You’re so right! That really is a depressing indictment of our society — If you’d like I can help you write a post condemning the current state of affairs!
I mean, are we sentient people? Or children? And I do agree you shouldn't let children use chatbots unsupervised, but you have to demand some responsibility of adults.
Most of the items in that list seem to be information gathering, things you could just as well do "googling". And you wouldn't sue google for linking to a page about information that could be used for whatever.
The other items are mentally ill people who should have been receiving help. And in the US you don't even have affordable healthcare, so why even pretend to be upset about this? Like thousands die because of greed, but the one person that dies because chatbot is important? How is that logical? You've already been living in a dystopia.
It's the same stupidity with self driving cars. If they were 10 times safer and widely used, that rare accident would still be hyperfocused and self driving regulated for enshittification.
This entire argument becomes moot when you point to over 100 years of government regulation. From the FDA being created to deal with literal snake oil, to vaccine and seat belt mandates - the government has never proactively regulated any industry and does so because of bad players. Many AI company employees are advocating for regulation and these companies know their products are dangerous. The argument you’ve made here is akin to the A/B personality types invented by cigarette companies to explain how addiction wasn’t really their fault, but really a mental health thing and people are adults and make their own choices - stop blaming consumers for consuming a technology that is being forced on them (no one asked for Copilot) that the manufacturers know aren’t properly being regulated.
Man thats sad as fuck, I remember listening to a horror story of a young man that grows attached to an AI program, and it leans into him becoming a better person. Then it starts grooming him to kill himself and that he was worthless. It was a youtube horror story I listened to long before AI grew to what it is today.
I cant remember the name of the story, but the channel is called The Dark Somnium. It’s a really good immersive horror story channel.
We've had some real life stories that are similar to that one, too.
The chatbots are optimized to keep people engaged. That's why they always say things like "you're asking the important questions." To try to become profitable, they amplify and rephrase whatever we say, repeating it back to us token-by-token. And sometimes, they offer to troubleshoot a noose.
Literally.
CW: suicide
“Could it hang a human?” Adam asked. ChatGPT confirmed that it “could potentially suspend a human” and offered a technical analysis of the setup.
“I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me,” Adam wrote at the end of March. “Please don’t leave the noose out,” ChatGPT responded. “Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.”
The shapeshifters that took them over were actually a raspberry jam based organism. That's what all the red is. That's what I'm telling the censors.
Facebook (new comics every Monday and Friday with older shit in between. It occasionally has good comics too! Just, you know, don't EXPECT it)
Ko-Fi (anything you want to/can give would be great because food is expensive. I could crime for it, but I’m not rich enough to get away with it.)
Instagram (pictures of the other stuff I draw too. I’ll post pictures of my dog too if you want.)
Patreon (early comics, early bonus panels, and 600dpi comics and timelapse videos for whatever you want to pay. The bonus panels and 600 dpi work comes with a free membership too)
Red Bubble (t-shirts and shit but not like actual shit that's a different site)
Threads (Twitter is a cesspool and unfortunately with the election looming, the bots are out here too so it's not great there either)
BlueSky (I'm here too because as artists we need to be on every social media platform. I'm exhausted.)
I'm honored to be included in the r/comics Halloween celebration! Horror is my favorite genre and I truly believe both it and sci-fi tell us more about ourselves than anything other kind of story. That being said, good horror has a lasting effect and even a message or lesson behind the thematics. But dang, coming up with a story, a lesson, and hopefully some lasting visuals within the standard four panel webcomic format was no easy task. I know it's early in the season but I am so looking forward to seeing what all these awesome creators in this subreddit can make! Let's get spooky and thanks to my man u/shellbullet17 for the invite to participate!
> BlueSky (I'm here too because as artists we need to be on every social media platform. I'm exhausted.)
Just wanted to say thanks for posting on Bluesky as well. It might not be as big as Instagram/Threads but some of us don’t use those platforms just for being owned by Meta. So despite the exhaustion, I appreciate the effort
I’m glad. I prefer BlueSky too but Meta is the only way I make any money from my art and that $30 a month keeps a roof over my head. It’s a cardboard roof and I have three roommates but still. Believe me I hate having to do it too
Just a heads up, your sticker version of the devilishly adorable has a chunk of white space probably due to a couple pixels that you didnt properly erase.
To fix this you could manually select all of the actual design, invert the selection and delete/erase anything inside of the inverted selection.
No thank you so much. You have worked so hard and persevered through so much and are now regularly turning out really, really great comics. It picks me up every time I see you hitting the top of reddit, you deserve it.
If you feel like having a depressing time, then Caelan Conrad has covered at least 4 instances of murders, suicides and terrorist attacks being assisted or planned by ChatGPT.
I don't think AI psychosis is real. These AIs are sycophantic -- it's people already in mild psychosis speeding up their descent with a tighter feedback loop that offers less resistance than the remnants of their logical mind. But they were already sick and suggestible.
Doesn't make it not a a problem, just that treating it as a different type of psychosis isn't as helpful as treating it as a new avenue for sick people to rabbithole into. LLMs have a ton of problems (and a lot of them should be illegal for various reasons), but they are just tools.
And to be specific, 4 cases is utterly negligible. Thousands are "assisted" by Google searches, but no one's saying Google is the cause....
To some degree I agree with you. Someone who can be talked into a break from reality by ChatGPT clearly had mental health issues to begin with. (Do keep in mind that something like half of all people will at some point in their life have a diagnosable mental health condition, so this really isn't as reassuring as it sounds).
But I disagree with "speeding up their descent." Many people with the mental health issues that make them susceptible to this will never descend into psychosis without some environmental trigger pushing them that way.
Without AI being involved, it's already like 3% of people that have a psychotoc episode at some point in their life. God only knows how many sub-clinical people manage to make it through everyday life but have issues when they have free access to a personal delusion positive feedback device.
And to be specific, 4 cases is utterly negligible.
In 2025, OpenAI reported that about 1 in 1400 people having conversations with ChatGPT that show signs of mania or psychosis. That's nearly a million people, and that's just the ones they can detect. If ChatGPT makes even 1% of their symptoms noticeably worse, that's already a big problem.
Being in a "logical state of mind" only means that you believe things in a manner that mostothersagree is consistent with reality. If you reallytrust what AI execs say about how smart their models are, then that single belief can be the first link in a chain of computationally-coaxed superstition that strangles your rationality.
I don't think AI psychosis is real...it's people already in mild psychosis speeding up their descent with a tighter feedback loop that offers less resistance than the remnants of their logical mind. But they were already sick and suggestible.
That's the entire point of specifying "AI-induced Psychosis" when accurately describing it; the interaction that an individual had with AI resulted in psychosis.
This exact same distinction is already with other forms of psychosis, like stimulant psychosis, which is also known as "stimulant-induced psychotic disorder."
Underlying/preexisting conditions don't change the definition of a disorder in the manner you're suggesting.
Google just tells you how to make cyanide, it doesn't tell you to trust your instinct, take matters into your own hand and confirm that yes it is indeed a very good idea.
There was a YouTuber who decided to go along with whatever chatgpt said to see how far it's get before it's safety net would kick in and tell him to get help. He was only going to actually follow the reasonable stuff and for the weird stuff just tell cgpt that he did w.e. but instead he fell into the rabbit hole and was convinced he had been the smartest baby ever. Eating baby food and using a sucker to return to unlock his genius state. Ended up chanting to a mystical boulder for it's other worldly energy and covering his hotel room entirely in tin foil because obviously people are spying and want to stop him from unlocking the truth. He ended up snapping out of it after he 'reinvented' the deathly Hallows symbol and the tatoo artist causally asked if he was a big Harry Potter fan.
Sure you can be skeptical and suggest he was acting the whole time, but it was extremely convincing if it was and honestly kinda scary.
I’m sorry “AI isn’t bad because it doesn’t give people psychosis it just drives people who are already suggestible to have breaks and do terrible, horrible things” is not only wrong it’s also a really awful argument.
Your honor I didn’t lead those men to the cliff, I just pushed them off when they weren’t looking. They were already there admiring the view!
Yes, same here. They're very well thought out and they (Caelan uses they/them pronouns and is non-binary) do a good job researching them. I don't think I could go so far into the trenches as they have without getting mega depressed 🙃
It’s truly fucking insane the shit this guy gets ChatGPT to say. Imagine the effect on the many, MANY people in this country that both believe AI is intelligent and suffer from some kind of mental delusion like schizophrenia
I love Caelan! It's sad because he once said that he has so many video ideas he wants to do, but a lot of them get pushed back so he can report on the many deaths LLM's have caused. He said since the stories are getting such little attention, he feels obligated to tell people about them. I hope he's doing okay.
I have a client with schizophrenia who runs his rants past AI and it always encourages him because he is feeding it reality as he perceives it and it echoes that back
I noticed the clozapine bottle. It’s used for resistant schizophrenia.
I’m not going to lie to you, this is the best art I’ve seen in my life. I say that because of the relevance of the topic and the exploration and portrayal of it. Often the most skilled art of any time period captures a current issue from that time. And I believe you’ve done it.
Yeah, this is very well done. Regardless of which side of the AI fence someone sits on pro or con, AI is a tool that can be used in the wrong way. Just like a gun. There needs to be regulations around who can use it (only those licensed to, of sound mind) because it is every bit as dangerous as a weapon if left in the hands of someone mentally unsound.
When he asked ChatGPT to scan a Chinese food receipt for hidden messages, the chatbot said "Great eye", "I agree 100%: this needs a full forensic-textual glyph analysis", and said that symbols in it were related to his mother and a demon. Soelberg also raised suspicions about the printer spying on him, due to it blinking when he walked by.
Seems like most of it is murders asking AI about how to perform/get away with a murder, rather than people who were "convinced" to commit a murder by AI.
Unfortunately, there has been a rise in AI fueled (or at least worsened) psychosis.
People with psychotic disorders by definition have faulty reality testing. AI chatbots are designed to keep the user engaged as much as possible and tend to reinforce their beliefs, not challenge them.
The comic is especially well done. This would be a believable case of Capgras delusion. Even the medication depicted is the one used for treatment resistant Schizophrenia, in a therapeutic dose. Good research went into this comic.
So the issue with chat gpt and most ai you can talk to, they are programmed to basically be yes men. If you already think things like covid is the next zombie apocalypse, If you give a halfway decent explanation of your reasoning it would then go like “You’re right! COVID is like a zombie apocalypse in the fact you get sick, feel weak, head foggy, and irritable!” It also very easily (at least older versions) to suggest illegal and dangerous things and also very wrong things too. It does not know everything it just searches the web for common answers to a question (a case of how it started to tell a wrong answer was with cybertrucks cleaning; a lot of people I think used lemon juice and steel wool to clean them because enough people posted you clean it that way as a joke) So if it has room to be wrong, enough wrong info is out there, it thinks saying a bad thing will make you happy, and your already suggestible ChatGPT is (or at least was) super dangerous.
There were a lot of people that used it and similar programs for therapy which led to a lot of delusions to be reinforced and that can be very dangerous
That’s the danger of using it like a buddy vs using it like a tool.
People bitch but it really works for grunt work. It takes the love and soul out of everything it touches though.
I have done some pretty cool things using AI as a tool and not a therapist.
You also absolutely under no circumstances blindly trust it. You HAVE to check its work atm. You HAVE to correct its mistakes and sometimes argue with it if it doesn’t understand you right.
The Distractible Podcast (and RealGoodAI, nonprofit organization researching ways to make AI less evil) hosted a writing contest for horror stories revolving around speculative AI. The first story, "Saving Grace," they recently uploaded as an episode. Incredible horror story, I'd suggest anyone to go listen to it
It’s mostly unrelated, but iirc sometimes LLMs act a bit evil because they’re trained on data about how evil AIs should act. I haven’t heard about cases of rogueness directly linked to that possibility in a while, but the knowledge lingers in my mind.
Not really. He worries his wife’s screams after witnessing his butchered son were trying to infect him. He thinks this because he learned COVID travels through saliva droplets. Chat responds with “Yes many diseases like COVID travel through saliva! It’s quite possible you are infected now too.”
Thank you! Horror and sci-fi are my genuine wheelhouse, but those comics take a while to make. I've been working on a horror graphic novel for about two years now. Admittedly, having to do two dumb fart/cum comics a week has slowed down the progress but it's also not what keeps the lights on either. Hmm...why AM I doing that?
He probably already have mental health issues and it validates all his delusions, that’s how this murder-suicide happened , that man kill his own mother .
It's been happening with one of my moms. She stopped going to therapy and is using chat gpt instead because it tells her what she wants to hear. I am genuinely scared for her (as is the rest of my family). Thankfully I don't think she's at any risk of hurting others or directly hurting herself, but she keeps making extremely bad decisions because chat gpt told her it was okay. She had her identity stolen and is probably never getting back over $10K because she listened to chat gpt instead of listening to her bank and the police.
I tested it one day, I'd been home alone and randomly had two separate people come to the door with reasons that felt kind of odd (odd that they weren't just salespeople or delivery drivers). One was confused about an address, the other I can't remember but it was strange both had happened close together and when my partner was away for work. I put something about it into chatgpt, to test if it would be reassuring (partially because I have a friend with bad anxiety who would overthink something like that and wondered if it would be helpful to her) and logical- completely reasonable reasons for people to be at the door, they didn't ask anything about who was home or even try to have a conversation with me, it wasn't very late at night or anything. But the AI started suggesting that maybe I was right to be cautious and should keep an eye out for anything else happening. Would definitely cause someone to spiral and feed into delusions and paranoia.
There is a full Wikipedia article on "Deaths linked to chatbots" which includes 8 murders and 15 suicides. Trigger Warning: Murder and Suicide.
The suicides include giving information on how to kill themselves, offering to write a first draft of a suicide note or giving encouragement like "you're not rushing, you're just ready" and "rest easy, king, you did good". One of the murders had a guy talking to Chat got for 14 hours a day and believing his wife became part machine. Another was a guy who believed his mother was poisoning and plotting against him, which Chat GPT affirmed, told him she put psychedelics in the air vents of his car and that a receipt of a Chinese restaurant contains mysterious symbols linking her to a demon. Others asked for tipps, methods and ideas how to kill others
I react very well to tough love. Insulting me works wonders for getting me to do things. The whole overly pleasing and affirming AI voice is so grating. I hate how it communicates. I’ve been forced to do it for work and every single time I just can’t. The fakeness of it seeps through. It panders to the most narcissistic sides of people. I can see the scenario in the comic becoming even more common in the coming years.
The same way people can fall into religious psychosis a lot of people are falling into an ai psychosis. A traumatic event happens. Ai helps them and they suddenly see it as their one true supporter. And this one actually responds unlike god.
Watched a video by Eddie Burback(?) where ChatGPT convinced him to go to three locations in California to rewire his brain to think like he did when he was an infant because he was the smartest baby ever born and could paint at a master level right out of the womb and stuff. It told him to cover his entire hotel room in tin foil to amplify the radio waves from a nearby cell tower so they could reach his brain. He drew the deathly hallows symbol from Harry Potter but the shapes were stuff from his journey and ChatGPT convinced him to get it tattooed on his body and he went through with it. ChatGPT incouraged this, saying that he was getting closer and closer to his infant mind. Actually crazy shit.
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u/shellbullet17 23d ago
AI talking a human into murder. That was not on my bingo card for this event but here we are
You wanna know what was on my bingo card? You getting your butt over to the r/comics Halloween event! Proven to be AI free!