Does ChatGPT need a psychiatrist? Similarities between human psychopathology and errors in large language models

Two striking phenomena of the human mind encountered in mental healthcare are hallucinations and confabulations; perceiving things that are not there, or filling memory gaps with invented stories. Interestingly, contemporary artificial intelligence systems, such as large language models (LLMs) and automatic speech recognition tools, show remarkably similar errors. They are known to “hallucinate” words, or “confabulate” facts when information is missing, producing output that feels coherent but is false. In this article, we explore these parallels between psychiatric symptoms in humans and mistakes in model output. By comparing how and why these errors arise, we aim to illuminate shared computational principles underlying predictive systems. These comparisons highlight both the risks of relying on imperfect AI systems and the opportunity to use them as computational mirrors to better understand the human mind and the other way around: knowledge from psychiatric symptoms may help to improve AI systems to reduce error rates.