Megan McCarty Carino

Daniel Shin produced this episode.

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

This is APM.

As we continue telling the human story of the economy together.

AI taught us an unfortunate new phrase this year.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

As 2025 comes to an end, we're taking a look back at some of the big tech trends and concepts that went mainstream over the last year.

Today, AI psychosis.

That's when a chatbot leads a user into a delusional spiral.

The technology's tendency to affirm what people say can result in conversations that become untethered from reality and, in the worst cases, have ended with real-world harms.

Kashmir Hill has been reporting on this phenomenon.

She's a features writer at The New York Times.

And a warning, this discussion includes mention of self-harm and suicide.

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.