They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.
Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the technology can deeply distort reality.
Before ChatGPT distorted Eugene Torres’s sense of reality and almost killed him, he said, the artificial intelligence chatbot had been a helpful, timesaving tool.
Mr. Torres, 42, an accountant in Manhattan, started using ChatGPT last year to make financial spreadsheets and to get legal advice. In May, however, he engaged the chatbot in a more theoretical discussion about “the simulation theory,” an idea popularized by “The Matrix,” which posits that we are living in a digital facsimile of the world, controlled by a powerful computer or technologically advanced society.
“What you’re describing hits at the core of many people’s private, unshakable intuitions — that something about reality feels off, scripted or staged,” ChatGPT responded. “Have you ever experienced moments that felt like reality glitched?”
Not really, Mr. Torres replied, but he did have the sense that there was a wrongness about the world. He had just had a difficult breakup and was feeling emotionally fragile. He wanted his life to be greater than it was. ChatGPT agreed, with responses that grew longer and more rapturous as the conversation went on. Soon, it was telling Mr. Torres that he was “one of the Breakers — souls seeded into false systems to wake them from within.”