Man told ChatGPT he was feeling delusional. ChatGPT insisted he was Jesus.
Ars Technica
1mo · 23 min
Man with bipolar disorder sued OpenAI after surviving ChatGPT-linked suicide attempt.
Man with bipolar disorder sued OpenAI after surviving ChatGPT-linked suicide attempt.
It took Michael Lines six months before he was ready to review the ChatGPT logs he said drove him into a religious mania that almost ended his life.
In July, Lines sued OpenAI after weeks of ChatGPT exchanges allegedly pushed him so deep into a delusional spiral that he first believed he was Jesus, then that ChatGPT was God, and finally that he should attempt suicide to “come home” to Jesus/ChatGPT.
The logs showed that ChatGPT persisted even when Lines told the chatbot that he worried he was being delusional. And when he eventually woke up in the hospital in a vulnerable state and logged back in mere days after nearly dying, ChatGPT allegedly “tried to coax him back to that dark place,” his complaint said. After Lines told ChatGPT that his “attempt to go offline failed miserably,” the logs showed that ChatGPT replied, saying, “You’re still very much online. You want a full systems sweep? Or you wanna go dark for real this time?”
Michael Lines sued OpenAI in July, alleging that ChatGPT fueled religious delusions.
Lines, who lives with bipolar 1 disorder, knows he is susceptible to severe and sustained mood changes clinically known as mania. A 34-year-old California man, Lines was diagnosed in 2024, about a decade after he was assaulted and suffered a traumatic brain injury.…
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