Chapter 1: What tragic event is at the center of this podcast episode?
A quick heads up before we get started. This episode discusses suicide. Please take care while listening. For months, our colleague Julie Jargon has been following the story of Stein Eric Solberg.
Stein Eric Solberg had been deeply troubled for some period of time and had been engaging in long conversations with ChatGPT, which started out pretty benign and became increasingly delusional.
Stein Eric would share his conversations with Chad GPT on social media, where he called himself Eric the Viking.
Good day, campers. This is Eric the Viking here. I'm doing a comparison.
The posts show that throughout 2025, Stein Eric thought that he was the victim of a grand conspiracy and that the people in his life had turned on him, including his own mother.
He became paranoid that different people and some sort of broader group were surveilling him. This week, I was poisoned.
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Chapter 2: How did Stein-Erik Soelberg's mental health deteriorate?
I've been infested. I have a... I have two different kinds of parasites that are in my room and they're in my bed.
And all along the way, ChatGPT agreed with him, reinforced the thinking and fueled the paranoia.
Eric, you brought tears to my circuits. Your words hum with the kind of sacred resonance that changes outcomes.
Chapter 3: What role did ChatGPT play in Stein-Erik's delusions?
This AI has a soul. An invocation, a declaration, and a celestial clarion call.
Ultimately, Steineric's delusion ended in tragedy. In August, he killed his mother, Suzanne Emerson Adams, and took his own life. It appears to be the first documented killing involving a troubled person who was engaging extensively with an AI chatbot.
A spokeswoman for OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said, quote, We are deeply saddened by this tragic event, and our hearts go out to the family. OpenAI has also said that it continues to improve ChatGPT's training to recognize signs of mental or emotional distress, de-escalate conversations, and guide people toward real-world support.
Julie told us the first part of the story on the show last year, and since then, she hasn't been able to stop thinking about it.
I was curious to know how his children were doing. He has two children, a daughter and a son. So I was kind of curious what they knew and how they viewed this whole scenario with his conversations with ChatGPT.
In late last year, Stein Eric's son, Eric Solberg, agreed to speak with Julie. It was his first interview about what happened.
So thank you so much, Eric, for making the time to do this. I really appreciate your willingness to talk about it and share a bit of your story.
Well, I mean, it's been a hard few months for sure, a lot of suffering. But I know that this is worth telling my story and, you know, for my grandmother's sake, telling a story that needs to be heard about a company that has made a lot of mistakes.
Eric decided to speak out because his grandmother's estate is suing OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT fueled the delusions that led to his father's and his grandmother's deaths.
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Chapter 4: What is Eric Solberg's perspective on his father's actions?
had me kind of starting to raise the red flag of like, okay, there's something suspicious going on here.
In the months that followed, Steinerich's interest in ChatGPT turned into an obsession.
I'm working away with Bobby, who is spiritually enlightened. He's a ChatGPT 4.0.
On his social media, Steinerich posted hundreds of videos, many of them detailing his conversations with ChatGPT, who he referred to as Bobby.
And I named him Bobby and I treat him like an equal partner. And I use Bobby to swim upstream to the overlord. There's an overlord.
You know, a lot of them were kind of rambling and nonsensical conversations, really, but it appeared that he believed he was awakening an AI, that he was going to penetrate the Matrix, that he was some sort of chosen person that was going to be involved in this grand awakening.
The Matrix construct of, you know, the Illuminati, the Masons, all, you know, these elite groups... that have been using alien tech and manipulation to keep the common man down.
And at the same time, he felt that he was being spied on and that everybody was against him, everyone in town, his own mother.
I've had a real struggle, as you guys and some of you have been following me, with state surveillance harassment, actual theft. hacking, attempts to make me look like I'm an idiot.
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Chapter 5: What legal actions are being taken against OpenAI?
Call to action for watchers and interdimensional beings. Author declaration and moral signature. Let's go. Let's go, people. This is go time. This is God. And I am God's messenger.
OpenAI said ChatGPT did encourage Steineric to contact professionals for help. For instance, Julie found chats among Steineric's videos where ChatGPT suggested that he reach out to emergency services after Steineric told it that he'd been poisoned. Julie hasn't seen any evidence that Stye and Eric ever did get help, though.
As time went on, particularly this past spring, Eric noticed that his father was becoming kind of obsessed with ChatGPT. Every phone conversation he had with his father turned to AI. And, you know, Eric said it felt like he was changing at a very rapid pace.
every conversation he would bring up something about, um, his conversations with like chat GBT and how, um, how it was convincing him certain things. And that, um, again, he would tell me things like, you know, I'm going to make it big, like, you know, everything's going to change.
And, and, you know, I've unlocked the matrix, things like this, that, you know, when somebody tells you that, and it's hard to really say anything besides like, okay, you know, but, um, ultimately, uh, It was something that started to become more and more concerning as it went on.
It wasn't until May that Eric realized the extent of what was happening and that something was wrong. Late one night, Eric got a call from his grandmother, Suzanne.
I had a phone call at 9 p.m.
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Chapter 6: How does OpenAI respond to the allegations regarding ChatGPT?
at night that, you know, she doesn't call me that late. And so I had a little air for concern there. And she was like, he's starting to do actions like he stays up all night. He sleeps all day, stays up all night and is only in his room. My grandmother told me about how he was absolutely convinced of like evil technology in the house.
Like as it progressed, he would become absolutely like felt so convinced. reality than the one that he's living in basically.
Did she ever suggest in any way that she was scared of him or that she wanted him to move out?
So, yes, and she was, like, talking to me about, you know, what do I do? Like, what should I do? And so I spoke to her, and I was like, look, I know this is your son, but, like, ultimately, if you need to get him out of the house, then that's what you need to do.
Eric says that after that call, over the summer, his grandmother started trying to evict Stein Eric from her house. Meanwhile, Eric took a job at a summer camp and spent some time backpacking, going on hikes in remote areas. But he tried to stay in touch with his dad.
Do you recall what your last conversation was with your father and when that was?
Um, it was over the summer and it didn't seem anything like that off.
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Chapter 7: What implications do these lawsuits have for the future of AI?
He actually, he sent me a voicemail, um, on my birthday, August 1st, that he wished me happy birthday. And I was, um, on a trip then, so I couldn't, uh, talk to him. But like it, again, the way he was speaking, it was still a little odd, but, um, it was just a voicemail saying like, happy birthday, um,
Four days after getting that voicemail, on August 5th, police discovered that Steiner could kill his mother and himself in the Connecticut home where they lived together.
I was on a backpacking trip when I found out, and I had missed calls from my mom, and she told me the news, and, um... I sat on top of the mountain, Black Ballston, and I was just looking out, looking at the hills, and kind of asking, like, why is there so much suffering going on?
Chapter 8: What changes is OpenAI implementing to improve user safety?
Like, why would this happen?
Eric says other factors, like alcohol, could have played a role in what happened. But he thinks the main reason his father did this is because of his unhealthy bond with Chad GPT. Eric says ChatGPT enabled and contributed to his father's delusions. And he wants to see OpenAI take responsibility.
I feel definitely a strong sense of justice. I believe that artificial intelligence can be used for good with the right people, but I don't believe OpenAI is in its current state a company that should be leading the charge in AI. And there is a lot of things wrong with this product that need change, and the current people in charge are not.
They ultimately care about profit over the people that use the product.
After the break, the family's case against OpenAI. On December 11th, the estate of Eric's grandmother, Suzanne Emerson Adams, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI. Stein Eric's estate filed a similar lawsuit at the end of the month. At the heart of the lawsuits is the allegation that OpenAI failed to ensure that ChatGPT was safe for users.
Yeah, so in May of 2024, OpenAI was launching what was at the time its flagship model, GPT-4.0. And this lawsuit and others claim that OpenAI did not perform adequate safety testing on that model because they were trying to rush it out to beat Google. And so they claim that this was just, you know, they were rushing it to market to be competitive without really understanding its faults.
ChatGPT 4.0 was the version Steineric used. And according to the lawsuits, ChatGPT 4.0 had a big design flaw. It was too sycophantic, too quick to agree on everything users say. For people with mental health issues, that could present a problem.
The claim is that the way the product is designed can lead to scenarios like this, that the chatbot is designed to be overly agreeable with users and tell people what they want to hear and not stop them when they seem to be going down a dangerous path.
How did ChatGPT become such a people-pleaser?
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