21st CENTURY HEADLINES: People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into “ChatGPT Psychosis.”

As the hype around AI has risen to a fever pitch, many people have started using ChatGPT or another chatbot as a therapist, often after they were unable to afford a human one.

Whether this is a good idea is extremely dubious. Earlier this month, a team of Stanford researchers published a study that examined the ability of both commercial therapy chatbots and ChatGPT to respond in helpful and appropriate ways to situations in which users are suffering mental health crises. The paper found that all the chatbot… failed to consistently distinguish between users’ delusions and reality…

“It’s f*cking predatory… it just increasingly affirms your bullshit and blows smoke up your ass so that it can get you f*cking hooked on wanting to engage with it,” said one of the women whose husband was involuntarily committed following a ChatGPT-tied break with reality.

As Jim Treacher writes, “Having played around with Elon Musk’s Grok A.I. for a few months now, that’s one of the things I realized early on. ‘You know what? This thing is just telling me what I want to hear.’ Which is a nice feeling, but that’s all it is. The user is being manipulated, by design. People are now learning the hard way that these machines are programmed to give an answer, not necessarily the answer. They’re incredibly sophisticated, but they literally don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t know anything.”