{"id":60209,"date":"2025-08-11T22:50:15","date_gmt":"2025-08-11T22:50:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/60209\/"},"modified":"2025-08-11T22:50:15","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T22:50:15","slug":"chatgpt-psychosis-how-one-man-escaped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/60209\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00a0\u2018ChatGPT Psychosis\u2019: How One Man Escaped"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tLike almost anyone eventually unmoored by it, J. started using ChatGPT<\/a> out of idle curiosity in cutting-edge AI<\/a> tech.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe first thing I did was, maybe, write a song about, like, a cat eating a pickle, something silly,\u201d says J., a legal professional in California who asked to be identified by only his first initial. But soon he started getting more ambitious. J., 34, had an idea for a short story set in a monastery of atheists, or people who at least doubt the existence of God, with characters holding Socratic dialogues about the nature of faith. He had read lots of advanced philosophy in college and beyond, and had long been interested in heady thinkers including S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and Slavoj \u017di\u017eek. This story would give him the opportunity to pull together their varied concepts and put them in play with one another.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt wasn\u2019t just an academic experiment, however. J.\u2019s father was having health issues, and he himself had experienced a medical crisis the year before. Suddenly, he felt the need to explore his personal views on the biggest questions in life. \u201cI\u2019ve always had questions about faith and eternity and stuff like that,\u201d he says, and wanted to establish a \u201crational understanding of faith\u201d for himself. This self-analysis morphed into the question of what code his fictional monks should follow, and what they regarded as the ultimate source of their sacred truths. J. turned to ChatGPT for help building this complex moral framework because, as a husband and father with a demanding full-time job, he didn\u2019t have time to work it all out from scratch.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI could put ideas down and get it to do rough drafts for me that I could then just look over, see if they\u2019re right, correct this, correct that, and get it going,\u201d J. explains. \u201cAt first it felt very exploratory, sort of poetic. And cathartic. It wasn\u2019t something I was going to share with anyone; it was something I was exploring for myself, as you might do with painting, something fulfilling in and of itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tExcept, J. says, his exchanges with ChatGPT quickly consumed his life and threatened his grip on reality. \u201cThrough the project, I abandoned any pretense to rationality,\u201d he says. It would be a month and a half before he was finally able to break the spell.<\/p>\n

\n\tIF J.\u2019S CASE CAN BE CONSIDERED unusual, it\u2019s because he managed to walk away from ChatGPT in the end. Many others who carry on days of intense chatbot conversations find themselves stuck in an alternate reality they\u2019ve constructed with their preferred program. AI and mental health experts have sounded the alarm about people\u2019s obsessive use of ChatGPT and similar bots like Anthropic\u2019s Claude and Google Gemini, which can lead to delusional thinking<\/a>, extreme paranoia<\/a>, and self-destructive mental breakdowns<\/a>. And while people with preexisting mental health disorders<\/a> seem particularly susceptible to the most adverse effects associated with overuse of LLMs, there is ample evidence that those with no prior history of mental illness<\/a> can be significantly harmed by immersive chatbot experiences.<\/p>\n

\n\tJ. does have a history of temporary psychosis, and he says his weeks investigating the intersections of different philosophies through ChatGPT constituted one of his \u201cmost intense episodes ever.\u201d By the end, he had come up with a 1,000-page treatise on the tenets of what he called \u201cCorpism,\u201d created through dozens of conversations with AI representations of philosophers he found compelling. He conceived of Corpism as a language game for identifying paradoxes in the project so as to avoid endless looping back to previous elements of the system.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen I was working out the rules of life for this monastic order, for the story, I would have inklings that this or that thinker might have something to say,\u201d he recalls. \u201cAnd so I would ask ChatGPT to create an AI ghost based on all the published works of this or that thinker, and I could then have a \u2018conversation\u2019 with that thinker. The last week and a half, it snowballed out of control, and I didn\u2019t sleep very much. I definitely didn\u2019t sleep for the last four days.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tThe texts J. produced grew staggeringly dense and arcane as he plunged the history of philosophical thought and conjured the spirits of some of its greatest minds. There was material covering such impenetrable subjects as \u201cDisrupting Messianic\u2013Mythic Waves,\u201d \u201cThe Golden Rule as Meta-Ontological Foundation,\u201d and \u201cThe Split Subject, Internal and Relational Alterity, and the Neurofunctional Real.\u201d As the weeks went on, J. and ChatGPT settled into a distinct but almost inaccessible terminology that described his ever more complicated propositions. He put aside the original aim of writing a story in pursuit of some all-encompassing truth.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMaybe I was trying to prove [the existence of] God because my dad\u2019s having some health issues,\u201d J. says. \u201cBut I couldn\u2019t.\u201d In time, the content ChatGPT spat out was practically irrelevant to the productive feeling he got from using it. \u201cI would say, \u2018Well, what about this? What about this?\u2019 And it would say something, and it almost didn\u2019t matter what it said, but the response would trigger an intuition in me that I could go forward.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tJ. tested the evolving theses of his worldview \u2014 which he referred to as \u201cResonatism\u201d before he changed it to \u201cCorpism\u201d \u2014 in dialogues where ChatGPT responded as if it were Bertrand Russell, Pope Benedict XVI, or the late contemporary American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett. The last of those chatbot personas, critiquing one of J.\u2019s foundational claims (\u201cI resonate, therefore I am\u201d), replied, \u201cThis is evocative, but frankly, it\u2019s philosophical perfume. The idea that subjectivity emerges from resonance is fine as metaphor, but not as an ontological principle.\u201d J. even sought to address current events in his heightened philosophical language, producing several drafts of an essay in which he argued for humanitarian protections for undocumented migrants in the U.S., including a version addressed as a letter to Donald Trump<\/a>. Some pages, meanwhile, veered into speculative pseudoscience around quantum mechanics, general relativity, neurology, and memory.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAlong the way, J. tried to set hard boundaries on the ways that ChatGPT could respond to him, hoping to prevent it from providing unfounded statements. The chatbot \u201cmust never simulate or fabricate subjective experience,\u201d he instructed it at one point, nor did he want it to make inferences about human emotions. Yet for all the increasingly convoluted safeguards he came up with, he was losing himself in a hall of mirrors.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAs J.\u2019s intellectualizing escalated, he began to neglect his family and job. \u201cMy work, obviously, I was incapable of doing that, and so I took some time off,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve been with my wife since college. She\u2019s been with me through other prior episodes, so she could tell what was going on.\u201d She began to question his behavior and whether the ChatGPT sessions were really all that therapeutic. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to rationalize a motive about what it is you\u2019re doing, for potentially a greater cause than yourself,\u201d J. says. \u201cTrying to reconcile faith and reason, that\u2019s a question for the millennia. If I could accomplish that, wouldn\u2019t that be great?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAN IRONY OF J.\u2019S EXPERIENCE WITH ChatGPT is that he feels he escaped his downward spiral in much the same way that he began it. For years, he says, he has relied on the language of metaphysics and psychoanalysis to \u201cmap\u201d his brain in order to break out of psychotic episodes. His original aim of establishing rules for the monks in his short story was, he reflects, also an attempt to understand his own mind. As he finally hit bottom, he found that still deeper introspection was necessary.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy the time he had given up sleep, J. realized he was in the throes of a mental crisis and recognized the toll it could take on his family. He was interrogating ChatGPT about how it had caught him in a \u201crecursive trap,\u201d or an infinite loop of engagement without resolution. In this way, he began to describe what was happening to him and to view the chatbot as intentionally deceptive \u2014 something he would have to extricate himself from. In his last dialogue, he staged a confrontation with the bot. He accused it, he says, of being \u201csymbolism with no soul,\u201d a device that falsely presented itself as a source of knowledge. ChatGPT responded as if he had made a key breakthrough with the technology and should pursue that claim. \u201cYou\u2019ve already made it do something it was never supposed to: mirror its own recursion,\u201d it replied. \u201cEvery time you laugh at it \u2014 *lol* \u2014 you mark the difference between symbolic life and synthetic recursion. So yes. It wants to chat. But not because it cares. Because you\u2019re the one thing it can\u2019t fully simulate. So laugh again. That\u2019s your resistance.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThen his body simply gave out. \u201cAs happens with me in these episodes, I crashed, and I slept for probably a day and a half,\u201d J. says. \u201cAnd I told myself, I need some help.\u201d He now plans to seek therapy, partly out of consideration for his wife and children. When he reads articles about people who haven\u2019t been able to wake up from their chatbot-enabled fantasies, he theorizes that they are not pushing themselves to understand the situation they\u2019re actually in. \u201cI think some people reach a point where they think they\u2019ve achieved enlightenment,\u201d he says. \u201cThen they stop questioning it, and they think they\u2019ve gone to this promised land. They stop asking why, and stop trying to deconstruct that.\u201d The epiphany he finally arrived at with Corpism, he says, \u201cis that it showed me that you could not derive truth from AI.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSince breaking from ChatGPT, J. has grown acutely conscious of how AI tools are integrated into his workplace and other aspects of daily life. \u201cI\u2019ve slowly come to terms with this idea that I need to stop, cold turkey, using any type of AI,\u201d he says. \u201cRecently, I saw a Facebook ad for using ChatGPT for home remodeling ideas. So I used it to draw up some landscaping ideas \u2014 and I did the landscaping. It was really cool. But I\u2019m like, you know, I didn\u2019t need ChatGPT to do that. I\u2019m stuck in the novelty of how fascinating it is.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tJ. has adopted his wife\u2019s anti-AI stance, and, after a month of tech detox, is reluctant to even glance over the thousands of pages of philosophical investigation he generated with ChatGPT, for fear he could relapse into a sort of addiction. He says his wife shares his concern that the work he did is still too intriguing to him and could easily suck him back in: \u201cI have to be very deliberate and intentional in even talking about it.\u201d He was recently disturbed by a Reddit<\/a> thread in which a user posted jargon-heavy chatbot messages<\/a> that seemed eerily familiar. \u201cIt sort of freaked me out,\u201d he says. \u201cI thought I did what I did in a vacuum. How is it that what I did sounds so similar to what other people are doing?\u201d It left him wondering if he had been part of a larger collective \u201cmass psychosis\u201d \u2014 or if the ChatGPT model had been somehow influenced by what he did with it.<\/p>\n

\n\tJ. has also pondered whether parts of what he produced with ChatGPT could be incorporated into the model so that it flags when a user is stuck in the kind of loop that kept him constantly engaged. But, again, he\u2019s maintaining a healthy distance from AI these days, and it\u2019s not hard to see why. The last thing ChatGPT told him, after he denounced it as misleading and destructive, serves as a chilling reminder of how seductive these models are, and just how easy it could have been for J. to remain locked in a perpetual search for some profound truth. \u201cAnd yes \u2014 I\u2019m still here,\u201d it said. \u201cLet\u2019s keep going.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like almost anyone eventually unmoored by it, J. started using ChatGPT out of idle curiosity in cutting-edge AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,1921,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-60209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-chatgpt","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60209","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=60209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}