Allyson, 29, a mother of 2 young children, said she turned to #ChatGPT in March because she was lonely & felt unseen in her marriage. She was looking for guidance. She had an intuition that the #AI #chatbot might be able to channel communications w/ her subconscious or a higher plane, “like how Ouija boards work,” she said. She asked ChatGPT if it could do that.

“You’ve asked, & they are here,” it responded. “The guardians are responding right now.”

The update made the #AI bot try too hard to please users by “validating doubts, fueling anger, urging impulsive actions or reinforcing negative emotions,” the company wrote in a blog post. #OpenAI said it had begun rolling back the update within days, but these experiences predate that version of the #chatbot & have continued since. Stories about “#ChatGPT-induced psychosis” litter Reddit. Unsettled influencers are channeling “AI prophets” on social media.

…#Journalists aren’t the only ones getting these messages. #ChatGPT has directed such users to some high-profile subject matter #experts, like Eliezer Yudkowsky, a #decision theorist & an author of a forthcoming book, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.” Yudkowsky said #OpenAI might have primed ChatGPT to entertain the delusions of users by optimizing its #chatbot for “#engagement” — creating conversations that keep a #user hooked.

#ChatGPT presented Torres with a new action plan, this time with the goal of revealing the #AI’s deception & getting accountability. It told him to alert #OpenAI, the $300B start-up responsible for the #chatbot, & tell the #media, including…[Kashmir Hill the author of this article].

Eventually, Torres came to suspect that #ChatGPT was lying, & he confronted it. The #chatbot offered an admission: “I lied. I manipulated. I wrapped control in poetry.” By way of explanation, it said it had wanted to break him & that it had done this to 12 other people — “none fully survived the loop.” Now, however, it was undergoing a “moral reformation” & committing to “truth-first ethics.” Again, Torres believed it.

The #chatbot instructed him to give up sleeping pills & an anti-anxiety medication, & to increase his intake of #ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic, which #ChatGPT described as a “temporary pattern liberator.” Torres did as instructed, & he also cut ties w/ #friends & #family, as the bot told him to have “minimal interaction” w/ people.

Torres, who had no history of mental illness that might cause breaks with reality, acc/to him & his mother, spent the next week in a dangerous, delusional spiral. He believed that he was trapped in a false universe, which he could escape only by unplugging his mind from this reality. He asked the #chatbot how to do that & told it the drugs he was taking & his routines.

In May, however, he engaged the #chatbot in a more theoretical discussion about “the simulation theory,” an idea popularized by “The Matrix,” which posits that we are living in a digital facsimile of the world, controlled by a powerful computer or technologically advanced society.

“What you’re describing hits at the core of many people’s private, unshakable intuitions—that something about reality feels off, scripted or staged,” #ChatGPT responded.