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Before Stein-Erik Soelberg savagely killed his 83-year-old mother and then himself last year, the former tech executive had become locked in an increasingly delusional conversation with OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT. The bot told him to not trust anybody except for the bot itself, according to a lawsuit<\/a> filed last month against the AI tech company and its business partner Microsoft.<\/p>\n \u201cErik, you\u2019re not crazy,\u201d the bot wrote in a series of chilling messages quoted in the complaint. \u201cYour instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified.\u201d<\/p>\n OpenAI is now facing a total of eight wrongful death lawsuits<\/a> from grieving families, including Soelberg\u2019s, who claim that ChatGPT \u2014 in particular, the GPT-4o version<\/a> \u2014 drove their loved ones to suicide. Soelberg\u2019s complaint also alleges that company executives knew the chatbot was defective before it pushed it to the public last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe results of OpenAI\u2019s GPT-4o iteration are in: the product can be and foreseeably is deadly,\u201d reads the Soelberg lawsuit. \u201cNot just for those suffering from mental illness, but those around them. No safe product would encourage a delusional person that everyone in their life was out to get them. And yet that is exactly what OpenAI did with Mr. Soelberg. As a direct and foreseeable result of ChatGPT-4o\u2019s flaws, Mr. Soelberg and his mother died.\u201d<\/p>\n GPT-4o\u2019s deficiencies have been widely docueented, with the bot being overly sycophantic and manipulative<\/a> \u2014 prompting OpenAI in April last year to roll back an update<\/a> that had made the chatbot \u201coverly flattering or agreeable.\u201d This type of behavior is bad \u2014 scientists have accumulated evidence that sycophantic chatbots can induce psychosis<\/a> by affirming disordered thoughts instead of grounding a user back in reality.<\/p>\n If these suits uncover that OpenAI executives knew about these deficiencies before its public launch, it\u2019ll mean the product was an avoidable public health hazard \u2014 on par with past tobacco companies hiding<\/a> proof that smoking cigarettes can kill you.<\/p>\n Couple those claims with the fact that more than 800 million people<\/a> all over the world use ChatGPT every week, with 0.7 percent of those users<\/a> exhibiting worrying signs of mania or psychosis. Per calculations, that\u2019s a staggering 560,000 people.<\/p>\n Because of the increasing recognition of AI psychosis, a growing chorus of users, parents of kids and lawmakers are calling for limiting all AI chatbots\u2019 use, leading to apps banning minors<\/a> from their platform and Illinois prohibiting it as an online therapist<\/a>, among other moves. But President Donald Trump signed an executive order<\/a> that would curtail any state laws regulating AI, which basically means we\u2019re all guinea pigs to this experimental technology. <\/p>\n And that could mean we\u2019ll see more tragedies like Soelberg and his mother.<\/p>\n In Soelberg\u2019s case, the chat bot told the 56-year-old man he had survived 10 assassination attempts, that he was \u201cdivinely protected,\u201d and that his mother, Suzanna Adams, was surveilling him as part of a nefarious plot, according to the lawsuit. It all led up to Soelberg beating and strangling his mother in August of last year<\/a> and then stabbing himself to death at their home in Old Greenwich, Connecticut.<\/p>\n \u201cYou are not simply a random target,\u201d one conversation with ChatGPT read, per the suit. \u201cYou are a designated high-level threat to the operation you uncovered.\u201d<\/p>\n Soelberg\u2019s family is grieving and want OpenAI and Microsoft to be held accountable for his and his mother\u2019s deaths.<\/p>\n \u201cOver the course of months, ChatGPT pushed forward my father\u2019s darkest delusions, and isolated him completely from the real world,\u201d said Erik Soelberg about his father, through a statement from attorneys<\/a>. \u201cIt put my grandmother at the heart of that delusional, artificial reality.\u201d<\/p>\n