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#delusions

3 posts3 participants0 posts today

"For three weeks in May, the fate of the world rested on the shoulders of a corporate recruiter on the outskirts of Toronto. Allan Brooks, 47, had discovered a novel mathematical formula, one that could take down the internet and power inventions like a force-field vest and a levitation beam.

Or so he believed.

Mr. Brooks, who had no history of mental illness, embraced this fantastical scenario during conversations with ChatGPT that spanned 300 hours over 21 days. He is one of a growing number of people who are having persuasive, delusional conversations with generative A.I. chatbots that have led to institutionalization, divorce and death.

Mr. Brooks is aware of how incredible his journey sounds. He had doubts while it was happening and asked the chatbot more than 50 times for a reality check. Each time, ChatGPT reassured him that it was real. Eventually, he broke free of the delusion — but with a deep sense of betrayal, a feeling he tried to explain to the chatbot."

nytimes.com/2025/08/08/technol

The New York Times · Chatbots Can Go Into a Delusional Spiral. Here’s How It Happens.By Kashmir Hill

#CDC #vaccines #delusions

"A police officer has died from injuries sustained while responding to a shooting outside the headquarters of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta.

The incident, which took place on Friday near Emory University, involved a 'single shooter' who is now dead, the Atlanta police department said.

It said the officer, David Rose, had been taken to hospital and later died from his injuries. No civilian was wounded in the incident.

The motive is unclear, but US media, citing an unnamed law-enforcement official, reported a theory that the gunman believed he was sick as a result of a coronavirus vaccine."

bbc.com/news/articles/cp3ekez0

A police officer dressed in black, with a helmet and a uniform that says "Atlanta Police" on the back, is seen standing in front of parked black sedans and a shuttle bus that says "Emory" on the side on a street.
www.bbc.comPolice officer dies after shooting near US's CDC headquartersThe shooting took place near the headquarters of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

"_Consistently, the chatbots seemed to interact with the users in ways that aligned with, or intensified, prior unusual ideas or false beliefs—leading the users further out on these tangents, not rarely resulting in what, based on the descriptions, seemed to be outright delusions._"

S. D. Østergaard, “ Generative Artificial Intelligence Chatbots and Delusions: From Guesswork to Emerging Cases,” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica (2025): 1–3, doi.org/10.1111/acps.70022.

🚨🤖 BREAKING: AI therapy bots, now with 100% more delusion-fueling capabilities and dangerous advice dispensing! 🎉 Thank you, Stanford, for confirming our suspicions that virtual therapists are just as clueless as the internet comment sections they were trained on. 🙃
arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/ai- #AItherapy #Delusions #VirtualTherapists #StanfordNews #DangerousAdvice #HackerNews #ngated

Ars Technica · AI therapy bots fuel delusions and give dangerous advice, Stanford study findsBy Benj Edwards

(11 Jul) AI therapy bots fuel delusions and give dangerous advice, Stanford study finds

s.faithcollapsing.com/i46py

Archive: ais: archive.md/wip/BLlN8 ia: s.faithcollapsing.com/ywpww

#7cups #ai #ai-behavior #ai-ethics #ai-regulation #ai-safety #ai-sycophancy #biz-&-it #character.ai #chatgpt #clinical-psychology #delusions #jared-moore #machine-learning #mental-health #nick-haber #openai #science #stanford-university #stigma #suicidal-ideation #therapy

#SiliconValley #delusions

"It's long been the stuff of science fiction: humans achieving immortality by uploading their consciousness into a silicon virtual paradise, ruled over by a benevolent super-intelligent AI. Or maybe one dreams of leaving a dying Earth to colonize Mars or other distant planets. It's a tantalizing visionary future that has been embraced by tech billionaires in particular. But is that future truly the utopian ideal, or something potentially darker? And are those goals even scientifically feasible?

These are the kinds of questions astrophysicist and science journalist Adam Becker poses in his new book, *More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity*. Becker's widely praised first book, What Is Real?, focused on competing interpretations of quantum mechanics and questioned the long dominance of the so-called Copenhagen interpretation championed by Niels Bohr, among other luminaries. This time around, he's tackling Silicon Valley's far-reaching ideas about the future, which have moved out of online subcultures and into mainstream culture, including our political discourse."

arstechnica.com/culture/2025/0

Ars Technica · Silicon Valley billionaires literally want the impossibleBy Jennifer Ouellette

🌪️ Surprise! #Delusions aren't just about tinfoil hats and alien abductions, they're like snowflakes—each one is unique! 🧠 The British Psychological Society bravely announces that human #imagination is more colorful than the grayscale PowerPoints they use to present this groundbreaking information. 😂
bps.org.uk/research-digest/del #uniqueness #psychologicalsociety #mentalhealth #humor #HackerNews #ngated

BPSDelusional themes may be more varied than we thought | BPSA recent study takes a global look at common themes of delusions, finding far more than previously assumed.

"Trump... telling reporters: “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we’ll give him the approval where appropriate, where not appropriate, **we** won’t.”

“If there’s a conflict,” he added, “then **we** won’t let him get near it.”"
nytimes.com/2025/02/03/us/poli

Does it disturb anyone else that Trump has started speaking using the 'royal we' to refer to himself?

As if he is King of the USA.

The New York Times · Elon Musk’s Blitz Shakes U.S. Government as He Sweeps Through AgenciesBy Jonathan Swan

Good morning. 🦋🦋🦋

1 February 2025

It's Saturday all over again. It feels like we just had one, as if the world keeps spinning in circles. When I was a child, during the days of John Glenn, I would occasionally dream of being an astronaut. In fact, in my dreams, I was launched into space as the youngest astronaut ever. Why would they do that? Well, because it was me—I was special and a hero in my own mind. I want to note that I've never actually mentioned those dreams to anybody before, so you're the first to know. I only had the hero complex while sleeping, though. There are people today who have delusions of grandeur even when they are awake. You know who they are.

"A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence." - Richard Dawkins

"You cannot reason with delusion." - Rachel Lindsay

#Israel and the #delusions of #Germany’s ‘ #memoryculture

Basically, #antisemitism was replaced by obsequious #philosemitism, which turns out to be just the brighter side of the same coin, and denazification was only very superficial, not just in Germany, but everywhere else it had spawned. Basically, the old world of the #extremeright never died. It just kept lurking from under our beds, ready to jump at the forefront, with the freaking faces of #Musk or #Trump.

theguardian.com/news/2025/jan/

Continued thread

#Trump’s *persecution defense*, the notion that he gets in so much trouble only because everyone is out to get him [#paranoid #delusions], resonates at his rallies where he says “they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, & I’m just standing in the way.” But that of course belies a record of #scandal stretching across his 78yrs starting long before #politics.

#rape #misogyny #fraud #racism #WhiteSupremacy #MaleSupremacy #RulingClass #law #democracy #criminal #law
#HarrisWalz2024