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Then OpenAI takes steps to mitigate those risks, and it becomes a salacious story as well.
Society having no idea what to expect from these tools makes this a difficult situation for LLM providers.
> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here. With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police . From there: > "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelb…
There's an awful lot of explaining to do between "one man has a psychotic breakdown" and "the species is not ready".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They tried to mitigate sycophancy in the GPT-5 release. Guess what happened? A lot of users started complaining that "GPT-5 sucks, my AI now HATES me". And OpenAI relented.
This is kind of a big problem. Because on the one hand, sycophancy is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. On the other hand, not being sycophantic is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. There are professionals who speak to people in crisis for a reason. That's because it's fraught with pitfalls and trapdoors that take the situation from "ment…
On one hand, the media hammered OpenAI for not doing enough to protect people from the possible harms of AI. Then OpenAI takes steps to mitigate those risks, and it becomes a salacious story as well. Society having no idea what to expect from these tools makes this a difficult situation for LLM providers.
What I would genuinely like to see in ChatGPT and similar services are well-implemented parental controls that allow a parent to monitor a child's conversations and get reports on them.
> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here. With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police . From there: > "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelb…
This is actually the URL: https://futurism.com/man-chatgpt-psychosis-murders-mother
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is kind of a big problem. Because on the one hand, sycophancy is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. On the other hand, not being sycophantic is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. There are professionals who speak to people in crisis for a reason. That's because it's fraught with pitfalls and trapdoors that take the situation from "ment…
I think "not being sycophantic" is the lesser error in just about every scenario. You do more harm by reinforcing delusions than you could ever do with a dismissive attitude of "no, that sounds psychotic, you should get your head checked". But a big part of the issue is that OpenAI wants user engagement - and "not being sycophantic" goes against that. They knew feeding raw user feedback into the training process invi…
> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here. With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police . From there: > "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelb…
The exchanges between a teenager and ChatGPT leading the former into suicide are equally chilling, to say the least: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Raine... > > “I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me,” ... > “Please don’t leave the noose out ... Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.” This is among other highlights, from kn…
Is genuinely such a horrifying snippet that it's almost beyond belief.
I'm surprised this isn't all over the mainstream news.