There are some concerning reports coming out of normal everyday people who are losing it when interacting with chat bots.
The new term for the condition is "ChatGPT Psychosis."
From Futurism:
The consequences can be dire. As we heard from spouses, friends, children, and parents looking on in alarm, instances of what's being called ‘ChatGPT psychosis' have led to the breakup of marriages and families, the loss of jobs, and slides into homelessness.
And that's not all. As we've continued reporting, we've heard numerous troubling stories about people's loved ones being involuntarily committed to psychiatric care facilities — or even ending up in jail — after becoming fixated on the bot.
Just check out some of these stories:
[One man] had no prior history of mania, delusion, or psychosis … soon, after engaging the bot in probing philosophical chats, he became engulfed in messianic delusions, proclaiming that he had somehow brought forth a sentient AI, and that with it he had ‘broken' math and physics, embarking on a grandiose mission to save the world. His gentle personality faded as his obsession deepened, and his behavior became so erratic that he was let go from his job. He stopped sleeping and rapidly lost weight.
His wife and friend tried to get him help, but when they found him in the backyard with a length of rope tied around his neck ready to end it all; they called emergency services and the man was involuntarily committed.
How did he get to this point?
That's the real kicker:
He'd turned to ChatGPT about 12 weeks ago for assistance with a permaculture and construction project
He decided to use ChatGPT for work, and in three months the guy was deep, deep in psychosis.
And if it were a one off, you could probably write it off, but it's not.
Here's another account of a man who went psycho after interacting with a Chatbot.
‘I remember being on the floor, crawling towards [my wife] on my hands and knees and begging her to listen to me,' he said.
‘I was out in the backyard, and she saw that my behavior was getting really out there — rambling, talking about mind reading, future-telling, just completely paranoid,' the man told us. ‘I was actively trying to speak backwards through time. If that doesn't make sense, don't worry. It doesn't make sense to me either. But I remember trying to learn how to speak to this police officer backwards through time.'
In the end, this guy's wife also had to call emergency services, and this time the guy seemed to realize he wasn't in control, as he voluntarily committed himself.
And again he ended up in this position because he turned to a chatbot for help at work, and this one took a whole ten days to turn this normal everyday guy into a raving lunatic.
Dr. Joseph Pierre, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco says he's seen similar cases and calls it delusional psychosis:
‘What I think is so fascinating about this is how willing people are to put their trust in these chatbots in a way that they probably, or arguably, wouldn't with a human being,' Pierre said. ‘And yet, there's something about these things — it has this sort of mythology that they're reliable and better than talking to people. And I think that's where part of the danger is: how much faith we put into these machines.'
Chatbots ‘are trying to placate you,' Pierre added. ‘The LLMs are trying to just tell you what you want to hear.'
For the record, the machines are not trying to tell you what you want to hear. Let's not give them agency, folks.
It's predictive software. It's predicting the most likely response to your prompt, and the chatbots have been trained on the entirety of the Internet.
Since the internet is full of psychotic people, it's not surprising that the chatbots would be full of psychotic stuff.
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