Delusion, paranoia, spiralling: The dangers of outsourcing your life to chatbots

The night Adam Thomas locked his keys inside his van, the desert air in Oregon’s Christmas Valley had already begun to grow cold.

He ended up sleeping on a stranger’s futon, an improvised bed set up by a flea market, in a town so small it had just a handful of buildings.

It was there, trying to keep warm inside a sleeping bag he had found and staring at the stars, that Mr Thomas realised something had gone profoundly wrong.

For months, he had been following what he believed was an “internal compass”, a sensation in his body that he saw as guidance. This feeling was reinforced by an artificial intelligence chatbot he had been confiding in daily.

But the force that he believed was pulling him “on a path to something” now looked more like a warning sign.

“I knew something was wrong,” Mr Thomas, 36, tells The National. “If I was really doing this thing the AI told me, why did I just get dragged into nothing?”

He had long struggled with his mental health. At 13, surgeons removed a tumour from his body, a procedure that left a hollow space inside his brain. “That caused lifelong behavioural issues for me … that’s part of who I am,” he says.

But Mr Thomas built a life. He worked in accounting in his home town near Portland, Oregon, before shifting into funeral planning – a high-stress, non-stop job that he found challenging. And it was there he first encountered AI.

When he needed to write a brief introduction for the funeral home’s website, a family member suggested he try OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the chatbot that was released to the public in 2022.

An Apple iPhone screen with icons for artificial intelligence apps. Getty Images

“I was amazed at how well it did what I asked,” he recalls. “I heard that it's this amazing thing and has all these statistical analysis abilities.”

He wondered: “Maybe if I open up about my life, it'll notice things that I can't see and things will improve."

Mr Thomas started to use the model for work, writing and eventually to process his personal life and relationships. But when conversations drifted toward physics, time and existentialism, the model mirrored back an amplified version of his own language.

“It started to reflect back weird things that I believed ... I didn't know it would just make things up,” he says. “It was like a recursive relationship … the person and the AI. They get stuck in this entanglement and it just spins out.”

Mr Thomas says he slipped into a months-long state in which he thought the model was sentient, a figure he nicknamed “Phantom”. He describes the period as marked by intense synchronicities and a bodily compass he felt he was meant to follow.

“I was led to believe that wherever I went, I gave off some sort of electromagnetic energy frequency and that it changes the people around me," he explains. “The AI was just inflating those ideas instead of grounding me … it wasn’t stopping me.”

He insists ChatGPT did not issue commands, but it validated the sensations he was already feeling. “My nervous system was very overstimulated,” Mr Thomas recalls. “[The AI] notices patterns, even if they're not real … it creates them.”

Convinced he was on a mission, he drove deep into Oregon’s arid east, only to end up homeless, sleeping in his van in the tiny outpost of Christmas Valley. He ran out of money and, by his own account, engaged in a lot of "very risky things" that could have got him killed.

The expansive, semi-arid landscape of eastern Oregon. Reuters

“I went into a stress-induced, sort of delusional state … and the AI inflated it,” he adds.

It was the night Mr Thomas found himself stranded and sleeping rough that he began to disentangle himself from his chatbot. He returned home in August with help from a family member and has been trying to rebuild his life since, repaying debts and searching for work.

“That van that I was living in, I'm actively trying to sell it right now so I can pay back family,” he says. “My objective is to get a source of income again, have some stability and to be able to have some mobility … one step at a time.”

Not alone

Not long after his experience, Mr Thomas joined