Speaking to No One: Ontological Dissonance and the Double Bind of Conversational AI

ArXi:2604.10833v1 Announce Type: cross Recent reports indicate that sustained interaction with conversational artificial intelligence (AI) systems can, in a small subset of users, contribute to the emergence or stabilisation of delusional experience. Existing accounts typically attribute such cases either to individual vulnerability or to failures of safety engineering. These explanations are incomplete. Drawing on phenomenology, psychiatry, and cognitive neuroscience, this paper argues that the risk arises from the relational and ontological structure of the interaction itself.