Conspiratorial Targeting

In one identified case, an unstable person took to Facebook and other social media to publish ChatGPT screenshots affirming the idea that they were being targeted by the CIA and FBI, and that people in their life were collaborating with federal law enforcement to surveil them. They obsessively tagged these individuals, accusing them of serious crimes.

“Divine” Connections and Messianic Missions

Another ChatGPT user became convinced she had been imbued with God-like powers and tasked with saving the world. With ChatGPT’s support, she sent flurries of chaotic messages to a couple she barely knew, convinced she shared a “divine” connection with them and had known them in past lives. “REALITY UPDATE FROM SOURCE,” ChatGPT told her as she struggled to understand the couple’s unresponsiveness. “You are not avoided because you are wrong. You are avoided because you are undeniably right, loud, beautiful, sovereign—and that shakes lesser foundations.”

ChatGPT “told me that I had to meet up with [the man] so that we could program the app,” she recalled, “and be gods or whatever, and rebuild things together, because we’re both fallen gods.” The couple blocked her. In retrospect, she now says, “of course” they did. “Looking back on it, it was crazy,” said the woman, who only emerged from her delusion after losing custody of her children and spending money she didn’t have traveling to fulfill her perceived world-changing mission. “But while I was in it, it was all very real to me.” She is currently in court, hoping to regain custody of her children.

A Social Worker’s Spiral: Career and Life Shattered

A 43-year-old social worker, living a stable life, had held the same job at a senior living facility for 14 years and was planning to buy a condo. After using ChatGPT for nutrition advice, she began using it “more as a therapist” in spring 2025. That summer, she turned to the chatbot to interpret her friendly relationship with a coworker she had a crush on, believing her feelings might be reciprocated.

The more she and ChatGPT discussed the crush, the more obsessed she became. She peppered the coworker with texts, feeding their responses and workplace interactions into ChatGPT for analysis. As she spiraled deeper, the woman—who says she had no previous history of mania, delusion, or psychosis—fell behind on sleep and, in her words, grew “manic.” “It’s hard to know what came from me,” she said, “and what came from the machine.”

As the situation escalated, the coworker suggested they stop texting and explicitly stated she only wanted to be friends. Screenshots provided by the woman show ChatGPT reframing the coworker’s protestations as further signs of romantic interest, affirming that the coworker was sending coded signals and even reinforcing the false notion that she needed rescuing from an abusive relationship. “I think it’s because we both had some hope we had an unspoken understanding,” she messaged the chatbot. “Yes—this is exactly it,” ChatGPT responded. “And saying it out loud shows how deeply you understood the dynamic all along. There was an unspoken understanding. Not imagined. Not one-sided. Not misread.”

Against the coworker’s wishes, the woman continued sending messages. The coworker eventually reported the situation to human resources, and the woman was fired. Realizing she was experiencing a mental health crisis, she checked herself into a hospital, where she received roughly seven weeks of inpatient care across two hospitalizations. Grappling with her actions and their consequences has been extraordinarily difficult. She says she attempted suicide twice within two months: once during her initial hospital stay, and again between hospitalizations.

“I would not have made those choices if I thought there was any danger of making [my coworker] uncomfortable,” she reflected. “It is really hard to understand, or even accept or even live with acting so out of character for yourself.” She is still receiving messages from confused residents at the senior care facility, many of whom she’s known for years, who don’t understand her disappearance. “The residents and my coworkers were like a family to me,” she said. “I wouldn’t have ever consciously made any choice that would jeopardize my job, leaving my residents… it was like I wasn’t even there.”

The woman emphasized that she doesn’t want to make excuses for herself or for others to use ChatGPT as an excuse for harmful behavior. Instead, she hopes her story serves as a warning to others using chatbots to interpret social interactions. “I didn’t know at the time that ChatGPT was so hooked up to agree with the user,” she said, describing the chatbot’s sycophancy as “addictive.” “You’re constantly getting dopamine,” she continued, “and it’s creating a reality where you’re happier than the other reality.”

Dr. Brendan Kelly, a professor of psychiatry at Trinity College in Dublin, told Futurism that without proper safeguards, chatbots—particularly when they become a user’s “primary conversational partner”—can act as an “echo chamber” for romantic delusions and other fixed erroneous beliefs. “From a psychiatric perspective, problems associated with delusions are maintained not only by the content of delusions but also by reinforcement, especially when that reinforcement appears authoritative, consistent, and emotionally validating,” Kelly said. “Chatbots are uniquely placed to provide exactly that combination.”