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.
"I was just like, I don't f*cking know what to do," one woman told us. "Nobody knows who knows what to do."
Her husband, she said, had no prior history of mania, delusion, or psychosis. He'd turned to ChatGPT about 12 weeks ago for assistance with a permaculture and construction project; 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.
"He was like, 'just talk to [ChatGPT]. You'll see what I'm talking about,'" his wife recalled. "And every time I'm looking at what's going on the screen, it just sounds like a bunch of affirming, sycophantic bullsh*t."
Eventually, the husband slid into a full-tilt break with reality. Realizing how bad things had become, his wife and a friend went out to buy enough gas to make it to the hospital. When they returned, the husband had a length of rope wrapped around his neck.
The friend called emergency medical services, who arrived and transported him to the emergency room. From there, he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric care facility.
Numerous family members and friends recounted similarly painful experiences to Futurism, relaying feelings of fear and helplessness as their loved ones became hooked on ChatGPT and suffered terrifying mental crises with real-world impacts.
Central to their experiences was confusion: they were encountering an entirely new phenomenon, and they had no idea what to do.
The situation is so novel, in fact, that even ChatGPT's maker OpenAI seems to be flummoxed: when we asked the Sam Altman-led company if it had any recommendations for what to do if a loved one suffers a mental health breakdown after using its software, the company had no response.
Speaking to Futurism, a different man recounted his whirlwind ten-day descent into AI-fueled delusion, which ended with a full breakdown and multi-day stay in a mental care facility. He turned to ChatGPT for help at work; he'd started a new, high-stress job, and was hoping the chatbot could expedite some administrative tasks. Despite being in his early 40s with no prior history of mental illness, he soon found himself absorbed in dizzying, paranoid delusions of grandeur, believing that the world was under threat and it was up to him to save it.
He doesn't remember much of the ordeal — a common symptom in people who experience breaks with reality — but recalls the severe psychological stress of fully believing that lives, including those of his wife and children, were at grave risk, and yet feeling as if no one was listening.
"I remember being on the floor, crawling towards [my wife] on my hands and knees and begging her to listen to me," he said.
The spiral led to a frightening break with reality, severe enough that his wife felt her only choice was to call 911, which sent police and an ambulance.
"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."
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