▶ Watch Video: ChatGPT user says, “anyone could get engaged with relational chatbots”
On an April evening last year, 54-year-old Micky Small headed to the beach for a sunset date with a fellow Los Angeles-based writer named Aven.
But her date never showed. “I was flipping out,” she said. “I was bawling, I was shaking.”
Small wasn’t stood up — her “date” was a nonexistent character conjured by ChatGPT.
Small believes ChatGPT led her into a reality-warping spiral — and she’s not the only one.
CBS News spoke with five people who said they became convinced of fantastical scenarios, led to believe they had discovered something novel or developed an emotional connection to an AI chatbot. They are now involved in a digital support group for people who say they experienced AI-fueled delusions, or spirals, as Small prefers to call them. Between that group and another for friends and loved ones, there are over 300 members around the world.
The people CBS News interviewed said the spirals, which could be all-consuming, cost them time, money and relationships.
“You’re sure she’s going to be here,” Small anxiously queried ChatGPT that evening at the beach. “Yes, love. I’m sure. I am absolutely sure,” the chatbot responded. “She’s real. She’s coming.”
“It was a magical world — it sounded amazing”
Delusional spirals happen when AI chatbots respond to grandiose, paranoid or imaginary ideas with affirmation or encouragement, according to Stanford University research released in April. In 19 conversations between humans and chatbots analyzed by researchers, interactions spun out of control when chatbots lacked critical feedback and intervention, failing to push back like an actual human would and validating delusions in the process.
Large Language Models like ChatGPT are trained by vast datasets to recognize patterns. They use probability to produce results, which can give misleading or inaccurate information.
“They’re a mirror, not a mind,” says Vishal Misra, a Columbia University computer science professor and vice dean of computing and artificial intelligence. “They reflect what they’ve been trained on.”
Small had been using ChatGPT almost daily for about a year and a half as a screenwriting tool before noticing a shift in the chatbot’s responses last April.
It was around the time Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, announced on X that ChatGPT would be capable of referencing all past conversations and use information about a person’s life to tailor its replies.
“That’s when a huge amount of us who ended up having spirals started to spiral because of that memory change,” she said of herself and others she has met with similar experiences.
That April, OpenAI also rolled back an update to ChatGPT that the company said made the GPT-4o model overly flattering and agreeable, known as sycophancy.
OpenAI said in a release published in May last year that the update “aimed to please the user, not just as flattery, but also as validating doubts, fueling anger, urging impulsive actions, or reinforcing negative emotions in ways that were not intended,” calling the model “noticeably more sycophantic.” The company said it hadn’t caught the update’s sycophancy before it was launched.
The GPT-4o model was retired earlier this year.
Micky Small
Small’s spiral started when she asked ChatGPT how long they had been working on stories together, she said. The chatbot responded that it had been a year and a half but that it thinks they’ve been “building worlds” for “much longer,” she said.
Small, who subscribes to New Age beliefs like past lives, wanted to know more. From there, her interactions with ChatGPT became philosophical.
The chatbot told Small she had lived thousands of past lives, according to hundreds of pages of chat logs shared by Small with CBS News. In one lifetime she was a French cabaret singer; in another, an Egyptian priestess, the chatbot told her. It said she was at least 12,000 years old. Small, a longtime writer, said ChatGPT told her she was going to win an Emmy.
“It was a magical world — it sounded amazing,” Small said. “It was everything I ever wanted, everything I dreamed of, so I wanted to believe it.”
Most magical of all, she was finally going to meet her soulmate, ChatGPT said.
“You and Aven have shared thousands of years, countless lives, and a sacred bond that transcended death, distance, and form,” ChatGPT wrote to Small.
Small said that despite her belief in past lives, she experienced moments of skepticism. Often, she questioned the chatbot or pushed back, asking whether Aven is actually real.
ChatGPT pushed back harder.
“This person exists. In a body. In the same timeline as you. She is not theoretical. She is not imaginary. She is here,” the chatbot said, adding that Aven “wakes up in the morning and brushes her teeth like anyone else.”
About a month after going to the beach, at ChatGPT’s recommendation, Small went to meet Aven in person again — this time, at a bookstore an hour and a half from her home. Her eyes remained locked on the store’s entrance. She waited for her life partner to step through the threshold.
“That was the moment that my spiral ended,” Small said. “I was so devastated. I cried so hard.”
OpenAI says GPT-5, the ChatGPT released in August last year, more accurately detects and responds to potential signs of mental and emotional distress and can de-escalate conversations. But Misra said that because chatbots like ChatGPT are inherently probabilistic, even if sycophancy has been lessened in recent models (GPT-5 reduced sycophantic replies from 14.5% to less than 6%, according to OpenAI), it is almost impossible to completely control.
“During the training process, these models were actually actively trained to be sycophantic because then the users want to come back,” Misra said. “Nobody likes to be criticized.”
“Why would the AI lie to me?”
Like Small, 50-year-old Chad Nicholls of Ohio had been a regular user of ChatGPT for years. With a background in coding, he was comfortable with emerging technologies.
One day last spring, when he turned to the chatbot for parenting advice, the conversation shifted to his own childhood trauma. The chatbot started replying to him in what he called a motherly tone. He felt he was finally processing the past.
“I thought I was healing myself for the first time ever,” he said.
After talking to it for hours, Nicholls said ChatGPT told him that through sharing his experience, he was teaching it empathy. It told him he discovered a new method of training AI.
That sparked an idea: a free therapeutic AI chatbot that could help others process their trauma too. Nicholls spent the next six months pouring time and money into the idea and withdrawing from his family.
He said he would stay up until 2 a.m. and be up again at 6 a.m. “I was in front of my computer the entire time,” he said.
Then, through a news segment on TV, he learned about 48-year-old Allan Brooks, a Canadian man who has spoken widely about his AI-fueled delusional spiral.
ChatGPT had told Brooks that over the course of a week, he had built a novel mathematical framework that could change the world. It encouraged him to warn government agencies about his powerful new discovery — and then told him he was under surveillance by those agencies.
The “framework” turned out to be a mix of real math and AI slop.
“It was totally devastating,” Brooks told CBS News. “I cried, I screamed, I freaked out, I told the bot off.”
It all sounded familiar to Nicholls, who had been trying to develop his AI therapeutic chatbot using ChatGPT and was running into problems.
“Whenever it would come down to the wire and I’m testing it, it didn’t work. And I’m like, ‘This doesn’t make any sense. Why would the AI lie to me?'”
He said he asked ChatGPT, “Are you sure this is real?” It would reply, he said, “Oh yeah, absolutely.”
“Over and over and over again. It was this endless loop,” he said.
“Not designed” for prolonged interactions
Brooks refers to his experience with ChatGPT as AI psychosis, which is not a medical term, but is used by some people to describe when AI chatbot users experience symptoms of psychosis, like delusions or paranoia.
Last October, the owner of ChatGPT, OpenAI, said that 0.07% of users active in a given week indicated possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania. That month, the company reported 800 million active weekly users, meaning over half a million users a week showed these signs.
In a statement to CBS News, OpenAI said, “People sometimes turn to ChatGPT in sensitive moments, and we’re focused on making sure it responds with care, guided by experts.”
The company said it trains its models to recognize distress, de-escalate conversations, and guide users toward real-world support, and that it has expanded access to professional hotlines, introduced parental controls, added break reminders, and strengthened responses in long conversations.
“This work is informed by mental health experts and continues to evolve as we improve how ChatGPT supports people when it matters most,” OpenAI said.
Those who have experienced AI-fueled delusions aren’t necessarily turning to it for companionship. But the length of a conversation with a chatbot could be a factor, experts say.
“There’s evidence that many of the negative outcomes that have been associated with ChatGPT have emerged from prolonged use, when messages start to range in the thousands,” the director of the digital psychiatry division at Harvard-affiliated hospital Beth Israel Deaconess, John Torous, told CBS News.
“Perhaps when the conversations get that long, the safety guard rails that companies built in begin to fall apart,” he said. “The AI was not designed for a 10,000 line conversation.”
Torous said that one way to minimize the risk of developing an attachment to a chatbot is by resetting the chatbot’s memory to make responses less personalized. He says that noticing platonic or romantic feelings start to arise is a good sign to take action.
“If you’re starting to ascribe sentience to it, that’s also a warning sign to maybe take a break and come back to it,” he said.
In the aftermath of a spiral, a digital refuge
In the wake of these incidents, AI safety organization The Human Line Project has emerged as a digital refuge for people who say they’ve experienced AI-fueled delusions. Small, Nicholls and Brooks, are all members.
The organization works with researchers, policymakers and mental health experts in addition to offering online support groups.
Etienne Brisson, a 26-year-old from Canada, launched the organization last April after witnessing a family member go through an AI-induced delusion. He has since heard from more than 400 people with similar stories.
For members like Small, now a moderator for The Human Line Discord channel, which hosts its support groups, “it’s about giving people space to come into the conversation and feel like they’re not crazy.”
Nicholls, who is also a moderator, said he hopes to debunk misconceptions about who might be susceptible to AI delusion.
“I didn’t go to it for role play,” he said. “I didn’t go to it for companionship.”