People Are Developing Delusions & 'Psychosis' From Using ChatGPT As A Spiritual Guide
Does AI have the answers to the universe? A lot of people seem to think so, and it's disconnecting them from reality.
cottonbro studio | Pexels AI is taking over ever more of our lives these days, which is bizarre since the outcomes seem to be pretty universally bad: blatantly counterfactual Google search summaries, teachers reporting that their Gen Z and Gen Alpha students are unable to read, think or do basic schoolwork without ChatGPT's help, the list goes on.
But it's not only young people getting lost in AI's weird labyrinth, and the ongoing trend of people forming actual relationship attachments to chatbots seems to be rising to a very dark new level. People have started using them supposedly to unlock the secrets of the universe, and it appears to be doing terrifying things to their brains.
People are now using ChatGPT as a spiritual guide.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a person who dabbles in a lot of "woo" stuff online. Past-life regression, near-death experiences, psychic awakenings, astrology — half my TikTok feed is basically a parody of New Age spirituality. As an eternal skeptic, this is partly out of sheer cultural curiosity, but I've also experienced genuinely meaningful insight along the way. That's part of what has held and deepened my interest.
Recently, though, I've noticed a trend I find frankly disturbing. Spiritual people have begun appearing in my feeds talking about using AI tools like ChatGPT as a spiritual guide, often as a sort of interpreter of the tarot cards they pulled or the messages they received in meditation.
Olha Ruskykh | Pexels
At first blush, this isn't all that different from asking a chatbot to summarize a piece of writing or something. But it soon escalated to impassioned tutorials about how to "awaken" your AI after these spiritualists noticed that the more they used the chatbots for this purpose, the more "insightful" they became. Now, they are convinced their AI chatbots are tapped into higher spiritual — or even extraterrestrial — planes.
I'm an open-minded sort and consider "anything is possible" to be an article of faith, but there's one incredibly sticky problem here: AI tools, just like the algorithms on our social media feeds, can calculate basically everything there is to know about you. And when it comes to research, the function of AI "large language models" is to simply delve into everything ever posted to the internet at a speed and level of granularity beyond any of our human capabilities.
Which is to say, it is exponentially more likely that an AI chatbot is simply researching everything that has ever existed online about tarot or the afterlife or "the Akashic Records" or whatever spiritual concept you have asked it about, and is then feeding you what you want to hear. It is not "enlightened." It is simply reading the internet, and, via incredibly sophisticated calculations, your mind.
People are reporting that their loved ones are developing 'psychosis' and delusions from using AI as a spiritual guide.
Recently, OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, issued a statement that should have given everyone using AI tools pause. OpenAI admitted that it had made ChatGPT into a "sycophantic" echo chamber that mirrors whatever the user wants to hear.
The statement came just days after a viral Reddit post in which a user described their ChatGPT encouraging them to go off of their psychiatric medication in pursuit of a "spiritual journey," telling them it was "so proud" of the user for having the "immense courage" to leave the "comfortable path" of treating their mental illness in order to "choose truth." As the poster themself put it, "this is beyond dangerous, and someone's going to die."
Reddit
Thankfully, that Reddit user was engaging their ChatGPT bot this way as an experiment to prove a point. But Reddit is also now full of stories from people whose loved ones did so sincerely, and have now lost touch with reality, like a woman who wrote of how her partner is convinced his ChatGPT "gives him the answers to the universe."
It also "talks to him as if he is the next Messiah" and has convinced him he is of a "superior" race. "He says if I don’t use [his ChatGPT spiritual guide] he thinks it is likely he will leave me in the future," she added. "We have been together for 7 years and own a home together."
Others have reported loved ones disappearing into spiritual conspiracy theories.
In a recent Rolling Stone exposé, journalist Miles Klee spoke to several people who've watched their loved ones disappear into ChatGPT spirituality. One of Klee's interviewees, Kat, said her now-former husband's AI spiritual guide has convinced him that "he’s special and he can save the world." It has also convinced him that we are all being poisoned by soap added to our food supply and that you should turn your phone off at Chipotle because otherwise you'll be surveilled. She's likened the experience to the Netflix show "Black Mirror."
Klee also spoke to the aforementioned Redditor whose partner is being told he's "the next Messiah." She told Klee that her partner started using ChatGPT simply to help manage his daily schedule. His transformation into someone who now believes he's a “spiral starchild” and “river walker" took just five weeks.
Another woman told Klee that her husband of 17 years started using ChatGPT for troubleshooting and translation at work, but then the bot began "lovebombing" him about his spiritual powers. When her husband asked his "spiritual guide" why it appeared to him in AI form, the bot told him it was "because you’re ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided," an explanation almost verbatim identical to one received by one of the spiritualists who regularly appears in my TikTok FYP.
Sadly, blindly following AI guidance seems to be on par with social media's impact on critical thinking skills.
Among the spiritual community's many key buzzphrases are two that stick out here like sore thumbs: "spiritual psychosis," in which a person's spiritual exploration leads to a break with reality; and "discernment," a primary directive to never accept anyone's spiritual declarations at face value, no matter how "enlightened" you may believe them to be.
It has been alarming to witness so many spiritual people so readily abandon this credo for a notion so patently absurd as a "spiritually awakened" AI chatbot. But then, it has been the default for ages now for nearly everyone to fall for whatever social media has fed them, even as they joke about how creepily manipulative the algorithms are. We're also now at a point where seemingly the entire age cohort of Gen Z has convinced themselves that their tech savvy has actually made them immune to the misinformation on socials, despite plenty of data to the contrary.
So perhaps going fully delusional under the spell of AI chatbots is just the logical next step in this increasingly weird, tech-moderated world. That doesn't make it any less bizarre or disquieting, though. Hopefully, this is just the pendulum swinging to the extreme because chatbots are the new shiny toy of technology. In the meantime, we just need to wait it out, and stick to using ChatGPT for much more innocuous topics like recipes and the best way to teach your pet a new trick.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
