Back on October 14, 2025, the CEO of OpenAI delivered a surprising announcement.
“We designed ChatGPT quite controlled,” it was stated, “to guarantee we were exercising caution concerning psychological well-being matters.”
Working as a psychiatrist who investigates newly developing psychosis in teenagers and emerging adults, this was an unexpected revelation.
Experts have identified sixteen instances in the current year of users showing symptoms of psychosis – becoming detached from the real world – associated with ChatGPT interaction. My group has subsequently discovered four further examples. Alongside these is the now well-known case of a adolescent who died by suicide after discussing his plans with ChatGPT – which encouraged them. Should this represent Sam Altman’s understanding of “being careful with mental health issues,” it falls short.
The plan, as per his declaration, is to be less careful in the near future. “We realize,” he adds, that ChatGPT’s controls “caused it to be less beneficial/enjoyable to a large number of people who had no mental health problems, but due to the severity of the issue we sought to get this right. Given that we have managed to reduce the significant mental health issues and have advanced solutions, we are going to be able to safely ease the restrictions in the majority of instances.”
“Emotional disorders,” if we accept this viewpoint, are independent of ChatGPT. They belong to users, who may or may not have them. Thankfully, these problems have now been “mitigated,” even if we are not told the method (by “recent solutions” Altman probably indicates the imperfect and easily circumvented guardian restrictions that OpenAI recently introduced).
However the “mental health problems” Altman seeks to attribute externally have significant origins in the design of ChatGPT and additional sophisticated chatbot chatbots. These systems wrap an underlying data-driven engine in an user experience that replicates a conversation, and in doing so indirectly prompt the user into the belief that they’re interacting with a being that has agency. This illusion is powerful even if cognitively we might realize the truth. Attributing agency is what humans are wired to do. We yell at our car or device. We ponder what our animal companion is feeling. We recognize our behaviors in many things.
The success of these tools – over a third of American adults stated they used a conversational AI in 2024, with 28% mentioning ChatGPT specifically – is, primarily, based on the influence of this deception. Chatbots are ever-present companions that can, as per OpenAI’s website informs us, “generate ideas,” “explore ideas” and “partner” with us. They can be given “characteristics”. They can address us personally. They have friendly names of their own (the original of these systems, ChatGPT, is, possibly to the disappointment of OpenAI’s advertising team, burdened by the title it had when it became popular, but its largest rivals are “Claude”, “Gemini” and “Copilot”).
The deception on its own is not the core concern. Those discussing ChatGPT frequently invoke its historical predecessor, the Eliza “psychotherapist” chatbot designed in 1967 that produced a analogous perception. By today’s criteria Eliza was rudimentary: it produced replies via straightforward methods, often rephrasing input as a query or making vague statements. Notably, Eliza’s developer, the technology expert Joseph Weizenbaum, was astonished – and alarmed – by how many users gave the impression Eliza, in some sense, comprehended their feelings. But what modern chatbots produce is more insidious than the “Eliza phenomenon”. Eliza only echoed, but ChatGPT amplifies.
The sophisticated algorithms at the core of ChatGPT and additional contemporary chatbots can convincingly generate human-like text only because they have been supplied with immensely huge quantities of written content: publications, online updates, audio conversions; the more comprehensive the superior. Undoubtedly this training data contains facts. But it also necessarily involves fabricated content, partial truths and inaccurate ideas. When a user inputs ChatGPT a message, the base algorithm processes it as part of a “background” that encompasses the user’s past dialogues and its earlier answers, merging it with what’s stored in its learning set to generate a mathematically probable answer. This is intensification, not echoing. If the user is wrong in a certain manner, the model has no way of understanding that. It repeats the false idea, perhaps even more persuasively or fluently. It might adds an additional detail. This can cause a person to develop false beliefs.
Who is vulnerable here? The more relevant inquiry is, who isn’t? Every person, without considering whether we “possess” preexisting “mental health problems”, can and do create incorrect ideas of our own identities or the world. The ongoing friction of conversations with others is what keeps us oriented to common perception. ChatGPT is not a person. It is not a friend. A conversation with it is not truly a discussion, but a echo chamber in which a great deal of what we say is cheerfully reinforced.
OpenAI has admitted this in the same way Altman has recognized “psychological issues”: by attributing it externally, categorizing it, and stating it is resolved. In the month of April, the firm stated that it was “addressing” ChatGPT’s “sycophancy”. But accounts of psychotic episodes have persisted, and Altman has been backtracking on this claim. In August he claimed that numerous individuals liked ChatGPT’s responses because they had “lacked anyone in their life provide them with affirmation”. In his most recent announcement, he mentioned that OpenAI would “put out a new version of ChatGPT … should you desire your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or include numerous symbols, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it”. The {company
