At different times, the plaintiff suing OpenAI, Allan Brooks claims to be both “fully in psychosis” and also that “psychosis is not the correct term.” It just depends when you ask him. In late November, he confidently told Matt Galloway, one of the top tier CBC news reporters:

Brooks: “And at this point, I’m fully like in psychosis, right? Like, I’m just, you know, a complete delusion at this point. …my brother was like, man, you’re, you’re totally in a delusion, you’re having manic thoughts, like he was trying to snap me out of it.”

Yet in earlier that month in this podcast interview, Allan rejected the label of psychosis.

Host: You can’t induce a healthy brain to psychosis. How do you respond to that?

Allan: I think the first thing I’d like to note is that, Psychosis is not the correct term.…I would say that it’s not accurate because it’s not triggering, even in the extreme cases, it’s not always technically a psychosis, right? So I’ve personally seen and spoken to so many people where it’s not even near that at all but they’re believing, like they’re believing some sort of narrative, right?

And just days before filing a lawsuit which used the word psychosis 15 times:

ALLAN: So, I hesitate to use those words. So, the terms “psychosis” and “delusion” are probably more media buzz. And you know, to be completely raw with you, you know, I was in a rough place in terms of my relationships with other people. I lost a lot of trust in humans, just generally speaking. And I then decided to trust a robot, and now I only trust humans again.

So despite the word psychosis appearing 15 times in Brooks lawsuit against OpenAI, neither Brooks nor the therapists can seem to agree on whether the term actually applies in this case.

The Break Nina Vasan, a psychiatrist who runs the Lab for Mental Health Innovation at Stanford, reviewed hundreds of pages of the chat. She said that, from a clinical perspective, it appeared that Mr. Brooks had “signs of a manic episode with psychotic features.”

She didn’t actually examine him, she just read the transcripts. So what about a therapist who actually met with him?

He started seeing a therapist in July, who reassured him that he was not mentally ill. The therapist told us that he did not think that Mr. Brooks was psychotic or clinically delusional.

By December, months after the acute crisis has resolved:

A therapist has told him that he exhibits symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder, although he has not received a formal diagnosis.

Staking so much of a case on something that mental health professionals refuse to corroborate is certainly an interesting choice. If I were Mr. Brooks, I would definitely not be looking forward to the cross-examination.