would really appreciate any advice on what we could have done better, either in the research itself or in the way we describe it in this post.IntroductionThere exists a problem referred to as LLM Psychosis (note: also called Chatbot Psychosis, Chatbot-induced Psychosis, ChatGPT-induced psychosis; some even describe it as more of a cult-like phenomenon[1]). We do not know exactly how widespread it is, although there is an opinion that its scale can be roughly estimated by the level of public “distress” observed during the shutdown of ChatGPT-4o.[2][3]We consider this to be a fairly serious issue: in some respects, it resembles problems such as excessive computer use for entertainment or social media addiction. A distinctive feature here is that the underlying algorithm is entirely different and outwardly imitates a human. In the literature, there are documented cases of “psychosis” following internet communication with real people.[4]Within our info-bubble, this problem is quite visible. One of the authors of this post has recently observed several individuals in their social networks and chats exhibiting such