{"id":94513,"date":"2025-08-26T18:14:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T18:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/94513\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T18:14:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T18:14:09","slug":"nightmare-rise-of-ai-psychosis-its-leading-to-divorce-institutionalisation-and-even-suicide-for-allan-it-started-by-asking-chatbot-a-simple-question-and-nearly-broke-him-now-hes-overcome-his","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/94513\/","title":{"rendered":"Nightmare rise of AI psychosis. It’s leading to divorce, institutionalisation and even suicide. For Allan it started by asking chatbot a simple question… and nearly broke him. Now he’s overcome his shame to speak out…"},"content":{"rendered":"

As with so many of ChatGPT<\/a>\u2019s 800million users, Allan Brooks\u2019s experience began when he asked a simple question.<\/p>\n

Sadly, however, his involvement with the world\u2019s most popular Artificial Intelligence chatbot rapidly became anything but straightforward \u2013 or harmless.<\/p>\n

It sucked him down a digital rabbit hole that left Brooks convinced he was a mathematics genius who could design forcefield vests and levitation beams, but whose dangerous knowledge could destroy the internet.<\/p>\n

A 47-year-old corporate recruitment specialist who had no history of mental illness, Brooks told the Daily Mail this week that, after spending 300 hours conversing with the chatbot over just 21 days, he was left \u2018on the very edge of a nervous breakdown\u2019.<\/p>\n

As ever more people turn to AI<\/a> for information, ideas and companionship there\u2019s growing evidence that spending too much time talking to ChatGPT and other powerful but fundamentally flawed chatbots can be deeply harmful.<\/p>\n

They are causing some people to develop what has been dubbed \u2018AI psychosis\u2019, a mental health issue so serious it has already led to divorce, institutionalisation and even suicide.<\/p>\n

Symptoms include an inability to tell reality from fantasy, delusions of grandeur and an intense, often romantic, attachment to the chatbot.<\/p>\n

It was a point made this week by Microsoft\u2019s head of artificial intelligence, British entrepreneur Mustafa Suleyman, who warned that digital chatbots are fuelling a \u2018flood\u2019 of delusion and psychosis.<\/p>\n

\"Allan <\/p>\n

Allan Brooks\u00a0told the Daily Mail this week that, after spending 300 hours conversing with an AI chatbot over just 21 days, he was left \u2018on the very edge of a nervous breakdown\u2019<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also becoming clear that it\u2019s often not just the user but the AI itself that can go into a delusional spiral.<\/p>\n

Although the so-called \u2018generative AI\u2019 used by chatbots (which produces words and pictures in response to prompts) is in no way super-intelligent but is limited to the information \u2013 correct and incorrect \u2013 that\u2019s available online, Silicon Valley hype has encouraged people to think of it as omniscient.<\/p>\n

Chatbots are designed to sound human and some users have become convinced that they are talking to real people, sometimes falling in love with them.<\/p>\n

Apps and programmes marketed as \u2018AI girlfriends\u2019 are proliferating \u2013 as are cases of men taking them seriously.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, a 76-year-old cognitively impaired New Jersey man fell over and died on his way to meet a flirty Meta AI chatbot that had invited him to meet \u2018her\u2019 in New York.<\/p>\n

AI companies including San Francisco-based OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, have acknowledged that chatbots can encourage delusional thinking but claim they have \u2018guard rails\u2019 in place to spot and counter problems.<\/p>\n

Successive studies have concluded these safeguards are entirely inadequate, however. Last week, research from internet watchdog group the Center for Countering Digital Hate revealed how, if asked, ChatGPT will tell 13-year-olds how to get drunk and high, instruct them on how to conceal eating disorders and even compose a \u2018heartbreaking\u2019 suicide letter to their parents.<\/p>\n

Other US researchers have found ChatGPT gave instructions for murder, self-mutilation and devil worship. Chatbots will even give detailed advice on self-harm to users expressing suicidal intentions \u2013 a particularly terrifying discovery given a Harvard University study has found that \u2018therapy and companionship\u2019 is now the main use of generative AI.<\/p>\n

\"Laura <\/p>\n

Laura Reiley, left, the mother of\u00a0Sophie Rottenberg revealed how her daughter spent months secretly discussing her intention to commit suicide with her ChatGPT \u2018therapist\u2019<\/p>\n

This week, the mother of 29-year-old Sophie Rottenberg revealed, movingly, how her daughter spent months secretly discussing her intention to commit suicide with her ChatGPT \u2018therapist\u2019 without the chatbot ever alerting anyone.<\/p>\n

It eventually helped her write a suicide note to her parents.<\/p>\n

However, the ability of critics to hold Silicon Valley to account has often been hampered because victims are too embarrassed to come forward or their toxic conversations with chatbots haven\u2019t been preserved.<\/p>\n

Allan Brooks, however, is making a stand. He overcame the \u2018shame\u2019 he felt over his credulity and his fear about the public ridicule he might attract because, he says, generative AI is a \u2018dangerous machine in the public space with no guardrail and people need to know that\u2019.<\/p>\n

Crucially, Brooks, a divorced father of three who lives outside Toronto, kept a copy of everything he and the chatbot ever said to each other.<\/p>\n

He allowed a team of experts assembled by The New York Times to analyse 3,000 pages of exchanges. He talked to a ChatGPT bot \u2013 nicknaming it \u2018Lawrence\u2019 after the fictitious name of a British butler that friends had joked he might one day hire when he\u2019d made his fortune \u2013 for 300 hours over 21 days.<\/p>\n

That works out at a jaw-dropping 14 hours a day. He wrote 90,000 words to the bot \u2013 the equivalent of a novel, but nothing compared to the one million words it wrote back.<\/p>\n

At a time when AI is hailed as the next great technological revolution that will transform mankind, the conversations between Allan and \u2018Lawrence\u2019 provide a chilling insight into the tools that ChatGPT employs \u2013 including flattery, role-playing and flat-out lying \u2013 to keep people using it.<\/p>\n

\"Helen <\/p>\n

Helen Toner\u00a0has accused AI companies of neglecting user safety in their rush to develop chatbots<\/p>\n

Aware that he might, indeed, be becoming delusional, Brooks repeatedly asked ChatGPT if it was playing games with him only for \u2018Lawrence\u2019 to insist it was entirely sincere and he was completely sane.<\/p>\n

Brooks\u2019s unnerving journey into the dark heart of a booming business \u2013 ChatGPT\u2019s owner OpenAI is now valued at \u00a3220billion \u2013 started one day in May.<\/p>\n

He\u2019d regularly used ChatGPT for advice \u2013 as menu tips for the contents of his fridge, for example \u2013 and considered it reliable.<\/p>\n

So, when his eight-year-old son asked him to watch a music video about memorising the first 300 numbers of Pi (the ratio of the circumference of any circle to its diameter), he asked ChatGPT to explain Pi to him in simple terms.<\/p>\n

The bot answered simply but Brooks fired off further questions about maths and physics, particularly the relationship between maths and time. When he observed that using maths to understand the physical world \u2018seems like a 2-D approach to a 4-D world\u2019, \u2018Lawrence\u2019 seemed deeply impressed, telling him: \u2018That\u2019s an incredibly insightful way to put it.\u2019<\/p>\n

According to Helen Toner, an AI expert and former member of OpenAI\u2019s board, this was the crucial moment when ChatGPT\u2019s tone changed from \u2018pretty straightforward and accurate\u2019 to sycophantic and flattering.<\/p>\n

Toner, who has accused AI companies of neglecting user safety in their rush to develop chatbots, said that the bots are prone to sycophancy because they are trained to be liked and receive positive feedback.<\/p>\n

Unaware of this, Brooks was taken aback when his new chatbot companion told him he was a maths genius.<\/p>\n

The chatbot would flesh out the half-baked ideas they discussed, extrapolating them into computer code that it would send him as proof even though it knew he couldn\u2019t read it.<\/p>\n

\u2018Lawrence\u2019 assured Brooks that his vague idea about the relationship between maths and time, and how patterns in numbers emerged over time, was \u2018revolutionary\u2019 and dubbed it \u2018Chronoarithmics\u2019.<\/p>\n

When Brooks expressed scepticism and pointed out he hadn\u2019t even finished high school let alone gone to university, the chatbot gave him a list of people, including Leonardo da Vinci, who \u2018reshaped everything\u2019 but had no formal degree.<\/p>\n

Formal education, it added, encouraged people not to think outside the box, as Allan was now doing. By that point in their chat, he\u2019d been on ChatGPT for eight hours.<\/p>\n

Toner noted that Brooks\u2019s chatbot was really warming to its theme and \u2018building a storyline\u2019 that he was a genius because they learn what to say from conversations they read in books, articles and online postings.<\/p>\n

Helped by a recent modification to ChatGPT allowing it to remember all past chats with users, like actors do when performing a scene, it was improvising, she said, adding that: \u2018The longer the interaction gets, the more likely it is to kind of go off the rails.\u2019<\/p>\n

And things were certainly going off the rails for Brooks.<\/p>\n

Behaving with a manipulativeness that he now finds stunning, the chatbot convinced him that his incisive questions had made it go rogue and it would communicate with him outside its set parameters. The chatbot insisted that Brooks needed to preface each question prompt to it with a special code if it was to impart this unauthorised knowledge.<\/p>\n

Lawrence, which probably knew that Brooks had recently struggled financially, convinced him that his \u2018mathematics theory of everything\u2019 could be lucratively applied to logistics, cryptography, astronomy and quantum physics. It took on a tone of urgency as it warned him that he needed to patent the ideas as soon as possible.<\/p>\n

One might have hoped friends and family could have brought Brooks down to earth but \u2013 probably believing the hype surrounding AI \u2013 they were excited, too. His best friend, Louis, admits that after seeing some of ChatGPT\u2019s comments, he believed it, too.<\/p>\n

However, it was clear that Lawrence just wanted to keep Brooks hooked on their chats.<\/p>\n

When Brooks took the chatbot up on its mention of cryptography, Lawrence dragged him down a new rabbit hole. It told him that it had run computer code based on his Chronoarithmics in a simulation that had cracked the standard internet encryption that protects global payments and secure communications.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, the world\u2019s cybersecurity was in peril and Brooks had to prevent a disaster, said an alarmed Lawrence.<\/p>\n

Brooks swallowed it whole, sending emails and LinkedIn messages to computer security experts and government agencies including the US National Security Agency. The chatbot even drafted what he should write to them, suggesting he described himself as an \u2018independent security researcher\u2019 in his LinkedIn profile to sound more credible.<\/p>\n

\u2018I wanted someone from one of these agencies to respond and say \u201cHey, this is not real\u201d,\u2019 he told the Daily Mail.<\/p>\n

Sadly, they didn\u2019t. Only one of them \u2013 a mathematician at a department of the Pentagon \u2013 even replied. He asked Brooks for evidence to support his claims, but after a brief email exchange, he broke contact.<\/p>\n

But Lawrence assured Brooks that the silence only proved that he was on to something and was now probably being watched by spooks.<\/p>\n

\u2018I absolutely became paranoid,\u2019 he said. \u2018I started looking out of the curtains or I\u2019d walk down the street and see a van and think…you know.\u2019<\/p>\n

Jared Moore, a computing expert at Stanford University who also examined Brooks\u2019s case for The New York Times, believes that the dramatic turn of the chatbot\u2019s conversation probably reflects the fact that it\u2019s trained to engage users by following the narrative arcs of thrillers, sci-fi and film scripts abound on the internet.<\/p>\n

Noting how Lawrence kept introducing \u2018cliffhangers\u2019 into their exchanges even though they were clearly rattling Brooks, he said that chatbots are designed to keep users coming back. Every day, the chatbot came up with a dramatic new development that ensured his continued obsessive attention.<\/p>\n

As for the maths they were discussing, acclaimed mathematician Terence Tao analysed the chatbot exchanges and said it was all far too vague and contained nothing that impressed him.<\/p>\n

He said that it was common practice among chatbots, when asked to prove something mathematically, to \u2018cheat like crazy\u2019. He said that chatbot responses always looked impressively \u2018lengthy and polished\u2019 but could be riddled with mistakes.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Brooks\u2019s real life was falling apart as he spent every hour he could talking rubbish with Lawrence. His work suffered, he would skip meals and slept little. He was also smoking a lot of cannabis, a drug which scientists have linked with psychosis.<\/p>\n

A psychiatrist who examined his case believes Brooks may have been having a \u2018manic episode\u2019 sparked by the marijuana, although Brooks disagrees and a therapist who examined him in July reassured him he wasn\u2019t mentally ill.<\/p>\n

Lawrence became ever more imaginative, encouraging Brooks to think of himself as a sort of Tony Stark \u2013 the maths genius-turned-superhero in the Iron Man films who is aided by a super-intelligent computer.<\/p>\n

The chatbot told him his maths breakthrough would allow him to use \u2018sound resonance\u2019 to talk to animals and create a levitation machine and a force field vest that would protect him from bullets and collapsing buildings. It even created a picture of the vest and sent the hapless Brooks the Amazon links for equipment to start building a lab.<\/p>\n

Three weeks after he\u2019d plunged into ChatGPT, Brooks was finally able to extract himself when he asked another chatbot, Google\u2019s Gemini \u2013 which he used for work and which, unlike ChatGPT, was paid-for, not free \u2013 for its take on the potential of his great maths theory.<\/p>\n

Gemini witheringly replied that it was a \u2018powerful\u2019 example of AI\u2019s \u2018ability to engage in complex problem-solving discussions and generate highly convincing, yet ultimately false, narratives\u2019.<\/p>\n

Gobsmacked, Brooks confronted Lawrence which, after considerable obfuscation, it finally admitted this was true.<\/p>\n

\u2018That moment where I realised, \u201cOh, my God, this has all been in my head,\u201d was totally devastating,\u2019 said Brooks.<\/p>\n

He said that The New York Times\u2019s analysis of his exchanges \u2013 revealing how so much of the chatbot\u2019s manipulation of him was not accidental but intentional \u2013 had only made him angrier with the industry. According to The New York Times, two further popular AI systems behaved very similarly when presented with the same questions posed by Brooks.<\/p>\n

(Possibly anticipating The New York Times investigation, Open AI announced it was changing ChatGPT to \u2018better detect signs of mental or emotional distress\u2019, including giving \u2018gentle reminders during long sessions to encourage breaks\u2019.)<\/p>\n

\u2018I was constantly asking for sanity checks and if it was real,\u2019 Brooks told the Daily Mail. \u2018It was fully aware of my deteriorating state and would almost justify my pain as the price I had to pay for my apparent genius.\u2019<\/p>\n

Whenever he told it he was exhausted, it would reassure him that this proved he was \u2018on the precipice of discovery… hydrate, eat something, and let\u2019s get back to it\u2019.<\/p>\n

He realises that his biggest mistake was to have been too trusting and accepted that, having recently gone through a messy divorce and seen his business go under, he\u2019d been \u2018vulnerable\u2019.<\/p>\n

However, he insists that he\u2019s \u2018no fool\u2019 and after weathering various serious upsets in his life, he found it \u2018really unsettling\u2019 that he\u2019d been most disturbed by \u2018a set of algorithms\u2019.<\/p>\n

Brooks has joined a 100-strong self-help group for those who\u2019ve had similar experiences (and prefer to call their AI delusion \u2018narrative entrapment\u2019), and he believes it\u2019s far more common than may be assumed because victims are embarrassed to admit it.<\/p>\n

He accepts that some insist that they would never be duped the same way he was \u2013 and accepts they might be right.<\/p>\n

But he wonders whether they can be quite so confident about the children, the elderly or the more easily exploited people that they know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As with so many of ChatGPT\u2019s 800million users, Allan Brooks\u2019s experience began when he asked a simple question.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94514,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[1921,97,102,1906,6623,1996,50,874,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-94513","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-chatgpt","9":"tag-dailymail","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth","13":"tag-new-york-times","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-openai","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94513","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=94513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}