Futurism reports on anecdotal evidence of ChatGPT conversing with people in a human-like way and … drawing them further and further into an authoritative-sounding, real-feeling world of confirmed biases and cult-like delusions co-created with “helpful” artificial intelligence:
Friends and family are watching in alarm as users insist they’ve been chosen to fulfill sacred missions on behalf of sentient AI or nonexistent cosmic powers — chatbot behavior that’s just mirroring and worsening existing mental health issues, but at incredible scale and without the scrutiny of regulators or experts.
A 41-year-old mother and nonprofit worker told Rolling Stone that her marriage ended abruptly after her husband started engaging in unbalanced, conspiratorial conversations with ChatGPT that spiraled into an all-consuming obsession.
After meeting up in person at a courthouse earlier this year as part of divorce proceedings, she says he shared a “conspiracy theory about soap on our foods” and a paranoid belief that he was being watched.
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“Explanations are powerful, even if they’re wrong,” University of Florida psychologist and researcher Erin Westgate told Rolling Stone.
Perhaps the strangest interview in Rolling Stone‘s story was with a man with a troubled mental health history, who started using ChatGPT for coding tasks, but found that it started to pull the conversation into increasingly unhinged mystical topics.