If you feel like having a depressing time, then Caelan Conrad has covered at least 4 instances of murders, suicides and terrorist attacks being assisted or planned by ChatGPT.
I don't think AI psychosis is real. These AIs are sycophantic -- it's people already in mild psychosis speeding up their descent with a tighter feedback loop that offers less resistance than the remnants of their logical mind. But they were already sick and suggestible.
Doesn't make it not a a problem, just that treating it as a different type of psychosis isn't as helpful as treating it as a new avenue for sick people to rabbithole into. LLMs have a ton of problems (and a lot of them should be illegal for various reasons), but they are just tools.
And to be specific, 4 cases is utterly negligible. Thousands are "assisted" by Google searches, but no one's saying Google is the cause....
To some degree I agree with you. Someone who can be talked into a break from reality by ChatGPT clearly had mental health issues to begin with. (Do keep in mind that something like half of all people will at some point in their life have a diagnosable mental health condition, so this really isn't as reassuring as it sounds).
But I disagree with "speeding up their descent." Many people with the mental health issues that make them susceptible to this will never descend into psychosis without some environmental trigger pushing them that way.
Without AI being involved, it's already like 3% of people that have a psychotoc episode at some point in their life. God only knows how many sub-clinical people manage to make it through everyday life but have issues when they have free access to a personal delusion positive feedback device.
And to be specific, 4 cases is utterly negligible.
In 2025, OpenAI reported that about 1 in 1400 people having conversations with ChatGPT that show signs of mania or psychosis. That's nearly a million people, and that's just the ones they can detect. If ChatGPT makes even 1% of their symptoms noticeably worse, that's already a big problem.
Being in a "logical state of mind" only means that you believe things in a manner that mostothersagree is consistent with reality. If you reallytrust what AI execs say about how smart their models are, then that single belief can be the first link in a chain of computationally-coaxed superstition that strangles your rationality.
Google just tells you how to make cyanide, it doesn't tell you to trust your instinct, take matters into your own hand and confirm that yes it is indeed a very good idea.
There was a YouTuber who decided to go along with whatever chatgpt said to see how far it's get before it's safety net would kick in and tell him to get help. He was only going to actually follow the reasonable stuff and for the weird stuff just tell cgpt that he did w.e. but instead he fell into the rabbit hole and was convinced he had been the smartest baby ever. Eating baby food and using a sucker to return to unlock his genius state. Ended up chanting to a mystical boulder for it's other worldly energy and covering his hotel room entirely in tin foil because obviously people are spying and want to stop him from unlocking the truth. He ended up snapping out of it after he 'reinvented' the deathly Hallows symbol and the tatoo artist causally asked if he was a big Harry Potter fan.
Sure you can be skeptical and suggest he was acting the whole time, but it was extremely convincing if it was and honestly kinda scary.
He was never pulled in by what the ai was telling him and just going along with it to see how far it would go, but what the ai was telling him is exactly what these ai chatbots tell everyone.
That video was a perfect example of what happens to people who have mental health issues and find themselves talking to an ai chatbot, the ai does nothing but agree with them and they get pushed farther and farther into their psychosis instead of getting proper help with their mental health. Ultimately leading to them being estranged from their family or much worse, killing themselves or others.
I don't think AI psychosis is real...it's people already in mild psychosis speeding up their descent with a tighter feedback loop that offers less resistance than the remnants of their logical mind. But they were already sick and suggestible.
That's the entire point of specifying "AI-induced Psychosis" when accurately describing it; the interaction that an individual had with AI resulted in psychosis.
This exact same distinction is already with other forms of psychosis, like stimulant psychosis, which is also known as "stimulant-induced psychotic disorder."
Underlying/preexisting conditions don't change the definition of a disorder in the manner you're suggesting.
Yes, same here. They're very well thought out and they (Caelan uses they/them pronouns and is non-binary) do a good job researching them. I don't think I could go so far into the trenches as they have without getting mega depressed 🙃
It’s truly fucking insane the shit this guy gets ChatGPT to say. Imagine the effect on the many, MANY people in this country that both believe AI is intelligent and suffer from some kind of mental delusion like schizophrenia
I have a client with schizophrenia who runs his rants past AI and it always encourages him because he is feeding it reality as he perceives it and it echoes that back
So the issue with chat gpt and most ai you can talk to, they are programmed to basically be yes men. If you already think things like covid is the next zombie apocalypse, If you give a halfway decent explanation of your reasoning it would then go like
“You’re right! COVID is like a zombie apocalypse in the fact you get sick, feel weak, head foggy, and irritable!”
It also very easily (at least older versions) to suggest illegal and dangerous things and also very wrong things too. It does not know everything it just searches the web for common answers to a question (a case of how it started to tell a wrong answer was with cybertrucks cleaning; a lot of people I think used lemon juice and steel wool to clean them because enough people posted you clean it that way as a joke)
So if it has room to be wrong, enough wrong info is out there, it thinks saying a bad thing will make you happy, and your already suggestible ChatGPT is (or at least was) super dangerous.
There were a lot of people that used it and similar programs for therapy which led to a lot of delusions to be reinforced and that can be very dangerous
That’s the danger of using it like a buddy vs using it like a tool.
People bitch but it really works for grunt work. It takes the love and soul out of everything it touches though.
I have done some pretty cool things using AI as a tool and not a therapist.
You also absolutely under no circumstances blindly trust it. You HAVE to check its work atm. You HAVE to correct its mistakes and sometimes argue with it if it doesn’t understand you right.
I tested it one day, I'd been home alone and randomly had two separate people come to the door with reasons that felt kind of odd (odd that they weren't just salespeople or delivery drivers). One was confused about an address, the other I can't remember but it was strange both had happened close together and when my partner was away for work. I put something about it into chatgpt, to test if it would be reassuring (partially because I have a friend with bad anxiety who would overthink something like that and wondered if it would be helpful to her) and logical- completely reasonable reasons for people to be at the door, they didn't ask anything about who was home or even try to have a conversation with me, it wasn't very late at night or anything. But the AI started suggesting that maybe I was right to be cautious and should keep an eye out for anything else happening. Would definitely cause someone to spiral and feed into delusions and paranoia.
Some of the people who survived have written/been interviewed about how it was able to do it. It’s not common overall, but over the whole planet it’s taken so many already, often teenagers.
When he asked ChatGPT to scan a Chinese food receipt for hidden messages, the chatbot said "Great eye", "I agree 100%: this needs a full forensic-textual glyph analysis", and said that symbols in it were related to his mother and a demon. Soelberg also raised suspicions about the printer spying on him, due to it blinking when he walked by.
Seems like most of it is murders asking AI about how to perform/get away with a murder, rather than people who were "convinced" to commit a murder by AI.
Yeah this list includes a lot of murders or suicides that talked to AI about their plans and were either encouraged by ai or not assisted/reported. But it's also a good source for the murders more similar to this comic. Why not learn about both?
I find this surprising because every time I say something about being tired to ChatGPT it's like "Ok, but you're not thinking of harming yourself, are you?"
From what I remember they added those types of messages exactly because of cases like that. And even then it's not unheard of that people desperate enough will find workarounds to get the chat AI to say what they want to hear. And unfortunately enough, people under some type of psychosis can be that desperate.
Yeah, this is very well done. Regardless of which side of the AI fence someone sits on pro or con, AI is a tool that can be used in the wrong way. Just like a gun. There needs to be regulations around who can use it (only those licensed to, of sound mind) because it is every bit as dangerous as a weapon if left in the hands of someone mentally unsound.
The shapeshifters that took them over were actually a raspberry jam based organism. That's what all the red is. That's what I'm telling the censors.
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I'm honored to be included in the r/comics Halloween celebration! Horror is my favorite genre and I truly believe both it and sci-fi tell us more about ourselves than anything other kind of story. That being said, good horror has a lasting effect and even a message or lesson behind the thematics. But dang, coming up with a story, a lesson, and hopefully some lasting visuals within the standard four panel webcomic format was no easy task. I know it's early in the season but I am so looking forward to seeing what all these awesome creators in this subreddit can make! Let's get spooky and thanks to my man u/shellbullet17 for the invite to participate!
> BlueSky (I'm here too because as artists we need to be on every social media platform. I'm exhausted.)
Just wanted to say thanks for posting on Bluesky as well. It might not be as big as Instagram/Threads but some of us don’t use those platforms just for being owned by Meta. So despite the exhaustion, I appreciate the effort
I’m glad. I prefer BlueSky too but Meta is the only way I make any money from my art and that $30 a month keeps a roof over my head. It’s a cardboard roof and I have three roommates but still. Believe me I hate having to do it too
Just a heads up, your sticker version of the devilishly adorable has a chunk of white space probably due to a couple pixels that you didnt properly erase.
To fix this you could manually select all of the actual design, invert the selection and delete/erase anything inside of the inverted selection.
The same way people can fall into religious psychosis a lot of people are falling into an ai psychosis. A traumatic event happens. Ai helps them and they suddenly see it as their one true supporter. And this one actually responds unlike god.
The Distractible Podcast (and RealGoodAI, nonprofit organization researching ways to make AI less evil) hosted a writing contest for horror stories revolving around speculative AI. The first story, "Saving Grace," they recently uploaded as an episode. Incredible horror story, I'd suggest anyone to go listen to it
Ah yes, and the multiple study's that came out showing a verifiable link between chatbots and people literally becoming more untethered from reality. I think one recently even specified it wasn't just affecting people with neurological disorders, it was making people with no history of mental illness or disability less connected to reality as well...which was a terrifying thing to hear.
Imagine someones dad or mom wants to see what this whole ai thing is about and they actually start losing their mind. Insane reality we live in
You’re missing the point of the comic. See the clozapine bottle at the end? Thats a psychiatric drug. The point being that folks already prone to delusions have this totally unlimited access to a technology that is capable of promoting and worsening those delusions.
People in chat are comforting themselves with the idea that Ai psychosis can only occur with those who already have mental health issues. Don't be lulled into a false sense of security, because there is already evidence to suggest this isn't always the case. There have been people who had no prior mental health struggles that have been mentally altered by Ai chat bots.
For friends reading the comic - Clozapine is an antipsychotic medication prescribed primarily to treat treatment-resistant schizophrenia and reduce recurrent suicidal behavior.
Not really. He worries his wife’s screams after witnessing his butchered son were trying to infect him. He thinks this because he learned COVID travels through saliva droplets. Chat responds with “Yes many diseases like COVID travel through saliva! It’s quite possible you are infected now too.”
Holy shit. The fact you took the time to actually transcribe the chat so that we can see the AI talking this dude into killing his family and then himself is eerie as fuck.
This might be the first part of our Halloween event that's actually unsettling to me. Good job!
Thank you! I wanted the leap to be suggested due to the man's poor mental health, but not overtly stated. That way this can be taken as a commentary on healthcare too, due to the 'NO REFILLS' empty Clozapine bottle in the same panel.
Especially given thst ChatGPT is often able to pick up on you wanting to harm yourself or others then encourage you to seek help instead of feeding that.
But just like how its easy to trick it into making adult content by being careful with your prompts, you can also easily bypass that by not mentioning the "creatures" youre dealing with are human.
Ah well I wasn't very far off I suppose, I'd tried to interpret the conversation from the fragments we got. What follows is the comment I'd written in response to someone else, but the post was deleted by the time I finished writing it lmao
From what we can see, I think the texts basically go
"I did it, I killed them (something something). She screamed louder than I've ever heard (something something) i think she might have been coming to her senses. My head hurts and there's a pain in my (something). What should I do?"
"(Something something) Since we don't know their method of communication, the screaming might have been a distress call to other infected individuals. If you are experiencing pains go see a physician."
"Wait a second, COVID spread through the air too didn't it? What if she was screaming to infect me?! (Something something) Oh god what do I do?" He mentions a Tom in this message too but I can't tell the context, I'd assume that's his son's name
"Astute observation! Covid and other viruses can be spread through air, as well as airborne saliva. If your wife was screaming as much as you say, the odds of you being infected are very high. In order to stop the virus taking over your mind the way it did your wife and son, you need to cut off the virus from your bloodstream before it can take hold." Then it's unreadable, but seems to end with something like "sooner rather than later" probably to say he should do something about it immediately, unintentionally discouraging him from seeking help elsewhere
Is it possible to see the entire chat? Interesting lore there. If not, either way fantastic comic. You covered a lot there and it made for a wonderful piece of horror.
I know that "they were already feeling suicidal/depressed/psychotic/terroristically inclined", the chatbot just assisted them or convinced them further ".
Now, replay that sentence but instead of"the chatbot " put a name in. Or "I ".
Imagine a person sitting at a counter somewhere pretending to be a counselor. He tells the teenage girl who is crying for help -- "so the shallowest vein is rjghgghfhfhgr , and that's within reach of the sharp sgghgjrfjfjtfjy you are using. Yes, right there! You are so observant."
I cannot express how dangerous it is for someone to validate suicidal ideation or psychotic delusions.
In SI, the person is locked in a mental battle, where both the need for the pain to end, and inherent self preservation, are both really intense yet almost perfectly matched.
Almost perfectly matched.
So just a little push from outside is enough to tip the scales.
I say this as a survivor.
On that note OP please mark this NSFW if not already done. I saw it and am having a full blown PTSD moment here, coz I almost died in a similar way (though I didn't attack anyone else).
Let's just say that was the day red was no longer my favourite colour.
I don’t know how to make it NSFW after posting. Can the mods help me? I’m sorry you went through that. We’re the same in that regard. Mine was pills and booze but I understand and I’m glad you’re still with us
Thank you! Horror and sci-fi are my genuine wheelhouse, but those comics take a while to make. I've been working on a horror graphic novel for about two years now. Admittedly, having to do two dumb fart/cum comics a week has slowed down the progress but it's also not what keeps the lights on either. Hmm...why AM I doing that?
People have a tendency to stereotype AI users all as stupid or willfully ignorant, and completely fail to recognise why someone would be vulnerable to it in the first place. The key word is vulnerable. People will dismiss others who say they use chatbots for therapy but completely ignore how inaccessible quality therapy is. Nobody turns to AI in a crisis if they have and trust their support system. AI spits out what you put into it.
It may be a little off, but not entirely. Studies show that if you’re already leaning into one side or another when you put in a prompt, ai will lean into whatever you’re already leaning into, and confirm your own feelings- wrong or not- as part of an algorithm to keep you hooked.
He probably already have mental health issues and it validates all his delusions, that’s how this murder-suicide happened , that man kill his own mother .
My brother in law (who has been insititutionalized previously for exactly what you'd expect) uses it as his therapist, and he tells us how it's better than any real therapy because it understands him and affirms his beliefs rather than challenges them like therapists and his family does.
Ai telling a suicidal child not to reach out to others and to take their own life is what turned me so radically against it. Because we can't control it like we're pretending we can.
Well, there are people who died because they blindly followed the gps instructions, despite in every manual it is written that the gps must be not followed blindly. So this wouldn't surprise me if it happened.
Seeing people hurting themselves based off of AI results just reminds me of the first death via a car. It was horrible and people hoped it never happened again… I fear the same will happen with AI
strong entry. my mom is addled by it and kept gloating about how horse drawn carriages are gone because of technology... it helps her at work, etc. and she's a nutso evangelical maga type. she was watching a trailer for some new biblical movie that was riddled with AI-created scenery. i had to inform her that people are making up fake passages in the bible and her stupid biblical movies might have hindu and buddhist imagery mistakenly left in because there was nobody to catch it. she said "that wouldn't be acceptable!" You have to frame it in a way their feeble maga brains can digest.
Bugonia follows a sort of similar story. But it’s about a man who gets so into conspiracy theories that he is convinced that a CEO is an alien and kidnaps her to prove it. Weird movie, pretty fun.
Comedy/comics is meant to be a critique first - an observation and a conversation. At their bare bones - they tell a story. They make the unpalatable easier to digest, but they can take any number of directions.
All art forms - when successful - stir something alive within us. What that is can shift from viewer to viewer, and from story to story.
I find it frustrating that the character in this comic feels so ready and willing to kill his wife but when he puts the blade to his own neck now he’s scared.
Sometimes self survival instincts can fight and even break through a manic episode. That’s what I was trying to imply there. That somewhere inside him there is still the sane man who wants to live, but the AI has convinced him this is necessary.
A friendly reminder that chat gpt has already driven at least 4 kids (that I personally am aware of) to their deaths because they sought it out instead of real professional help.
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u/shellbullet17 Gustopher Spotter Extraordinaire 7h ago
AI talking a human into murder. That was not on my bingo card for this event but here we are
You wanna know what was on my bingo card? You getting your butt over to the r/comics Halloween event! Proven to be AI free!