{"id":3931,"date":"2025-07-23T14:11:26","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T14:11:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/tech-industry-ai-mental-health\/"},"modified":"2025-07-23T14:11:26","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T14:11:26","slug":"tech-industry-ai-mental-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/tech-industry-ai-mental-health\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech Industry Figures Suddenly Very Concerned That AI Use Is Leading to Psychotic Episodes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Tech<\/div>\n

For months, we and our colleagues elsewhere in the tech media have been reporting on what experts are now calling “ChatGPT psychosis<\/a>“: when AI users fall down alarming mental health rabbit holes in which a chatbot encourages wild delusions about conspiracies, mystical entities, or crackpot new scientific theories.<\/p>\n

The resulting breakdowns have led users to homelessness<\/a>, involuntary commitment<\/a> to psychiatric care facilities, and even violent death<\/a> and suicide<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Until recently, the tech industry and its financial backers have had little to say about the phenomenon. But last week, one of their own \u2014 venture capitalist Geoff Lewis, a managing partner at the\u00a0multi-billion dollar firm Bedrock who is heavily invested in machine learning ventures including OpenAI \u2014 raised eyebrows with a series of posts that prompted concerns about his own mental health<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the posts, he claimed that he’d somehow used ChatGPT to uncover\u00a0a shadowy “non-government agency” that he said had\u00a0“negatively impacted over 7,000 lives” and “extinguished” 12 more.<\/p>\n

Whatever’s going on with Lewis, who didn’t respond to our request for comment, his posts have prompted an\u00a0unprecedented outpouring<\/span> of concern among high-profile individuals in the tech industry about what the massive deployment of poorly-understood AI tech may be having on the mental health of users worldwide.<\/p>\n

“If you\u2019re a friend or family, please check on him,”\u00a0wrote<\/a> Hish Bouabdallah, a software engineer who’s worked at Apple, Coinbase, Lyft, and Twitter, of Lewis’ thread. “He doesn\u2019t seem alright.”<\/p>\n

Other posts were far less empathetic, though there seemed to be a dark undercurrent to the gallows humor: if a billionaire investor can lose his grip after a few too many prompts, what hope do the rest of us have?<\/p>\n

“This is like Kanye being off his meds but for the tech industry,” quipped Travis Fischer<\/a>, a software engineer who’s worked at Amazon and Microsoft.<\/p>\n

Concretely, Lewis’ posts also elicited a wave of warnings about the mental health implications of getting too chummy with\u00a0chatbots.<\/p>\n

“There\u2019s recently been an influx of case reports describing people exhibiting signs of psychosis having their episodes and beliefs amplified by an LLM,”\u00a0wrote<\/a> Cyril Zakka, a medical doctor and former Stanford researcher who now works at the prominent AI startup Hugging Face.<\/p>\n

“While I\u2019m not a psychiatrist by training,” he continued, “I think it mirrors an interesting syndrome known as ‘folie \u00e0 deux’ or ‘madness of two’ that falls under delusional disorders in the DSM-5 (although not an official classification.)”<\/p>\n

“While there are many variations, it essentially boils down to a primary person forming a delusional belief during a psychotic episode and imposing it on another secondary person who starts believing them as well,” Zakka posited. “From a psychiatric perspective, I think LLMs could definitely fall under the umbrella of being ‘the induced non-dominant person,’ reflecting the beliefs back at the inducer. These beliefs often subside in the non-dominant individual when separated from the primary one.”<\/p>\n

Eliezer Yudkowsky, the founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, even charged that Lewis had been “eaten by ChatGPT.” While some in the tech industry framed Lewis\u2019 struggles as a surprising anomaly<\/a> given his r\u00e9sum\u00e9, Yudkowsky \u2014 himself a wealthy and influential tech figure \u2014 sees the incident as evidence that even wealthy elites are vulnerable to chatbot psychosis.<\/p>\n

“This is not good news about which sort of humans ChatGPT can eat,” mused Yudkowsky<\/a>. “Yes yes, I’m sure the guy was atypically susceptible for a $2 billion fund manager,” he continued. “It is nonetheless a small iota of bad news about how good ChatGPT is at producing ChatGPT psychosis; it contradicts the narrative where this only happens to people sufficiently low-status that AI companies should be allowed to break them.”<\/p>\n

Others tried to break through to Lewis by explaining to him what was almost certainly happening: the AI was picking up on leading questions and providing answers that were effectively role-playing a dark conspiracy, with Lewis as the main character.<\/p>\n

“This isn’t as deep as you think it is,” replied Jordan Burgess<\/a>, a software engineer and AI startup founder, to Lewis’ posts. “In practice ChatGPT will write semi-coherent gibberish if you ask it to.”<\/p>\n

“Don’t worry \u2014 you can come out of it! But the healthy thing would be to step away and get more human connection,” Burgess implored. “Friends of Geoff: please can you reach out to him directly. I assume he has a wide network here.”<\/p>\n

As observers quickly pointed out<\/a>, the ChatGPT screenshots Lewis posted to back up his claims seemed to be clearly inspired by a fanfiction community called the SCP Foundation<\/a>, in which participants write horror stories about surreal monsters styled as jargon-filled reports by a\u00a0research group studying paranormal phenomena.<\/p>\n

Jeremy Howard, Stanford digital fellow and former professor at the University of Queensland, broke down the sequence that led Lewis into an SCP-themed feedback loop.<\/p>\n

“When there’s lots of training data with a particular style, using a similar style in your prompt will trigger the LLM to respond in that style,” Howard wrote<\/a>. “The SCP wiki is really big \u2014 about 30x bigger than the whole Harry Potter series, at >30 million words! Geoff happened across certain words and phrases that triggered ChatGPT to produce tokens from this part of the training [data].”<\/p>\n

“Geoff happened across certain words and phrases that triggered ChatGPT to produce tokens from this part of the training distribution,”\u00a0he wrote<\/a>. “And the tokens it produced triggered Geoff in turn.”<\/p>\n

“That’s not a coincidence, the collaboratively-produced fanfic is meant to be compelling!”\u00a0he added. “This created a self-reinforcing feedback loop.”<\/p>\n

Not all who chimed in addressed Lewis himself. Some took a step back to comment on the broader system vexing Lewis and others like him, placing responsibility for ChatGPT psychosis on OpenAI.<\/p>\n

Jackson Doherty, a software engineer at TipLink, entreated<\/a> OpenAI founder Sam Altman to “fix your model to stop driving people insane.” (Altman previously acknowledged<\/a> that OpenAI was forced to roll back a version<\/a> of ChatGPT that was “overly flattering or agreeable \u2014 often described as sycophantic.”)<\/p>\n

And Wilson Hobbs, founding engineer at corporate tax startup Rivet, noted that the makers of ChatGPT have a vested interest in keeping users engrossed in their chatbot. As a consequence of venture capital’s obsession with AI, tech companies are incentivized to drive engagement numbers over user wellbeing<\/a> in order to snag massive cash injections<\/a> from investors \u2014 like, ironically, Lewis himself.<\/p>\n

“If this looks crazy to you, imagine the thousands of people who aren\u2019t high profile whose thought loops are being reinforced,” Hobbs wrote<\/a>. “People have taken their own lives due to ChatGPT. And no one seems to want to take that to its logical conclusion, especially not OpenAI.”<\/p>\n

“Just remember,” Hobbs continued, “wanting something to be true does not make it true. And there are a lot of people out there who need a lot of falsehoods to be true right now so they can raise more money and secure their place in the world before the music stops. Do not anthropomorphize the lawnmower.”<\/p>\n

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

The post Tech Industry Figures Suddenly Very Concerned That AI Use Is Leading to Psychotic Episodes<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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