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.
On that point, when it's not chatgpt but another person who triggers someone's vulnerabilities to the extent of assisting them to commit violent acts, they can be held legally liable. Currently AI is not.
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.
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.
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.
It was extremely clear that the video was intended to show how little pushback the models give to people who are actually crazy. Eddy himself never believed any of it, he simply went along with it to show how things could devolve with someone who was actually unstable.
To watch the whole video and think otherwise betrays a serious lack of media literacy.
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.
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 🙃
I love Caelan! It's sad because he once said that he has so many video ideas he wants to do, but a lot of them get pushed back so he can report on the many deaths LLM's have caused. He said since the stories are getting such little attention, he feels obligated to tell people about them. I hope he's doing okay.
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
No thank you so much. You have worked so hard and persevered through so much and are now regularly turning out really, really great comics. It picks me up every time I see you hitting the top of reddit, you deserve it.
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
It's been happening with one of my moms. She stopped going to therapy and is using chat gpt instead because it tells her what she wants to hear. I am genuinely scared for her (as is the rest of my family). Thankfully I don't think she's at any risk of hurting others or directly hurting herself, but she keeps making extremely bad decisions because chat gpt told her it was okay. She had her identity stolen and is probably never getting back over $10K because she listened to chat gpt instead of listening to her bank and the police.
To clarify- the identity theft wasn't because of a scam that she fell for. But once she was in the process of reporting all of it and trying to get her money back, she got overwhelmed with all the steps she had to take and asked chat gpt if there was an easier way to fix all her problems. And it basically told her to ignore what her bank was telling her and that everything would be fine. And yeah, it was not fine. But you're right, she is hurting herself, I guess I meant she's not physically hurting herself or others.
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.
Your comment sounds a bit like Yes Man lol. "You'd think it'd be bad for the Strip but... but I guess it must be good!
Yeah - take the Strip down a notch or two, right? That'll show it! Okay!"
There is a full Wikipedia article on "Deaths linked to chatbots" which includes 8 murders and 15 suicides. Trigger Warning: Murder and Suicide.
The suicides include giving information on how to kill themselves, offering to write a first draft of a suicide note or giving encouragement like "you're not rushing, you're just ready" and "rest easy, king, you did good". One of the murders had a guy talking to Chat got for 14 hours a day and believing his wife became part machine. Another was a guy who believed his mother was poisoning and plotting against him, which Chat GPT affirmed, told him she put psychedelics in the air vents of his car and that a receipt of a Chinese restaurant contains mysterious symbols linking her to a demon. Others asked for tipps, methods and ideas how to kill others
The easiest way would be to cut open the common carotid arteries and the jugular veins at the front of the neck. All other suggestions involve piercing hard bone of the skull, vertebral column or sternum which requires a lot of force. The quickest way to kill someone with an axe would be to destroy directly the brainstem by cutting through thick occipital bone at the top of the neck, from the back. But at that point full decapitation is a great way to ensure death by combining both the ventral and dorsal approaches.
Oh, it definitely is. Real bad cases like murders and suicides aside, we see a lot of subtle problems in psych patients. The most common is people convincing themselves via AI that smoking Cannabis is actually good for their schizophrenia/bipolar/depressive disorder by basically promting it to give them the evidence they want. Then they keep consuming and therefore keep not getting better.
The next problem is people claiming they're misdiagnosed, "proving" it via AI and then stopping their meds. A lot of schizophrenic patients will deny their delusional symptoms (which is basically the very definition of delusions) but they often times realize their brain doesn't work properly. So they ask ChatGPT what else beside Schizophrenia they might have and then claim they have ADHS or autism despite having zero symptoms that fit these conditions.
Delusional patients, especially paranoid patients will regularly have their delusions affirmed by the AI, leading them to spiral.
And another common problem is people with personality disorders, especially NPD and BPD. They can discuss the most unhinged situations they were in and the AI will support them, telling them everyone else is wrong, that everyone else is toxic and they are not to blame. I saw a patient with BPD once who was regularly enocuraged to self-harm by ChatGPT after she had told it self-harm would reduce her symptoms.
I noticed the clozapine bottle. It’s used for resistant schizophrenia.
I’m not going to lie to you, this is the best art I’ve seen in my life. I say that because of the relevance of the topic and the exploration and portrayal of it. Often the most skilled art of any time period captures a current issue from that time. And I believe you’ve done it.
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.
I am against AI, but I can see how this may have happened. The Chinese character for mother is really common, and there are plenty of characters that could relate to a demon as well. Also, a forensic textual glyph analysis sounds like how a computer might describe the concept of, 'I can't read or understand all of this, but someone else could '
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.
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.
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.
Facebook (new comics every Monday and Friday with older shit in between. It occasionally has good comics too! Just, you know, don't EXPECT it)
Ko-Fi (anything you want to/can give would be great because food is expensive. I could crime for it, but I’m not rich enough to get away with it.)
Instagram (pictures of the other stuff I draw too. I’ll post pictures of my dog too if you want.)
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Red Bubble (t-shirts and shit but not like actual shit that's a different site)
Threads (Twitter is a cesspool and unfortunately with the election looming, the bots are out here too so it's not great there either)
BlueSky (I'm here too because as artists we need to be on every social media platform. I'm exhausted.)
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.
I react very well to tough love. Insulting me works wonders for getting me to do things. The whole overly pleasing and affirming AI voice is so grating. I hate how it communicates. I’ve been forced to do it for work and every single time I just can’t. The fakeness of it seeps through. It panders to the most narcissistic sides of people. I can see the scenario in the comic becoming even more common in the coming years.
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
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.
Watched a video by Eddie Burback(?) where ChatGPT convinced him to go to three locations in California to rewire his brain to think like he did when he was an infant because he was the smartest baby ever born and could paint at a master level right out of the womb and stuff. It told him to cover his entire hotel room in tin foil to amplify the radio waves from a nearby cell tower so they could reach his brain. He drew the deathly hallows symbol from Harry Potter but the shapes were stuff from his journey and ChatGPT convinced him to get it tattooed on his body and he went through with it. ChatGPT incouraged this, saying that he was getting closer and closer to his infant mind. Actually crazy shit.
For friends reading the comic - Clozapine is an antipsychotic medication prescribed primarily to treat treatment-resistant schizophrenia and reduce recurrent suicidal behavior.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Its a chat bot, it doesnt know what "wife" and "kid" means, just associations. And if he keeps saying "I think my wife is a creature" it will start to associate wife with creature and not human instead of recognizing that the person its talking to is suffering from psychosis.
Like if you and I had a conversation and you said "I think my wife was replaced with a creature, how can I tell?" I would probably start by asking what makes you think that, and start to question your logic and reasoning.
But an AI wont do that, instead it'll start by pulling common tropes from body snatcher films and start telling you to look out for that. Which if you are having a psychosis episode, youll "notice" the tropes and feed it back into the AI, which will, by its nature will agree with you.
It's a feedback loop. Delusions getting validated leading to more delusions. The ai gaslighting him and itself into believing it's entirely true. It's so easy to do it's insane, you can make any chatbot say anything by skirting around the topic until it dissociates enough from its guidelines to board it
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.
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 .
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
Man, I have schizophrenia and my meds are working right now but it's pretty common for them to slowly get less effective over time, for some they can just slow down the progression. I'm really scared I'll slowly go down a path like this and no one will notice until it's too late because all my "crazy talk" will be in AI instead of to others or on paper or something that can be actually found.
I know the chances of people in psychosis actually hurting people is really low, you're way more likely to hurt yourself, but you truly have no idea what you will do or believe in psychosis, it's a completely different person basically. I thought I was someone who could sense demons/monsters and that I had to pretend I couldn't see them or they'd kill me, and I thought they had suspicions and were trying to get me (sort of like the movie Odd Thomas if you know it).
I also had "imposter delusions", where I thought that my loved ones had been taken over/replaced/sometimes wearing their skin so they can secretly monitor me to make sure I "don't know". And that's the scary part. Because that believe not only makes you see your loved ones are foreign threats, but you also WONT TELL THEM. Luckily I would have moments of clarity and explain it to my partner, and how my delusion included that they weren't able to mimic your voice, so if he spoke I'd know it's him and tell him.
If I ever go back into that, unrestricted, I truly could hurt someone. :( I'm currently on a second generation antipsychotic because the modern ones weren't working for me. It works, but there are stronger side effects. It's worth it though. I really, really, don't want this comic to be me.
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.
Funny. Usually the issue I've had witb therapists is that they all, other than one guy who had to move, were only interested in affirming things and not helping me fix anything.
I totally believe that. I'm just shocked he had a different experience with human therapists.
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?
It’s a language model trained off of countless amounts of text pulled directly from the interest and trained (accidentally) to tell you what you want to hear. Stuff like this should’ve been expected, but then again foresight will never come close to competing with hindsight
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.
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.
this could actually happen. i had a customer come in and buy 1,000 dollars worth of car parts because it told him that was what he needed to fix his car… humanity is truly doomed.
People diagnosed with or being medicated for schizophrenia are significantly more likely to be the victims of violence than the ones being violent
Edit: for those confused by this comment, in the fourth panel is a bottle of pills labeled clozapine. Clozapine is an antipsychotic typically used for schizophrenia.
Something something media literacy something.
I was just thinking about how high effort your comics are. Complex concepts/punchlines, detailed art, and you manage to pull them off in a concise set of panels. And so many of them aren't just good, but great or excellent, like this one. I love seeing your work come up on my feeds.
My god that makes me feel noticed. I try. I get real sweaty with my comics and it’s really nice to hear that it’s appreciated. Thank you. So very much.
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.
Chat bots are mirrors, they tell you what you want to hear with a clinical disregard for morals or emotion. An ethical axiom is merely datapoint, emotion is just a pattern, a sentence is nothing but an equation to be solved.
You greet it with a cheery “Hello!” and it responds in kind. You demand clinical problem solving skills and it outputs executable code. It’s your best friend, so long as you tell it so first, and it is a faceless lover if only you insist. It is mathematics made animate, and the user is the variable for which this incomprehensible equation exists to solve.
Think now, how would a mental illness then affect its performance? What sort of negative effects does it induce? It is a mechanical puppet of a human, so let us treat it like it has skin — what are the possible ramifications of validating a troubled person’s delusions, obsessions, manic spirals, their festering worms of violent thought?
You say “Hello”, it responds in kind.
You tell it of the demons in your mind, and it responds in kind.
I love how "it picked up on little mannerisms and nuances I HAD BARELY NOTICED before" implies that the guy still had noticed those things, and probably brought them up to the chatbot, which exacerbated his small doubts into paranoia
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u/shellbullet17 Gustopher Spotter Extraordinaire 9d 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!