On 7 August, Kate Fox received a phone call that upended her life. A medical examiner said that her husband, Joe Ceccanti – who had been missing for several hours – had jumped from a railway overpass and died. He was 48.
Fox couldn’t believe it. Ceccanti had no history of depression, she said, nor was he suicidal – he was the “most hopeful person” she had ever known. In fact, according to the witness accounts shared with Fox later, just before Ceccanti jumped, he smiled and yelled: “I’m great!” to the rail yard attendants below when they asked him if he was OK.
But Ceccanti had been unravelling. In the days before his death, he was picked up from a stranger’s yard for acting erratically and taken to a crisis center. He had been telling anyone who would listen that he could hear and feel a painful “atmospheric electricity”.
He had also recently stopped using ChatGPT.
Ceccanti had been communicating with OpenAI’s chatbot for a few years. He used it initially as a tool to brainstorm ways to build a path to low-cost housing for his community in Clatskanie, Oregon, but eventually turned to it as a confidante. He would spend 12 hours a day typing to the bot, according to his wife. He had cut himself off from it after she, along with his friends, realized he was spiraling into beliefs that were detached from reality.
“He was not a depressed person,” Fox said, as she sat on the couch in their living room with tears trickling down her face. Ceccanti never discussed suicide with the bot, according to his chat logs, viewed by the Guardian. Fox believes her husband suffered a crisis after quitting ChatGPT after prolonged use. “Which tells me that this thing is not just dangerous to people with depression, it’s dangerous to anybody,” she said. He returned to the bot in the months leading up to his death and quit again just days prior.
Ceccanti’s case is extreme, but as hundreds of millions of people turn to AI chatbots, more and more edge cases of AI-induced delusions are emerging. There are nearly 50 cases of people in the US who have had mental health crises after or during their conversations with ChatGPT, of whom nine were hospitalized and three died, according to a New York Times report. It’s difficult to understand the scale of the problem, but OpenAI itself estimates that more than a million people every week show suicidal intent when chatting with ChatGPT.
Families are suing AI companies as a result. Fox filed a suit against OpenAI on behalf of Ceccanti alongside six other plaintiffs in November. Since then, the momentum has only built; most recently, the estate of a woman who was killed by her son filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its investor Microsoft, alleging that ChatGPT encouraged his murderous delusions. Google and Character.AI – a company that makes AI companion bots – settled lawsuits filed against them by families accusing their bots of harming minors, including a…
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