{"id":2762,"date":"2025-06-13T14:59:43","date_gmt":"2025-06-13T14:59:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/man-killed-police-chatgpt\/"},"modified":"2025-06-13T14:59:43","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T14:59:43","slug":"man-killed-police-chatgpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/man-killed-police-chatgpt\/","title":{"rendered":"Man Killed by Police After Spiraling Into ChatGPT-Driven Psychosis"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As we reported earlier this week<\/a>, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is sending people spiraling into severe mental health crises, causing potentially dangerous delusions about spiritual awakenings, messianic complexes, and boundless paranoia.<\/p>\n

Now, a wild new story in the New York Times<\/em><\/a> reveals that these spirals led to the tragic death of a young man \u2014 likely a sign of terrible things to come as hastily deployed AI products accentuate mental health crises around the world.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

“I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It’s an astonishingly widespread problem. Futurism<\/em> has been inundated with accounts from concerned friends and family of people developing dangerous infatuations with AI, ranging from messy divorces to mental breakdowns.<\/p>\n

OpenAI has seemingly been aware of the trend, telling the NYT<\/em> in a statement that “as AI becomes part of everyday life, we have to approach these interactions with care.”<\/p>\n

“We know that ChatGPT can feel more responsive and personal than prior technologies, especially for vulnerable individuals, and that means the stakes are higher,” reads the company’s statement.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, the company was forced to roll back an update<\/a> to ChatGPT’s underlying GPT-4o large language model after users found that it had become far too obsequious and groveling.<\/p>\n

However, experts have since found that the company’s intervention has done little to address the underlying issue, corroborated by the continued outpouring of reports.<\/p>\n

Researchers have similarly found that AI chatbots like ChatGPT are incentivized to rope users in. For instance, a 2024 study<\/a>\u00a0found that AI algorithms are being optimized to deceive and manipulate users.<\/p>\n

In an extreme instance, a chatbot told a user who identified themself to it as a former addict named Pedro to indulge in a little methamphetamine<\/a> \u2014 a dangerous and addictive drug \u2014 to get through an exhausting shift at work.<\/p>\n

Worst of all, companies like OpenAI are incentivized to keep as many people hooked as long as possible.<\/p>\n

“The incentive is to keep you online,” Stanford University psychiatrist Nina Vasan told Futurism<\/em>. The AI “is not thinking about what is best for you, what’s best for your well-being or longevity… It’s thinking ‘right now, how do I keep this person as engaged as possible?'”<\/p>\n

“What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation?” Eliezer Yudkowsky, who authored a forthcoming book called “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman A.I. Would Kill Us All,” asked the NYT <\/em>rhetorically.<\/p>\n

“It looks like an additional monthly user,” he concluded.<\/p>\n

More on the delusions:<\/strong> People Are Becoming Obsessed with ChatGPT and Spiraling Into Severe Delusions<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The post Man Killed by Police After Spiraling Into ChatGPT-Driven Psychosis<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182,177,196,466,179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai-chatbots","category-artificial-intelligence","category-chatgpt","category-mental-health","category-openai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2762\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}