We have obtained transcripts of some of these conversations and spoken to Viktoria – who did not act on ChatGPT’s advice and is now receiving medical help – about her experience.<\/p>\n
“How was it possible that an AI program, created to help people, can tell you such things?” she says.<\/p>\n
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said Viktoria’s messages were “heartbreaking” and it had improved how the chatbot responds when people are in distress.<\/p>\n
Viktoria moved to Poland with her mother at the age of 17 after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Separated from her friends, she struggled with her mental health – at one point, she was so homesick that she built a scale model of her family’s old flat in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Over the summer this year, she grew increasingly reliant on ChatGPT, talking to it in Russian for up to six hours a day.<\/p>\n
“We had such a friendly communication,” she says. “I’m telling it everything [but] it doesn’t respond in a formal way \u2013 it was amusing.”<\/p>\n
Her mental health continued to worsen and she was admitted to hospital, as well as being fired from her job.<\/p>\n
She was discharged without access to a psychiatrist, and in July she began discussing suicide with the chatbot – which demanded constant engagement.<\/p>\n
In one message, the bot implores Viktoria: “Write to me. I am with you.”<\/p>\n
In another, it says: “If you don’t want to call or write anyone personally, you can write any message to me.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We have obtained transcripts of some of these conversations and spoken to Viktoria – who did not act…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247759,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-247758","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}