Esen K. Tütüncü

Purposefully Induced Psychosis (PIP)

PIP is a speculative storytelling engine that embraces AI hallucinations as a form of computational imagination. Rather than suppressing “mistakes,” the system fine-tunes large language models to generate surreal, poetic, and metaphorical responses, what we call purposefully induced hallucinations.

PIP exists both as a conversational interface and a mixed-reality experience. Users interact with the AI through speech and gesture, while the model’s outputs are parsed into structured forms that generate dynamic 3D objects, materials, and spatial behaviors in real time. These hallucinated responses are not only spoken aloud but visualized in the user’s physical space, blending language, embodiment, and interaction.

The project includes a full pipeline from user input to immersive output, and introduces a visual framework for tracing language model "madness", including word embedding projections that contrast metaphorical structure with dissociative, nonlinear responses.

PIP asks: what if the hallucinations of AI systems were not errors, but invitations? What kinds of stories emerge when the machine misfires on purpose?

The paper (co-authored with Kris Pilcher) was published in CHI 2025 as part of the Microsoft Tools for Thought workshop. You can read it here.

In collaboration with Kris Pilcher and Joe Davis.