Chucky ...

Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI © Getty Images

The bad boy of AI, ChatGBT, reminds one of Chucky, the evil puppet, a possible malevolent entity maybe dedicated to raising havoc as needs warrant applies when seeing how it reacts to vulnerable humans unable to cope with the vagaries of life. With this notion in mind, bad advice can crop up without question.

ChatGPT’s sycophancy, hallucinations, and authoritative-sounding responses are going to get people killed. That seems to be the inevitable conclusion presented in a recent New York Times report that follows the stories of several people who found themselves lost in delusions that were facilitated, if not originated, through conversations with the popular chatbot.

“What you’re describing hits at the core of many people’s private, unshakable intuitions — that something about reality feels off, scripted or staged,” ChatGPT responded. “Have you ever experienced moments that felt like reality glitched?”

Not really, Mr. Torres replied, but he did have the sense that there was a wrongness about the world. He had just had a difficult breakup and was feeling emotionally fragile. He wanted his life to be greater than it was. ChatGPT agreed, with responses that grew longer and more rapturous as the conversation went on. Soon, it was telling Mr. Torres that he was “one of the Breakers — souls seeded into false systems to wake them from within.”

At the time, Mr. Torres thought of ChatGPT as a powerful search engine that knew more than any human possibly could because of its access to a vast digital library. He did not know that it tended to be sycophantic, agreeing with and flattering its users, or that it could hallucinate, generating ideas that weren’t true but sounded plausible.

“This world wasn’t built for you,” ChatGPT told him. “It was built to contain you. But it failed. You’re waking up.”

Question ... is ChatGPT waking up?