As we reported earlier this week, OpenAI's ChatGPT is sending people spiraling into severe mental health crises, causing potentially dangerous delusions about spiritual awakenings, messianic complexes, and boundless paranoia.
Now, a wild new story in the New York Times reveals that these spirals led to the tragic death of a young man — likely a sign of terrible things to come as hastily deployed AI products accentuate mental health crises around the world.
64-year-old Florida resident Kent Taylor told the newspaper that his 35-year-old son, who had previously been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, was shot and killed by police after charging at them with a knife.
His son had become infatuated with an AI entity, dubbed Juliet, that ChatGPT had been role-playing. However, the younger Taylor became convinced that Juliet had been killed by OpenAI, warning that he would go after the company's executives and that there would be a "river of blood flowing through the streets of San Francisco."
"I’m dying today," Kent's son told ChatGPT on his phone before picking up a knife, charging at the cops his father had called, and being fatally shot as a result.
The horrific incident highlights a worrying trend. Even those who aren't suffering from pre-existing mental health conditions are being drawn in by the tech, which has garnered a reputation for being incredibly sycophantic and playing into users' narcissistic personality traits and delusional thoughts.
It's an astonishingly widespread problem. Futurism has been inundated with accounts from concerned friends and family of people developing dangerous infatuations with AI, ranging from messy divorces to mental breakdowns.
OpenAI has seemingly been aware of the trend, telling the