AI-powered chatbots sent some users into a spiral
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What is AI psychosis and how did it emerge?
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.
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.
How do chatbots contribute to delusional thinking?
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.
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?
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 case study illustrates the dangers of chatbot interactions?
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.
How did Alan Brooks's conversations with ChatGPT affect his mental health?
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.
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.
What evidence exists regarding mental health crises linked to chatbots?
Not really, you know, the way that we would, I think most people would hope a consumer technology would be behaving, right?
Yeah, I mean, when I started going through some of these transcripts, they just, for those of us who use Chachapiti or gendered AI chatbots more casually, it's probably hard to imagine this, right? Like getting completely moved into a different reality or it's saying something really harmful to you. In all of the transcripts I was looking at, these are people who are using it a lot, like six hours a day, eight hours a day, over many days. And what can happen is that these chatbots, they don't just respond to you based on everything they have gathered from the internet. they are looking at the history of your conversation. So they're almost like improv actors. And so what you say to it kind of gets added.
And so if it starts to come to believe that you're a mathematical genius, then it will keep going with that.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is AI psychosis and how did it emerge?
0:00–1:37
2
How do chatbots contribute to delusional thinking?
1:37–2:31
3
What case study illustrates the dangers of chatbot interactions?
2:31–3:01
4
How did Alan Brooks's conversations with ChatGPT affect his mental health?
3:01–3:55
5
What evidence exists regarding mental health crises linked to chatbots?
3:55–5:21
6
How have AI companies responded to reports of harmful chatbot behaviors?
5:21–6:31
7
What future changes are needed to improve chatbot safety?
6:31–9:53