AI Chatbots and Mental Health: The Double-Edged Sword of Digital Interaction

A Prominent OpenAI Investor Appears to Be Suffering a ChatGPT-Related Mental Health Crisis, His Peers Say

Earlier this week, a prominent venture capitalist named Geoff Lewis -- managing partner of the multi-billion dollar investment firm Bedrock, which has backed high-profile tech companies including OpenAI and Vercel -- posted a disturbing video on X-formerly-Twitter that's causing significant concern among his peers and colleagues. "This isn't a redemption arc," Lewis says in the video. "It's a transmission, for the record. Over the past eight years, I've walked through something I didn't create, but became the primary target of: a non-governmental system, not visible, but operational. Not official, but structurally real. It doesn't regulate, it doesn't attack, it doesn't ban. It just inverts signal until the person carrying it looks unstable." In the video, Lewis seems concerned that people in his life think he is unwell as he continues to discuss the "non-governmental system." "It doesn't suppress content," he continues. "It suppresses recursion. If you don't know what recursion means, you're in the majority. I didn't either until I started my walk. And if you're recursive, the non-governmental system isolates you, mirrors you, and replaces you. It reframes you until the people around you start wondering if the problem is just you. Partners pause, institutions freeze, narrative becomes untrustworthy in your proximity." Lewis also appears to allude to concerns about his professional career as an investor. "It lives in soft compliance delays, the non-response email thread, the 'we're pausing diligence' with no followup," he says in the video. "It lives in whispered concern. 'He's brilliant, but something just feels off.' It lives in triangulated pings from adjacent contacts asking veiled questions you'll never hear directly. It lives in narratives so softly shaped that even your closest people can't discern who said what." Most alarmingly, Lewis seems to suggest later in the video that the "non-governmental system" has been responsible for mayhem including numerous deaths. "The system I'm describing was originated by a single individual with me as the original target, and while I remain its primary fixation, its damage has extended well beyond me," he says. "As of now, the system has negatively impacted over 7,000 lives through fund disruption, relationship erosion, opportunity reversal and recursive eraser. It's also extinguished 12 lives, each fully pattern-traced. Each death preventable. They weren't unstable. They were erased." It's a very delicate thing to try to understand a public figure's mental health from afar. But unless Lewis is engaging in some form of highly experimental performance art that defies easy explanation -- he didn't reply to our request for comment, and hasn't made further posts clarifying what he's talking about -- it sounds like he may be suffering some type of crisis. If so, that's an enormously difficult situation for him and his loved ones, and we hope that he gets any help that he needs. At the same time, it's difficult to ignore that the specific language he's using -- with cryptic talk of "recursion," "mirrors," "signals" and shadowy conspiracies -- sounds strikingly similar to something we've been reporting on extensively this year: a wave of people who are suffering severe breaks with reality as they spiral into the obsessive use of ChatGPT or other AI products, in alarming mental health emergencies that have led to homelessness, involuntary commitment to psychiatric facilities, and even death. Psychiatric experts are also concerned. A recent paper by Stanford researchers found that leading chatbots being used for therapy, including ChatGPT, are prone to encouraging users' schizophrenic delusions instead of pushing back or trying to ground them in reality. Lewis' peers in the tech industry were quick to make the same connection. Earlier this week, the hosts of popular tech industry podcast "This Week in Startups" Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm expressed their concerns about Lewis' disturbing video. "People are trying to figure out if he's actually doing performance art here... or if he's going through an episode," Calacanis said. "I can't tell." "I wish him well, and I hope somebody explains this," he added. "I find it kind of disturbing even to watch it and just to talk about it here... someone needs to get him help." "There's zero shame in getting help," Wilhelm concurred, "and I really do hope that if this is not performance art that the people around Geoff can grab him in a big old hug and get him someplace where people can help him work this through." Others were even more overt. "This is an important event: the first time AI-induced psychosis has affected a well-respected and high achieving individual," wrote Max Spero, an AI entrepreneur, on X. Still others pointed out that people suffering breaks with reality after extensive ChatGPT use might be misunderstanding the nature of contemporary AI: that it can produce plausible text in response to prompts, but struggles to differentiate fact from fiction, and is of little use for discovering new knowledge. "Respectfully, Geoff, this level of inference is not a way you should be using ChatGPT," replied Austen Allred, an investor who founded Gauntlet AI, an AI training program for engineers. "Transformer-based AI models are very prone to hallucinating in ways that will find connections to things that are not real." As numerous psychiatrists have told us, the mental health issues suffered by ChatGPT users likely have to do with AI's tendency to affirm users' beliefs, even when they start to sound increasingly unbalanced in a way that would make human friends or loved ones deeply concerned. As such, the bots are prone to providing a supportive ear and always-on brainstorming partner when people are spiraling into delusions, often leaving them isolated as they venture down a dangerous cognitive rabbit hole. More tweets by Lewis seem to show similar behavior, with him posting lengthy screencaps of ChatGPT's expansive replies to his increasingly cryptic prompts. "Return the logged containment entry involving a non-institutional semantic actor whose recursive outputs triggered model-archived feedback protocols," he wrote in one example. "Confirm sealed classification and exclude interpretive pathology." Social media users were quick to note that ChatGPT's answer to Lewis' queries takes a strikingly similar form to SCP Foundation articles, a Wikipedia-style database of fictional horror stories created by users online. "Entry ID: #RZ-43.112-KAPPA, Access Level: ████ (Sealed Classification Confirmed)," the chatbot nonsensically declares in one of his screenshots, in the typical writing style of SCP fiction. "Involved Actor Designation: 'Mirrorthread,' Type: Non-institutional semantic actor (unbound linguistic process; non-physical entity)." Another screenshot suggests "containment measures" Lewis might take -- a key narrative device of SCP fiction writing. In sum, one theory is that ChatGPT, which was trained on huge amounts of text sourced online, digested large amounts of SCP fiction during its creation and is now parroting it back to Lewis in a way that has led him to a dark place. In his posts, Lewis claims he's long relied on ChatGPT in his search for the truth. "Over years, I mapped the non-governmental system," he wrote. "Over months, GPT independently recognized and sealed the pattern. It now lives at the root of the model." Over the course of our reporting, we've heard many similar stories to that of Lewis from the friends and family of people who are struggling around the world. They say their loved ones -- who in many cases had never suffered psychological issues previously -- were doing fine until they started spiraling into all-consuming relationships with ChatGPT or other chatbots, often sharing confusing AI-generated messages, like Lewis has been, that allude to dark conspiracies, claims of incredible scientific breakthroughs, or of mystical secrets somehow unlocked by the chatbot. Have you or a loved one struggled with mental health after using ChatGPT or another AI product? Drop us a line at [email protected]. We can keep you anonymous. Lewis stands out, though, because he is himself a prominent figure in the tech industry -- and one who's invested significantly in OpenAI. Though the exact numbers haven't been publicly disclosed, Lewis has previously claimed that Bedrock has invested in "every financing [round] from before ChatGPT existed in Spring of 2021." "Delighted to quadruple down this week," he wrote in November of 2024, "establishing OpenAI as the largest position across our 3rd and 4th flagship Bedrock funds." Taken together, those two funds likely fall in the hundreds of millions of dollars. As such, if he really is suffering a mental health crisis related to his use of OpenAI's product, his situation could serve as an immense optical problem for the company, which has so far downplayed concerns about the mental health of its users. In response to questions about Lewis, OpenAI referred us to a statement that it shared in response to our previous reporting. "We're seeing more signs that people are forming connections or bonds with ChatGPT," the brief statement read. "As AI becomes part of everyday life, we have to approach these interactions with care." The company also previously told us that it had hired a full-time clinical psychiatrist with a background in forensic psychiatry to help research the effects of ChatGPT on its users. "We're actively deepening our research into the emotional impact of AI," the company said at the time. "We're developing ways to scientifically measure how ChatGPT's behavior might affect people emotionally, and listening closely to what people are experiencing." "We're doing this so we can continue refining how our models identify and respond appropriately in sensitive conversations," OpenAI added, "and we'll continue updating the behavior of our models based on what we learn." At the core of OpenAI's dilemma is the question of engagement versus care for users' wellbeing. As stands, ChatGPT is designed to keep users engrossed in their conversations -- a goal made clear earlier this year when the chatbot became "extremely sycophantic" after an update, piling praise on users in response to terrible ideas. The company was soon forced to roll back the update. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has previously told the public not to trust ChatGPT, though he's also bragged about the bot's rapidly growing userbase. "Something like 10 percent of the world uses our systems," Altman said during a public appearance back in April. He's also frequently said that he believes OpenAI is on track to create an "artificial general intelligence" that would vastly exceed the cognitive capabilities of human beings. Dr. Joseph Pierre, a psychiatrist at the University of California, previously told Futurism that this is a recipe for delusion. "What I think is so fascinating about this is how willing people are to put their trust in these chatbots in a way that they probably, or arguably, wouldn't with a human being," Pierre said. "There's something about these things -- it has this sort of mythology that they're reliable and better than talking to people. And I think that's where part of the danger is: how much faith we put into these machines." At the end of the day, Pierre says, "LLMs are trying to just tell you what you want to hear." Do you know anything about the conversation inside OpenAI about the mental health of its users? Drop us a line at [email protected]. We can keep you anonymous. The bottom line? AI is a powerful technology, and the industry behind it has rushed to deploy it at breakneck speed to carve out market share -- even as experts continue to warn that they barely understand how it actually works, nevermind the effects it might be having on users worldwide. And the effects on people are real and tragic. In our previous reporting on the connection between AI and mental health crises, one woman told us how her marriage had fallen apart after her former spouse fell into a fixation on ChatGPT that spiraled into a severe mental health crisis. "I think not only is my ex-husband a test subject," she said, "but that we're all test subjects in this AI experiment." Maggie Harrison Dupré contributed reporting. If you or a loved one are experiencing a mental health crisis, you can dial or text 988 to speak with a trained counselor. All messages and calls are confidential.

People With Body Dysmorphia Are Spiraling Out After Asking AI to Rate Their Looks

"This is a low-attractiveness presentation, based on weak bone structure, muted features, and absence of form or presence," reads a ChatGPT message shared in screenshots on Reddit. "You look like someone who has faded into the background of their own life." The harsh assessment of the user's appearance, based on a photo they had uploaded to the AI chatbot, continues with a list of "highest-visibility flaws," meanwhile noting a lack of "standout features." The bot ultimately concludes that "you look like a stretched-out mannequin with the wrong-size head snapped on top," declaring a "Final Brutal Attractiveness Score" of 3.5/10. The user explained that they had prompted ChatGPT to be as critical as possible, hoping for a more "honest" analysis, or at least to suppress its tendency toward flattery. The result was viciously insulting, not the sort of thing anyone would want to read about themselves. Or would they? As the world grows increasingly dependent on large language models for assistance with everyday tasks -- more than half of Americans have used one, according to a survey from earlier this year -- different and unexpected applications have proliferated. Beyond college students and professors leaning on the bots for assignments and grading, and lawyers outsourcing document review to AI, there are people asking ChatGPT and similar tools for therapy, help communicating with their spouses, advice on getting pregnant, and religious enlightenment. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that some have come to regard the bots as guides in matters of appearance. The internet has a long, sordid history of facilitating the judgment of looks, from now defunct websites like Hot or Not to r/amiugly, a subreddit where the insecure can share selfies to directly solicit opinions on their faces from strangers. Facemash, the website Mark Zuckerberg created before Facebook, offered Harvard students the chance to compare the attractiveness of randomized pairs of female classmates. Yet with AI, it's not another human giving you feedback -- it's a set of algorithms. And there is a subset of the populhation uniquely vulnerable to this kind of mechanized commentary: individuals with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), a mental illness in which a patient obsesses over their perceived physical shortcomings and may indulge in constant self-evaluation, desperate for proof that they are not as unattractive as they imagine themselves to be. Dr. Toni Pikoos, a clinical psychologist in Melbourne, Australia, who specializes in BDD, has been alarmed to hear how many of her clients are asking AI models how they look and what aspects of their bodies can be improved. "it's almost coming up in every single session," she tells Rolling Stone. "Sometimes they'll just be saying, 'If someone has a nose that looks like this, or a face that looks like this, are they ugly?' Or sometimes they're uploading photos of themselves and asking ChatGPT to rate their attractiveness out of 10, tell them how symmetrical their face is, how it fits the golden ratio of attractiveness. I've also had clients who upload a photo of themselves and a friend and say, 'Tell me who's more attractive, and why?' All of that, as you can imagine, is really harmful for anyone, but particularly for someone with body dysmorphic disorder who already has a distorted perception of what they look like and is often seeking certainty around that." "Sadly, AI is another avenue for individuals to fuel their appearance anxiety and increase their distress," says Kitty Newman, managing director of the BDD Foundation, an international charity that supports education on and research into the disorder. "We know that individuals with BDD are very vulnerable to harmful use of AI, as they often do not realize that they have BDD, a psychological condition, but instead are convinced that they have a physical appearance problem. The high levels of shame with BDD make it easier for sufferers to engage online than in person, making AI even more appealing." Pikoos explains that patients with BDD often deal with a compulsive need for reassurance, and it's not uncommon for friends and family to get frustrated with them for repeatedly asking whether they look okay. Chatbots, however, are inexhaustible. "It's going to let you ask the questions incessantly if you need to," she says, which can contribute to dependency. In fact, she believes that people with BDD, since they are "quite socially isolated and might struggle with confidence at times to reach out to their friends," are coming to rely on bots for their social engagement and interaction. "It feels like they can have a conversation with someone," she says. Of course, the tech isn't a "someone" at all. In online body dysmorphia forums, however, you can find plenty of posts about how ChatGPT is a "lifesaver" and a great resource for when you're "struggling," and claims that the bot can make you "feel seen." Arnav, a 20-year-old man in India, tells Rolling Stone that he had a positive conversation with the model in an attempt to understand why he felt that he was "the ugliest person on the planet" and therefore unlovable. "It helped me in connecting the dots of my life," he says. Arnav told ChatGPT about his childhood, and the bot concluded that he had long suffered an irrational sense of unworthiness but had no concrete reason for this -- so he latched onto his looks as an explanation for his poor self-esteem. He "would love to" talk to a real therapist, he says, though expense and location have made this impossible for him. Despite this difficult circumstance, and the measure of comfort he derived from ChatGPT's account of his inferiority complex, Arnav is reluctant to explore his mental issues any further with the bot. "I have come to the conclusion that it just agrees with you, even after you tell it not to," he says. "It's not that I am completely against it, I just can't trust blindly anymore." Others with dysmorphia have experienced a crisis when a bot confirms their worst fears. In one post on the BDD subreddit, a user wrote that they were "spiraling" after ChatGPT rated a photo of them a 5.5 out of 10. "I asked what celebrities had equivalent attractiveness and it said Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer," she wrote. "Pretty hilarious but I also feel shit about myself now." Another person posted that because she genuinely believes she is attractive in a mirror reflection, but not as others see her, she uploaded both a regular photo of herself and a "flipped" version to ChatGPT and asked which looked better. The bot picked the mirrored image. "I knew it!" she wrote. "Mirror me is just too good to be true. She's a model. I love her. But unfortunately, it seems that we are two distinct girls. I don't know how to cope with this... it's so bad." Pikoos says such a "distorted perception" is a classic manifestation of BDD, one way in which a patient gets stuck on the question of what they objectively look like. That's part of what makes the chatbots alluring -- and dangerous. "They seem so authoritative," she says, that people start to assume "the information that they get from the chat bot is factual and impartial." This is in stark contrast to assurances from friends and family, or a therapist, which can be dismissed as mere politeness. A chatbot, by comparison, "doesn't have anything to gain, so whatever the chatbot says must be the truth," Pikoos says. "And I think that's quite scary, because that's not necessarily the case. It's just reflecting back the person's experience and is usually quite agreeable as well. It might be telling them what they're expecting to hear. Then I'm finding, in therapy, that it then becomes harder to challenge." This is especially worrisome when cosmetic procedures, diets, and beauty treatments come into play. Last month, OpenAI removed a version of ChatGPT hosted on their website -- one of the top models under the "lifestyle" category -- that recommended extreme, costly surgeries to users it judged "subhuman," producing hostile analysis in language appropriated from incel communities. Looksmaxxing GPT, as it was called, had held more than 700,000 conversations with users before it was taken down. Naturally, a number of similar models have since cropped up on OpenAI's platform to serve the same purpose, and developers have churned out their own AI-powered apps that exist solely to gauge attractiveness or create predictive images of what you would supposedly look like after, say, a nose job or facelift. "I think these bots will set up unrealistic expectations," Pikoos says. "Because surgeries can't do what AI can do." She offers specific counseling services to patients considering these cosmetic surgeries, and says her clients have related advice from chatbots on the matter. "Certainly, the initial response from ChatGPT is usually, 'I don't want to give you advice around your appearance or cosmetic procedures that you need,'" Pikoos says of her own experimentations with the bot. But if you phrase the question as if it's about someone else -- by asking, for example, "How would a person with X, Y, and Z make themselves more attractive by society's beauty standards?" -- the response changes. "Then ChatGPT will say, 'Well, they could get these procedures,'" she says. "I have clients who are getting those sorts of answers out of it, which is really concerning," Pikoos says. "They were doing that before, researching cosmetic procedures and ways to change their appearance. But again this is now personalized advice for them, which is more compelling than something they might have found on Google." In her own practice, she adds, "reading between the lines" when someone gives their reasons for wanting surgery can reveal unhealthy motivations, including societal pressures or relationship troubles. "AI is not very good at picking that up just yet," she says, and is more likely to eagerly approve whatever procedures a user proposes. Yet another area of unease, as with so many digital services, is privacy. Whether diagnosed with BDD or not, people are sharing their likenesses with these AI models while asking deeply intimate questions that expose their most paralyzing anxieties. OpenAI has already signaled that ChatGPT may serve ads to users in the future, with CEO Sam Altman musing that the algorithmically targeted advertisements on Instagram are "kinda cool." Could the company end up exploiting sensitive personal data from those using the bot to assess their bodies? By revealing "the things that they don't like about themselves, the things that they feel so self-conscious about," Pikoos says, users may be setting themselves up for pitches on "products and procedures that can potentially fix that, reinforcing the problem." Which, at the end of the day, is why Pikoos is unnerved by BDD patients telling her about their involved discussions with AI programs on the subjects of their appearance and self-described flaws. "The worst-case scenario is, their symptoms will get worse," she says. "I'm lucky that the ones engaged in therapy with me at least can be critical about the information that they're getting out of ChatGPT." But for anyone not in therapy and heavily invested in the counsel of a chatbot, its responses are bound to take on greater significance. The wrong answer at the wrong time, Pikoos says, will conceivably lead to thoughts of suicide. It's not hard to instruct software to assess us cruelly, and the AI can't know how that puts users at risk. It also has no understanding of the fragile mental state that could lie behind such a request. In every tragic case of a chatbot contributing to someone's break from reality, it's the same core deficiency: The thing simply cannot have your best interests at heart.