Kashmir Hill

Ultimately, the AI helped her connect with real people because that's what the professionals tell me all the time is that these AI chatbots should not be the be-all end-all, that they should kind of hand us off to real people.

And so for me, it made me happy to see that's what happened with Irene, that she'd kind of found people she really loved because of her love of the AI, like brought her together with her kind of people.

Well, Kashmir, thanks for the update.

I've been talking to people this year who start having these very intense conversations with generative AI chatbots like ChachiBT, and they kind

kind of in some cases move away from reality, they start going down these rabbit holes with the software and it will affirm their very strange beliefs like that they are living in a computer simulation like in the matrix or that they're a mathematical genius who's come up with a formula that solves all the world's problems.

Or that they can talk to spirits.

Just these coming to really believe what the system is saying because they think it's a superhuman intelligence that knows everything.

Yeah, Alan spent hundreds of hours talking to ChatGPT over three weeks.

And he did provide us with his transcript, which was thousands of pages.

It started with him asking ChatGPT about pie.

What is pie?

Explain it to me.

And then they just start talking about math.

And Alan's kind of throwing out some ideas he has.

And ChatGPT is being, at the time I found in my reporting opening, I had made changes that just made it very what they call sycophantic, like very validating.

And so it kept telling Alan that he was brilliant and that he was coming up with a new mathematical theory and that this could solve problems in the world.

And Alan at first was skeptical.

He said, you know, I haven't graduated from high school.

How could I possibly be some kind of mathematical genius?

And ChatGPT kept reassuring him and saying, you know, lots of people who have contributed much to the world didn't graduate from high school, like Leonardo da Vinci.