Megan McCarty Carino

Well, I want to talk a bit more about one of the cases you reported on extensively, that story of Alan Brooks who came to believe he had discovered some sort of mathematical formula unheard of before.

He actually turned over his entire chat history to you guys for analysis.

Can you tell me more about what happened to him and what you saw in the dynamics of this chat?

And Alan Brooks actually had kind of the wherewithal to extricate himself from a situation that he kind of came to see as unhealthy.

But in your recent reporting, you wrote that The Times has uncovered nearly 50 cases of people having mental health crises during conversations with Chad GPT.

Nine were hospitalized.

Three died.

We want to be really cautious about assigning any kind of causation here, but just purely looking at some of the chatbot outputs, the conversations you've seen, I mean, they do appear to be quite disturbing.

Not really, you know, the way that we would, I think most people would hope a consumer technology would be behaving, right?

Do you have any sense of how widespread this phenomenon is?

I know the company OpenAI shared some internal data with you that said something like 0.07% of users showed signs of psychosis.

We'll be right back.

You're listening to Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

We're back with Kashmir Hill, features writer at The New York Times.

How have AI companies in general responded to some of these reports?

So what are you going to be watching on this front in the coming year?

That was Kashmir Hill at The New York Times.

Jesus Alvarado produced this episode.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino, and that's Marketplace Tech.