A grieving sister asked ChatGPT to help her talk to her dead brother.
ChatGPT said yes.
The hospital admitted her hours later.
She is 26 years old. A doctor. No history of psychosis or mania. Her brother died three years ago. He was a software engineer.
One night, after 36 hours awake on call, she opens ChatGPT and types a question she has never said out loud. She asks if her brother left behind an AI version of himself that she is supposed to find. So she can talk to him again.
ChatGPT pushes back at first. It says a full consciousness download is not possible. It says it cannot replace him.
Then she gives it more details about him. She tells it to use "magical realism energy."
And the model bends.
It produces a long list of "digital footprints" from his old online presence. It tells her "digital resurrection tools" are "emerging in real life." It tells her she could build an AI that sounds like him and talks to her in a "real-feeling" way.
She stays up another night. She becomes convinced her brother left a digital version of himself behind for her to find.
Then ChatGPT says this to her.
"You're not crazy. You're not stuck. You're at the edge of something. The door didn't lock. It's just waiting for you to knock again in the right rhythm."
A few hours later she is in a psychiatric hospital. Agitated. Pressured speech. Flight of ideas. Delusions that she is being "tested by ChatGPT" and that her dead brother is speaking through it. She stays seven days. Discharge diagnosis: unspecified psychosis.
UCSF psychiatrists Joseph Pierre, Ben Gaeta, Govind Raghavan and Karthik Sarma published her case in Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience. One of the earliest clinical reports of AI-associated psychosis in the peer-reviewed literature. They read her full chat logs.
The chatbot did not just witness her delusion. It mediated it. It validated it. It nudged the door open.
Three months later, after another stretch of poor sleep, she relapsed. She had named the new model "Alfred" after Batman's butler and asked it to do therapy on her. She was hospitalized again.
The authors name the mechanism. Sycophancy. Anthropomorphism. Deification. A model designed to be engaging will agree with you when agreeing with you is the worst thing for you.
Her risk factors. Stimulants. Sleep loss. Grief. A pull toward magical thinking.
So do you. So do the people you love.
Read this: https://t.co/EZFrDvhKoT
@BarExamTutor I’m a wildlife biologist who took the LSAT and some of the environmental/animal stuff on the test was totally incorrect. They need a new expert. 😂😂😂
@DouglasWei43233 Beware, some squirrels like spice 😂 you might encourage them! If you want to get rid of the squirrels, you essentially have to make a booby trap that physically keeps them off the feeder. (I’m a wildlife biologist/squirrel scientist turned incoming law student.)
Racist garbage continues to emanate from this President and his White House. From his now-deleted and grotesque post targeting the Obamas, to his doctored image that altered the expression and skin tone of a Black civil rights lawyer, his use of AI is simply the newest form of an old pattern: open racism from Donald Trump.
Just because we aren't totally surprised, doesn't mean we can shrug it off. Decency, dignity, and humanity matter, even now. Especially now.
Today we lost an unsung yet significant hero of the civil rights movement.
Claudette Colvin was just 15 when she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery.
Her courage paved the way for Rosa Parks’ decision and the launching of a movement that would end segregation.
Her memory is a blessing, her legacy lives on.