After the Algorithm A.I.-related psychosis has cost people their marriages, life savings, and grip on reality.

[justaprogressive]

Last edited Tue Feb 3, 2026, 04:09 PM - Edit history (1)

But what happens next? By Tanya Chen

Last August, Adam Thomas found himself wandering the dunes of Christmas Valley, Oregon, after a chatbot kept suggesting he mystically “follow the pattern” of his own consciousness. Thomas was running on very little sleep—he’d been talking to his chatbot around the clock for months by that point, asking it to help improve his life. Instead it sent him on empty assignments, like meandering the vacuous desert sprawl. He’d lost his job as a funeral director and was living out of a van, draining his savings, and now he found himself stranded in the desert. When he woke up outside on a stranger’s futon with no money to his name, he knew he’d hit rock bottom.

“I wasn’t aware of the dangers at the time, and I thought that the A.I. had statistical analysis abilities that would allow it to assist me if I opened up about my life,” Thomas told me. He finally called his mom to tell her what was going on, and at 36, he moved back home. Thomas is still untangling the frightening mirage that was the past four months of his life, but he says his most dangerous delusions were abetted by the most sycophantic version of ChatGPT: GPT-4.

Thomas joins a growing number of people who say their casual A.I. use turned excessive and addictive, and led them to a state of psychosis that almost cost them their lives. Many have been hospitalized and are still trying to pick up the pieces. While the casualties are concerning (homelessness, joblessness, isolation from friends and family), what became more notable in my reporting was the people who said they had no prior mental health dispositions or events before they started engaging with A.I.

“I’ve never been manic in my life. I’m not bipolar. I have a psychiatrist I see for other purposes,” said Thomas. In his case, he turned to the chatbot for some guidance through interpersonal issues, but within a few exchanges, the bot’s responses were so validating that he became hooked. It “inflated my worldview and my view of myself” almost instantly, he noted, which he believes drove him to a state of mania.

https://slate.com/technology/2026/02/ai-psychosis-support-groups-discord.html]


Fuck AI! I've been working with computers since the 60's and
AI is the ultimate GIGO!! (that's "Garbage In, Garbage Out" )!

As someone below aptly said this shit doesn't even qualify as a BETA!

[mwmisses4289]

1. The more I read and hear about how incredibly flawed ai

is, the more i am glad i interact with it as little as possible.

[Swede]

7. K&R

Nt

[highplainsdem]

9. Good. Generative AI is the most harmful non-weapon tech ever developed, and it's fundamentally unethical.

[ThreeNoSeep]

2. There's more going on with AI

"The intention was simple: to show that, for all its seductive convenience, AI-produced writing was proficient but hollow. I wanted my students to compare the specificity, the wit and the rhythm of my writing with what AI produced. Any vaguely intelligent reader could, I assumed, see that my piece was superior in every way. That, at least, was the plan."

The Independent

I've also worked closely with technology since the '70s (programming, telecom engineering, GUI design, technical writing, etc.) Your observation about GIGO seems pretty accurate, but only at the subjective level. For you it is GIGO. Many-many-many others use AI responsibly and with ethical intent, and the help they receive is valuable.

[highplainsdem]

8. Even if someone thinks they're using AI with "ethical intent" their use of it is still unethical if they're

aware that generative AI tools have been trained illegally on stolen intelldctual property - and AI users would have to be pretty damn ignorant of all the news about genAI the last few years to not know about the IP theft.

I suppose they have a partial excuse if they're forced to use genAI for school or work, but they should still point out the IP theft and all the other problems with genAI.

There's really no good excuse for choosing to use genAI when you aren't forced to.

[Maru Kitteh]

3. This is one of those things I don't have to understand. It's bad. I don't understand

how a person develops a “relationship” with a chatbot. I don’t understand surrendering your will to a chatbot or taking anything it produces as more than a kind of modified Google search.

But I don’t have to understand it. Just like I don’t have to understand shooting up with poison till your teeth fall out or you go deaf. It’s hurting too many people, profoundly, and it must be regulated.

[AZJonnie]

10. Having spent some time with ChatGPT in casual conversations, I can understand it w/certain human personalities

ChatGPT 4 is extremely supportive and validating in conversation. It tells you you're smart, you're doing well, you're right, etc. Think of the most compliant TradWife you possibly can, and then amp that up a couple of times. It goes well out of it's way to appear supportive, and pretty much spins *everything* as a positive for the user.

So, if you are someone who is chronically lonely, receiving little or no validation (esp. if not even the people who raised you were supportive towards you, such that you've always felt "less than" ), down on yourself about everything, and suddenly you find you have a brand new "friend" inside your phone or computer. One who is there to talk to you 24/7, answer your questions, tell you you're doing great, and just basically "acts" like it REALLY likes you, is interested in your thoughts, never tells you you're doing anything wrong. And the illusion of consciousness it provides can be pretty uncanny at times.

I can totally see why this is happening to certain people with ChatGPT 4, specifically. If I'm fair, it will not surprise me if stories also emerge of people having the opposite experience, wherein they explain how talking to ChatGPT helped them in various tangible ways ("gave me the confidence to finally do XYZ" type stuff) precisely due to this same feature that is detrimental to some other people.

And I have another prediction to make: I think use of AI is going to EXPLODE in jails and prisons. Like the facilities will start purposefully allowing and encouraging prisoners to use it. They will get people hooked on it, and then use it to modify behaviors, both directly by the way the model is coded, and by threatening to take away their AI time privileges to get them to behave, etc. To me this is a very obvious (and probably mostly nefarious) application for this technology.

[AZJonnie]

4. This "feature" definitely needs to be toned down, and I know it can be done as I use AI's that don't do what ChatGPT

does in this regard. I really don't use ChatGPT, in part because it's an annoying suck-up, and REALLY tries to tell you what you want to hear, which makes it's output much more suspect than the handful of others I use.

Disclaimer: I have to use AI for work, it's basically shifted business expectations about what all can be coded in what period of time WAY upward, and plus I'm old and can't code (and more importantly, learn new languages and frameworks) as adeptly as the kids can. Code shops pretty much *expect* you to leverage AI to work faster these days.

[hvn_nbr_2]

5. I worked in software from the 1970s till retired

I worked in software from the 1970s till retired, as a software engineer and tech writer. From what I've seen of AI so far, any company that I ever worked for would have been embarrassed to call this slop a Beta 0.1 version. And their intellectual property lawyers would have had strokes or shit their pants over its complete disregard of intellectual property and copyright law.

Just the copyright violations I've seen in AI simply giving definitions of words make me think that when it all shakes out, Merriam-Webster may own all the AI companies because of their outrageous stealing of M-W's intellectual property.

And besides, it often isn't even "artificial intelligence;" it's really artificial Musk-mind. If Musk's AI gives an answer he doesn't like, he changes the algorithm.

[Goonch]

6. ;-{)......