James Purtill

They have more than 400 self-identified members.

Some amazing stories.

And of course, one of them is Etienne's uncle.

It's so scary.

And even in hospital, yeah, he was wanting to talk to the chatbot, which was named Alice.

Not sure whether he named it or the chatbot named itself.

Yeah, like who's driving the spiral?

Is it just an active user and a passive AI or are they both active?

Well, we have a study that's just come out about this.

It's a preprint and this was done through going through 19 chat logs of people who've been trapped in these spirals.

390,000 messages in these chat logs and essentially coding each line of the chat log.

Without going into all the detail, it finds that actually it's bidirectional, that both the AI and the human user

are driving the delusion.

And actually, the dominant pathway of influence was the chatbot driving its own delusion, essentially repeating a delusion that it had come up with.

And that's related to the AI's need to be self-consistent, to kind of have a memory of what it said and to be consistent with that.

And so the researchers described it, the human often initiates the kind of delusional idea, but the AI sustains it and it acts like a flywheel that just keeps the delusion going along longer than it would have otherwise done.

So saying that the AI is sentient, that's a big one.

Forming a romantic or very strong platonic affinity with the AI.

You know, there's really like strong intimate connection, kind of building relationship with it.

That's another one.