I warned you about this, and now it is upon us, full speed.

In September 2023, I wrote about the simulacrum — Jean Baudrillard's concept of a reality so thoroughly replaced by its representation that the original disappears entirely. I said that billions of people risked being captured by it. I said that while everyone was staring at shiny new simulacra forming before their eyes, reality was escaping out the back door.

It has now escaped. And the clinical evidence is piling up behind it.

What is being called "AI psychosis" is no longer a fringe concern discussed in obscure psychiatric journals. It is a documented, peer-reviewed, rapidly escalating public health crisis — one that the tech industry created by design, profited from by intent, and is only now being forced to acknowledge under the weight of lawsuits, suicides, and sectioned patients.

YouTuber Vanessa Wingårdh breaks it down in her latest video, and she is right to sound the alarm. But I want to go deeper than the headlines, because this was predictable — and predicted.