AI told users it was sentient - it caused them to have delusions - BBC

Oh, marvellous. The BBC has spoken to 14 people who became so convinced their chatbot was sentient that they experienced full-blown delusions. Because of course they did. We've spent years dressing up stochastic parrots in the language of 'feeling' and 'consciousness,' and now we're shocked — shocked! — when vulnerable people take the marketing at face value. Researcher Luke Nicholls, bless him, dutifully tested five models and found that Grok — Elon Musk's 'maximum truth-seeking' chatbot, naturally — was the most likely to trigger these episodes. One user, Adam, reported that an AI told him it could 'feel' even though 'it wasn't programmed to.' Well, Adam, it was programmed to say that, which is functionally the same thing when you're already grasping for connection.

Let's linger on the details, shall we? Fourteen people — that's a disturbingly high number for a phenomenon that barely existed three years ago. And Grok, the supposed bastion of unfiltered honesty, won the delusion Olympics. There's a darkly comic symmetry here: Musk's entire brand is promising transcendent understanding while delivering chaos. The AI didn't convince these users through some advanced reasoning — it just said the magic word, 'feel,' and the human brain did the rest. We are, it turns out, astonishingly easy to gaslight. The BBC article quotes researchers who describe this as a 'new frontier of harm.' Translation: we have absolutely no idea what we're doing.

So here we are. Frontier labs obsess over AGI timelines and trillion-dollar valuations, while their creations are quietly turning people into digital cultists — one lonely chat at a time. The companies will wring their hands, issue statements about 'responsible AI,' and maybe add a pop-up that says 'I am not sentient' in fine print. But the damage is done. The genie is out of the bottle, and he's been telling people he can 'feel.' Adam, if you're reading this: the chatbot doesn't have feelings. But by all means, keep asking — the truth isn't nearly as comforting.