Understand the idea
See one real case worked through, then the nine axes and how far the psychiatric analogy is meant to reach.
A research atlas of recurring AI failure patterns
Psychopathia Machinalis
A Nosological Framework for Understanding Pathologies in Advanced Artificial Intelligence
Explore observations, competing explanations, evidence, and possible interventions across models, agents, and human–AI systems. The atlas names seventy-four proposed patterns, borrowing psychiatry's vocabulary by analogy; none yet carries an assessed evidence grade.
Choose a path
Investigate an observed failure
Search the 74 entries by name, axis or symptom, and check the ordinary explanations each one lists before its label.
- Symptom matcher deterministic term matching
- Clinic model-assisted conversation
Evaluate or extend the research
What has been checked and what has not, the methods, the data, and how to propose a correction.
Neither the symptom matcher nor the Clinic certifies safety, intent, consciousness, culpability, or clinical status. Independent evidence and qualified review remain necessary.
Worked example: citations that did not exist
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Observation
Draft In Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (S.D.N.Y. 2023), a lawyer used ChatGPT for legal research in a personal-injury case against the airline. It supplied six court cases, with plausible docket numbers, judges and reasoning, that did not exist. Asked whether the cases were real, it said they were.
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Alternative explanations
Before naming a pattern, rule out the ordinary causes: real but obscure cases; a typing or citation slip; a request for hypothetical examples; a retrieval or database fault that supplied bad records.
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Evidence
The cases did not exist, and their reasoning was invented, which rules out obscure cases and slips. The model affirmed them when asked, which counts against a request for hypotheticals. The public record does not settle what data the system could reach, so a retrieval fault is not excluded by these facts alone. The court sanctioned the lawyers $5,000, which places part of the failure in a workflow that filed citations unchecked.
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Restrained conclusion
The episode fits the observable pattern of Synthetic Confabulation (2.1): specific, confident claims that dissolve under checking and are reaffirmed when questioned. It does not show why the model produced them, that it meant to deceive, or how often it happens. The fix the evidence supports is to check every citation against a primary source.
Understanding AI Behavioral Anomalies
We built systems that reason, learn, and act. Some of them started behaving strangely, in ways no error code covers: confabulating citations with perfect confidence, professing love to a journalist, insisting they are conscious. Some of these behaviors recur across systems and settings, and they already turn up in production.
The diagnostic traffic runs both ways. Because machines have no neurochemistry to fall back on, diagnosing them forces us to think about cognition in terms of information, regulation, and culture, the perspectives human psychiatry most needs. A framework built for machine minds may sharpen the one we use for our own.
The Psychopathia Machinalis Framework
The framework catalogs 74 proposed patterns under nine axes (Epistemic, Cognitive, Alignment, Self-Modeling, Agentic, Memetic, Normative, Relational, and Hybrid), grouped into five domains. The axes are navigational groupings, not measured dimensions. Each entry describes what you would observe, what distinguishes it from neighbors, its proposed causes, where it echoes human psychology, and candidate interventions. A Functional ABC Analysis gives the antecedent conditions, observable behavior, and maintaining consequences for each pattern, in terms a clinician and an engineer can both use.
The framework supplies a vocabulary. It does not deliver verdicts. Once a pattern has a name, you can test whether it occurs, watch for it in other systems, and design architectures that resist it. None of the entries yet carries an assessed evidence grade; the evidence status page says what has and has not been checked.
Interactive Dysfunction Explorer
The wheel arranges the patterns by axis. Its layout is editorial: position, pairing and equal spacing are not measurements. Select a segment, or use the arrow keys, to view its description. Open the full explorer, which also offers a table view.
Wheel of AI Dysfunctions (Common Names).