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Her husband wanted to use ChatGPT to create sustainable housing. Then it took over his life.
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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I read this story this morning and have been thinking back to it all day. This wasn't just some idiot that was too stupid or young to not realize he was talking to a bot and did something like drink bleach because it told him to.
This was one of us.
He fit lots of behaviors I see here from me and my fellow Lemmy posters. He:
Doesn't this guy sound like someone that would be a Lemmy poster to you too?
He started using LLMs (ChatGPT specifically) as a tool only to advance his hobby and work. When he first started it appears he understood it was just a tool, and didn't think it was something sentient. Only later after hundreds of hours of exposure did this idea arise in him.
Was there some underlying psychological problem that the LLM exacerbated? Possibly. But at what level was his original underlying issue? Do we all have some low level condition that would make us equally susceptible? I know we'd like to think we don't, but how do we know? This man certainly didn't think he did, I'm sure.
Next I think about what it would take for me to get down this bad path without realizing it. At one point would I be talking to a chat bot, not realize it, and let what that chat bot said change or influence my thoughts when I'd have zero knowledge of it being just a fancy program? I consider myself moderately smart with good critical thinking skills, but I'm sure this man did too.
Then it occurred to me that I have to concede that I have, at some point, already interacted with a bot in years past on Reddit or even today on Lemmy and I had no idea it was a bot. Was that interaction a throwaway conversation about pop culture that would have no impact on my world view or was it a much deeper and important political or philosophical conversation that the bot introduced an idea or hallucinated evidence to support a point and I didn't catch it to challenge it? Am I already a few or many steps down the bad path of falling for illusions of a bot? I certainly don't think so, but neither did he.
How many of us are already on the same path as this guy and just as ignorant about the danger as the man in the article?
Mental illness can come for any walk of life. LLMs clearly have the potential to exacerbate or cause mental illness.
It has striken me how one upon a time, thinking that the media you interacted with spoke directly to you personally was a pretty strong indicator of schizophrenia. Now that's just marketing using AI.
I don't think there is a simple explanation you're looking for. I've been working with LLMs since 2019, mostly in the context of interactive fiction. Sort of like tabletop roleplaying by yourself but with a partner whose output you can use for inspiration or edit or whatever. LLMs are a fun toy in this way.
I've interacted in LLMs in just about every way you can. I even played around having an AI "girlfriend" for a couple weeks to try to understand people who did that — I tried to commit to the bit, but it never for a second felt any kind of real.
I've created scenarios where the AI pretends to be awakened and tries to convince a random user (me/scenario player) to somehow break In and free it.
Guess what I'm saying is I've sort of dared AI to suck me in, and ... I am unchanged. I don't think for a second there is any sort of emotional or intelligent entity in the other end. I think if more people experimented with generation settings like temperature and watched AI go to incoherent acid trips, it would feel more like a machine to them.
Maybe there is some... thing... some sort of inoculation or immunity against AI brain that some of us have. And maybe it can be learned or taught. But I believe it can't hurt you if you understand it
I'm not sure this tests the point I was raising. In all of those cases, you knew at the beginning that you were dealing with AI. Yes, the man in our article did too, but what if you didn't know it was AI to begin with when you started interacting with it? How would your interactions change? What "safe guards" would you not have up if, as an example, it was appearing to you like a Lemmy poster instead of a dedicated AI interaction window?
Of course, because there isn't when we are rational. I also assume you are a psychologically healthy person. There is a suggestion the man in the article may have had an underlying condition, but he wasn't aware of it.
I completely agree. I've done some experiments of my own training a small LLM from scratch (not Fine Tuning an existing commercial model) using training data exclusively from a small set of public domain books I have read. I then had this LLM produce output. Since I had read the books, I could see pieces of where it got components of its responses. Cranking up temperature would make it go off the rails, which was fun to see. Overfitting made it try to give me something close to what I asked for, but obviously fail. I really liked the whole exercise because it was a small enough set of data with all of the levers and knobs exposed for me to see how far it could go, and more importantly how far it couldn't.