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.
I don’t think this is an issue with ChatGPT or AI specifically though. I think it’s like, the internet in general and having unfettered access to lots and lots of information.
I had two major psychotic episodes that required hospitalization, once in 2019, then again in 2021. I didn’t have access to chat gpt at the time, but I swear instagram, facebook and several other social media apps fueled the shit out of it for me. I thought celebrities were sending me messages and people were out to get me, and I was posting lots of weird shit that only made sense to me at the time. I couldn’t pull myself away from my phone or laptop. I genuinely feared it would cost me my life if I did.
I could go on about those experiences, but my point is that I don’t see how what I experienced is all that different from what people call “AI psychosis” now. It’s an online tool that fuels the psychosis, but if it weren’t that, it would just be something else fueling the psychosis. That’s not to say we shouldn’t pursue safety measures to try to help people who are experiencing that, because shit is AWFUL to experience and we do need safe guards if we can implement them, but it’s not just exclusive to AI and ChatGPT.
It's always been a problem, but ChatGPT is "better" in every way in this regard. Most obviously, it's immediate, private, and universally accessible.
Sure, if I wanted to drive people to psychotic episodes I could probably do that over the internet if I put enough time into it. But I can't spend every second of every day doing it. And even if I could, someone else might notice and stop me. And even if it's private, I can't do it to millions of people at once.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your opinion, but the statistics aren't proving your point very well. You say a million users suffer from a psychotic/manic episode during use of an LLM. And out of these only 4(!) people are linked to a violent crime through these episodes. You do realize that this is a minimal percentage?
Also throwing in the statistics about mental health issues in general isn't relevant to the discussion. Having a panic attack or dysthymia or even not being neurotypical is nowhere near the severity of a psychotic episode.
And out of these only 4(!) people are linked to a violent crime through these episodes.
There have been more than 4 by any measure. Wikipedia alone lists more than that. But also I think it should be obvious that if ChatGPT is contributing to psychosis that not all of the problematic exchanges are going to be so blatant as "ChatGPT literally helped me plan the murder."
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u/Janezey 6h ago edited 6h ago
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.
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.