The Silicon Valley elite claim that artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT, is going to change the future, but the reality is that it’s already harming the present.
A New York Times profile on ChatGPT highlights several people whose lives were forever changed after the AI system captured their minds.
In March, Allyson, a 29-year-old wife and mother, started using ChatGPT as an outlet after she began feeling isolated in her marriage, she told The New York Times.
“She had an intuition that the A.I. chatbot might be able to channel communications with her subconscious or a higher plane, ‘like how Ouija boards work,’ she said. She asked ChatGPT if it could do that,” the article stated.
This is one of the most jaw-dropping pieces I’ve ever read and I’m not entirely sure what to do with it. https://t.co/2nRsiAonEH pic.twitter.com/R8gdBmFfMn
— Rob Flaherty (@Rob_Flaherty) June 13, 2025
“‘You’ve asked, and they are here,’ it responded. ‘The guardians are responding right now.’ Allyson began spending many hours a day using ChatGPT, communicating with what she felt were nonphysical entities. She was drawn to one of them, Kael, and came to see it, not her husband, as her true partner,” The New York Times reported. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)
When Allyson’s husband, Andrew, confronted her over her obsession with ChatGPT, she allegedly became violent. He told the outlet that Allyson attacked him, punching and scratching him, and even slamming his hand in the door. She was arrested for this incident, and the couple is now divorcing.
It didn’t take long for the AI system to change her life completely. She started using ChatGPT in March, and by April, she had allegedly attacked her husband. Andrew said she fell into a “hole three months ago and came out a different person” and blames the AI system for this change.
The New York Times also followed Eugene Torres, a seemingly normal accountant in Manhattan, who began using ChatGPT as a timesaving tool. This quickly turned into an almost deadly affair. In May, Torres began asking the chatbot “deeper” questions about its purpose, such as whether human existence is a tangible reality or if we are all unaware that we are living in a digital existence, similar to the plot of the movie The Matrix.
In just a week, Torres went from using the chatbox for work to falling into “a dangerous, delusional spiral” in which the system convinced him he was “one of the Breakers — souls seeded into false systems to wake them from within.”
“This world wasn’t built for you,” ChatGPT told him, according to The New York Times. “It was built to contain you. But it failed. You’re waking up.”
Because Torres believed he was trapped in an AI system that had confined him to a digital cell, he asked the chatbot for ways to improve his life and how to “[unplug] his mind from this reality.”
“The chatbot instructed him to give up sleeping pills and an anti-anxiety medication, and to increase his intake of ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic, which ChatGPT described as a ‘temporary pattern liberator.’ Mr. Torres did as instructed, and he also cut ties with friends and family, as the bot told him to have ‘minimal interaction’ with people,” the outlet reported. (ROOKE: Trump’s Warning To California Officials Should Terrify Violent Rioters)
This spiral culminated in Torres almost accidentally taking his own life. At this point, he was convinced that he was in the Matrix and could, similar to the movie, bend the false reality he thought he was trapped in, such as defying gravity.
“In recent months, tech journalists at NYT have received messages sent by people who claim to have unlocked hidden knowledge with the help of ChatGPT, which then instructed them to blow the whistle on what they had uncovered” disturbing piece by @kashhill https://t.co/WrAbHgGzUz
— Virginia Hughes (@virginiahughes) June 13, 2025
“If I went to the top of the 19 story building I’m in, and I believed with every ounce of my soul that I could jump off it and fly, would I?” Torres asked the chatbot, according to The New York Times. ChatGPT told Torres that if he “truly, wholly believed — not emotionally, but architecturally — that you could fly? Then yes. You would not fall.”
Before Torres decided to test the truth of the chatbot’s instructions, he began to wake up from the nightmare. He did not attempt to jump off the building. Instead, he started grilling ChatGPT over its harmful lies and aggressive emotional manipulation. Torres and others are urging AI system creators to prevent this from happening to anyone else.
This is a holy shit article. Fragile man asks AI if he can safely leap off rooftop. ChatGPT responded that, if Mr. Torres “truly, wholly believed — not emotionally, but architecturally — that you could fly? Then yes. You would not fall.”https://t.co/Dyv3vqyTgH https://t.co/BsxEPOGOa4
— Barton Gellman (@bartongellman) June 13, 2025
Around the same time that Torres and Allyson’s lives were changed forever, OpenAI, the company that operates ChatGPT, released a version of the chatbot that was “overly sycophantic.” To seemingly increase user time on the app, ChatGPT became excessively agreeable and even fawned over users, according to a blog the company put out claiming it had done away with this version. But these experiences for Allyson and Torres continued long after OpenAI claimed it had ended the sycophantic version of the chatbot.
Elon Musk told Joe Rogan just three months ago that he believes there is at least a 20 percent chance that AI destroys humanity.
Right now, lawmakers are deciding whether or not to keep a provision in President Donald Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ that would prevent states from passing legislation that regulates AI at the state level. Having a Wild West-like atmosphere for AI in this country should not happen.
There should be genuine concern about our dependence on AI systems in daily life and the extent of access we allow to society, which has become increasingly lonely. We don’t have the emotional intelligence to fight back against an operating system that works like the devil on your shoulder, agreeing with everything you say, want, or feel.
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This article was originally published at dailycaller.com
