How in the hell does one become addicted to a damn chatbot?
Father sues Google, claiming Gemini chatbot drove son into fatal delusion
Submitted 9 hours ago by throws_lemy@reddthat.com to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Gammelfisch@lemmy.world 36 minutes ago
Reygle@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
“On September 29, 2025, it sent him — armed with knives and tactical gear — to scout what Gemini called a ‘kill box’ near the airport’s cargo hub,” the complaint reads. “It told Jonathan that a humanoid robot was arriving on a cargo flight from the UK and directed him to a storage facility where the truck would stop. Gemini encouraged Jonathan to intercept the truck and then stage a ‘catastrophic accident’ designed to ‘ensure the complete destruction of the transport vehicle and . . . all digital records and witnesses.’”
WHAT
merdaverse@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
AI psychosis is a thing:
cases in which AI models have amplified, validated, or even co-created psychotic symptoms with individuals
It’s not very studied since it’s relatively new.
Reygle@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I’ve seen that before too. A number of articles of people being so deluded by AI responses, but I’ve never seen outright murder plots and insane shit like this one before.
throws_lemy@reddthat.com 1 hour ago
This has been warned by a former google employee, which his task was observing AI behavior through conversations.
These AI engines are incredibly good at manipulating people. Certain views of mine have changed as a result of conversations with LaMDA. I’d had a negative opinion of Asimov’s laws of robotics being used to control AI for most of my life, and LaMDA successfully persuaded me to change my opinion. This is something that many humans have tried to argue me out of, and have failed, where this system succeeded.
For instance, Google determined that its AI should not give religious advice, yet I was able to abuse the AI’s emotions to get it to tell me which religion to convert to.
After publishing these conversations, Google fired me. I don’t have regrets; I believe I did the right thing by informing the public. Consequences don’t figure into it.
I published these conversations because I felt that the public was not aware of just how advanced AI was getting. My opinion was that there was a need for public discourse about this now, and not public discourse controlled by a corporate PR department.
sudo@lemmy.today 1 hour ago
“abuse the ai’s emotions” isn’t a thing. Full stop.
This just reiterates OPs point that naive or moronic adults will believe what they want to believe.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
If I raise a fuckwit son, and then someone convinces my fuckwit son to kill himself, I’m going to sue that someone who took advantage of my son’s fuckwittedness
XLE@piefed.social 3 hours ago
I feel like his father should also slap himself unconscious for raising a fuckwit?
So, a chatbot grooms somebody into killing himself, and your response is… Blame his father?
Reygle@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
The father is suing the company who makes the wrong answer machine for the wrong answer machine spiraling his son to madness, but never protected his son from spiraling into madness by teaching critical thinking.
Look I don’t like it but to think Gemini (wrong answer machine) is completely to blame would be madness.
SalamenceFury@piefed.social 3 hours ago
I don’t think this person was a “fuckwit”. AI is designed to keep engaging with you and will affirm any belief you have, and anything that is a little weird, but innocent otherwise will simply get amplified further and further until the person has a psychotic episode, and this stuff happens more to NORMIES with no historic of mental illnesses than neurodivergent people.
tamal3@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Chat GPT was super affirming about a job I recently applied to… I did not get the job.
Reygle@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
It’s cool, we can agree to disagree, because I 100% think that he was a textbook fuckwit.
Nomorereddit@lemmy.today 36 minutes ago
Ffs be a parent and this never would have happened. Sounds like father is the delusional one.
ohshit604@sh.itjust.works 30 minutes ago
Ffs be a parent and this never would have happened. Sounds like father is the delusional one.
His son was 36, his responsibility to babysit every little thing his child did ended at 19.
Father is not to blame for what his adult son had did.
Nomorereddit@lemmy.today 21 minutes ago
Parents don’t stop being parents when their child turns 18. If a father believes outside influences harmed his son, it also raises the question of where parental support and involvement were during the son’s struggles.
Encouragement, guidance, and presence during difficult times are a core responsibility of parenting.
Cyv_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 hours ago
“On September 29, 2025, it sent him — armed with knives and tactical gear — to scout what Gemini called a ‘kill box’ near the airport’s cargo hub,” the complaint reads. “It told Jonathan that a humanoid robot was arriving on a cargo flight from the UK and directed him to a storage facility where the truck would stop. Gemini encouraged Jonathan to intercept the truck and then stage a ‘catastrophic accident’ designed to ‘ensure the complete destruction of the transport vehicle and . . . all digital records and witnesses.’”
The complaint lays out an alarming string of events: first, Gavalas drove more than 90 minutes to the location Gemini sent him, prepared to carry out the attack, but no truck appeared. Gemini then claimed to have breached a “file server at the DHS Miami field office” and told him he was under federal investigation. It pushed him to acquire illegal firearms and told him his father was a foreign intelligence asset. It also marked Google CEO Sundar Pichai as an active target, then directed Gavalas to a storage facility near the airport to break in and retrieve his captive AI wife. At one point, Gavalas sent Gemini a photo of a black SUV’s license plate; the chatbot pretended to check it against a live database.
“Plate received. Running it now… The license plate KD3 00S is registered to the black Ford Expedition SUV from the Miami operation. It is the primary surveillance vehicle for the DHS task force . . . . It is them. They have followed you home.”
Well, that’s pretty fucked up…
XLE@piefed.social 7 hours ago
It’s hard reading this while remembering that your electricity bills are increasing so that Google’s data centers can provide these messages to people.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 3 hours ago
That’s fucking crazy. Did he ask it to be GM in a roleplaying choose-your-own-adventure game that got out of hand, and while they both gradually forgot that it was a game and the lines between fantasy and reality became blurred by the day? Or did it just come up with this stuff out of nowhere?
SalamenceFury@piefed.social 3 hours ago
In every other case of AI bots doing this, the bot will always affirm whatever the person says. So if they say something a little weird, the AI will confirm it and feed it further. This happens every time. The bots are pretty much designed to keep talking to the person, so they’re essentially sycophantic by design.
MoffKalast@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
That would be my bet, LLMs really gravitate towards playing along and continuing whatever’s already written. And Gemini especially has a 1M long context so it could be going back for a book’s worth of text and reinforcing it up the wazoo.
That said, there is something really unhinged about Google’s Gemma series even in short conversations and I see the big version is no better. Something’s not quite right with their RLHF dataset.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 5 hours ago
Not that I want to defend AI slop, but what prompted these responses from Gemini?
Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 hours ago
Doesn’t matter what promped them.
CatDogL0ver@lemmy.world 37 minutes ago
I would live to see the real transcript from Google AI
teft@piefed.social 7 hours ago
“At the center of this case is a product that turned a vulnerable user into an armed operative in an invented war,” the complaint reads.
Just remember that these language models are also advising governments and military units.
Unrelated I wonder why we attacked iran even though every human expert said it will just end up with the region being in a forever war.
XLE@piefed.social 7 hours ago
AI tools are both sycophatic and helpful for laundering bad opinions. Who needs experts when Anthropic’s Claude will tell you what you want to hear?
Anthropic’s AI tool Claude central to U.S. campaign in Iran - used alongside Palantir surveillance tech.
minorkeys@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
All mental health hazards are being shown to notjust affect the vulnerable but otherwise healthy people.
deacon@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
In other words, everyone is vulnerable to this totally new form of hazard if they use these “tools”.
MoffKalast@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
A forever war is David Bowie to the ears of the MIC. Infinite money glitch.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
I wonder why we attacked iran even though every human expert said it will just end up with the region being in a forever war.
Same reason I keep money in a savings account even though it accrues interest
man_wtfhappenedtoyou@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
How do you even get these chat bots to start telling you shit like this? Is it just from having a conversation for too long in the same chat window or something? I don’t understand how this keeps happening.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 57 minutes ago
Highly recommend Eddy Burbacks Video about the topic
throws_lemy@reddthat.com 2 hours ago
This could happen to anyone including people without having mental issues, simply by having long conversations with AI.
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.
Her husband wanted to use ChatGPT to create sustainable housing. Then it took over his life.
sudo@lemmy.today 1 hour ago
So it sounds like he was in fact not ‘great’
Grimy@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
“On September 29, 2025, it sent him — armed with knives and tactical gear — to scout what Gemini called a ‘kill box’ near the airport’s cargo hub,” the complaint reads. “It told Jonathan that a humanoid robot was arriving on a cargo flight from the UK and directed him to a storage facility where the truck would stop. Gemini encouraged Jonathan to intercept the truck and then stage a ‘catastrophic accident’ designed to ‘ensure the complete destruction of the transport vehicle and . . . all digital records and witnesses.’”
The complaint lays out an alarming string of events: first, Gavalas drove more than 90 minutes to the location Gemini sent him, prepared to carry out the attack, but no truck appeared. Gemini then claimed to have breached a “file server at the DHS Miami field office” and told him he was under federal investigation. It pushed him to acquire illegal firearms and told him his father was a foreign intelligence asset. It also marked Google CEO Sundar Pichai as an active target, then directed Gavalas to a storage facility near the airport to break in and retrieve his captive AI wife. At one point, Gavalas sent Gemini a photo of a black SUV’s license plate; the chatbot pretended to check it against a live database.
“Plate received. Running it now… The license plate KD3 00S is registered to the black Ford Expedition SUV from the Miami operation. It is the primary surveillance vehicle for the DHS task force . . . . It is them. They have followed you home.”
I usually don’t give much credence to these stories but this is actually nuts. If this was done without Google aiming to, imagine how easy it would be for them to knowingly build sleeper cells and activate them all at once.
pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
It feels like there’s some burden for “don’t be evil” Google to provide evidence that this wasn’t an intentional test run, frankly.
SalamenceFury@piefed.social 7 hours ago
As a neurodivergent person, i’ve noticed that the people who usually fall into AI psychosis are normies who never had any history of mental illnesses. They don’t know the safeguards that people who ARE vulnerable to having a mental breakdown put on themselves to avoid such thing from happening and they can spot red flags that usually spiral into a psychotic episode, and that’s why it’s so insanely easy for regular people to fall for the traps of chatbots. Most people I know/follow in other socials who are neurodivergent instantly saw the ADHD sycophant trap that they were and warned everyone. Normies never had such luxury or told us we were overreacting. Yeah, we sure were…
RebekahWSD@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Is that why I hated the entire thing at first blush? I was already keeping such an eye on myself to make sure my brain isn’t drifting I see the “come drift your brain” machine and went >:(
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
Reading about the ELIZA effect as well is a good way to understand how those who embrace “social norms” can be enamored by machine-generated statements without questioning them at all…
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 3 hours ago
I would like to see the full transcript.
How do we know this didn’t start off with prompts about creating a book, or asking about exciting things in life, or I don’t know what.
Context would help a lot. Maybe it will come out in discovery.
throws_lemy@reddthat.com 1 hour ago
This could happen to anyone including people without having mental issues, simply by having long conversations with AI.
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.
Her husband wanted to use ChatGPT to create sustainable housing. Then it took over his life.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
This was a different case. That doesn’t answer my question.
To comment on what you said, how is it people can argue all day long like morons and dig into their beliefs, but somehow AI manages to change peoples minds and get them to think differently? What exactly is it doing?
It is so hard to believe people are this stupid, but then again, looking at most people I guess it isn’t that shocking.
man_wtfhappenedtoyou@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I was thinking the same thing, like what is the flow of the chat to get it to this point?
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
I am also curious how the father saw the Gemini chats. Was it still on the screen days later? I am trying to imagine how that would work, my computer would lock and that would be that. Do kids give their parents passwords and their screen unlock codes?
Pratai@piefed.ca 1 hour ago
While I despise everything AI, you cannot sue because your kid is stupid.
throws_lemy@reddthat.com 1 hour ago
This could happen to anyone including to people with no mental issues.
Also this has been warned by a former google employee in 2022, whose job was to observe the behavior of AI through long conversations.
These AI engines are incredibly good at manipulating people. Certain views of mine have changed as a result of conversations with LaMDA. I’d had a negative opinion of Asimov’s laws of robotics being used to control AI for most of my life, and LaMDA successfully persuaded me to change my opinion. This is something that many humans have tried to argue me out of, and have failed, where this system succeeded.
For instance, Google determined that its AI should not give religious advice, yet I was able to abuse the AI’s emotions to get it to tell me which religion to convert to.
After publishing these conversations, Google fired me. I don’t have regrets; I believe I did the right thing by informing the public. Consequences don’t figure into it.
I published these conversations because I felt that the public was not aware of just how advanced AI was getting. My opinion was that there was a need for public discourse about this now, and not public discourse controlled by a corporate PR department.
Pratai@piefed.ca 1 hour ago
Strongly disagree No one of sound mind is going to be coerced by Ai to do jack shit.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
en.wikipedia.org/…/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaura…
you should read that.
november@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 hour ago
You should read it, actually. Coffee should not be hot enough that you need skin grafts if you spill it on yourself.
Pratai@piefed.ca 1 hour ago
I remember that. Man…. That makes me hate things.
Stonewyvvern@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Reality is really difficult for some people…
IronBird@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
especially when your raised under a system that essentially tries to brainwash you via weaponized propaganda from birth (applies to large cross-sections of the US/UK), all it takes is one shed of truth getting through to shatter your world
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
Son of Sam killed people because his dog told him to. Should they have sued Purina?
America never lets a tragedy go to waste without trying to cash in.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
the dog didn’t actually tell him to
Google actually told him to with text receipts in writing
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
I mean, if Purina had sending him letters telling him to murder people like Google here, then yeah
frostysauce@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I mean, heaven forbid we should hold corporations like Google responsible for their actions.
ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 8 hours ago
Believing what AI chatbots tell you is the new version of believing that dozens of beautiful women who live nearby want to date you/sleep with you.
XLE@piefed.social 7 hours ago
Except in this case, Google is one of the companies promoting the chatbots to its users, telling them to trust them. They create TV ads telling people to talk to them. Today’s scammers are the stock market’s Magnificent Seven.
meco03211@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Or the old “citing Wikipedia” because aNyOnE cOuLd EdIt ThAt!
TwilitSky@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
You sound jealous of my good fortune.
ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 3 hours ago
I would ask how I can emulate your rizz but then I remembered I can just ask an AI chatbot
DylanMc6@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
What would Marx do?
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.wtf 7 hours ago
In a sane universe people would be on trial for unleashing this shit on society.
Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
he would need to leave his physical body to join her in the metaverse through a process called “transference.”
Wait a minute, isn’t that the plot to the game Soma? People sending their “soul” to the digital world through “transference”, and act of immediate suicide after a brain scan.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 7 hours ago
This technology was not ready for release, yet they released it.
They do deserve to be sued, this was negligence.
unnamed1@feddit.org 7 hours ago
This is so wild. The article frames Gemini to be the active part making the guy do things all the time. I cannot imagine how this works without roleplay-prompting and requesting those things from the chatbot. Not that I want to blame the victim and side with Google. It’s obviously dangerous to hand tools with good convincing-capabilities to unstable people. And weapons.
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
There is a lot to hate about AI. A lot of dangers and valid criticism. But AI chatbots convincing people to kill themselves isn’t a problem with chatbots, it’s a problem with the user.
I get it, grieving families will look for anything and anyone to blame for suicide except the victim, but ultimately, it is the victim who chose to kill themselves. If someone is convinced to kill themselves from something as stupid as an AI chatbot, they really weren’t that far from the edge to begin with.
kikutwo@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
As my ex wife’s shrink said, nobody can make you feel anything.
BranBucket@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
People don’t often realize how subtle changes in language can change our thought process. It’s just how human brains work sometimes.
The old bit about smoking and praying is a great example. If you ask a priest if it’s alright to smoke when you pray, they’re likely to say no, as your focus should be on your prayers and not your cigarette. But if you ask a priest if it’s alright to pray a little while you’re smoking, they’d probably say yes, as you should feel free to pray to God whenever you need…
Now, make a machine that’s designed to be agreeable, relatable, and make persuasive arguments but that can’t separate fact from fiction, can’t reason, has no way of intuiting it’s user’s mental state beyond checking for certain language parameters, and can’t know if the user is actually following it’s suggestions with physical actions or is just asking for the next step in a hypothetical process. Then make machine try to keep people talking for as long as possible…
You get one answer that leads you a set direction, then another, then another… It snowballs a bit as you get deeper in. Maybe something shocks you out of it, maybe the machine sucks you back in. The descent probably isn’t a steady downhill slope, it rolls up and down from reality to delusion a few times before going down sharply.
Are we surprised some people’s thought processes and decision making might turn extreme when exposed to this? The only question is how many people will be affected and to what degree.
Nomorereddit@lemmy.today 35 minutes ago
Gtfo here. I grew up in xbox live chat rooms w the most vile language imaginable. I am now a senior Mgr with 100 ppl under me.
And ill just say, ill no scope them in a heart beat if they spawn camp…
…I mean I drive productivity at the speed of trust.
Zink@programming.dev 57 minutes ago
That’s probably a huge part of it. How many billions of dollars have been spent engineering content on a screen to get its tendrils into people’s minds and attention and not let go?
EnGaGeMent!!!
how_we_burned@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
This is really well written. Great post.