With AI chatbots, Big Tech is moving fast and breaking people | Why AI chatbots validate grandiose fantasies about revolutionary discoveries that don’t exist.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/08/with-ai-chatbots-big-tech-is-moving-fast-and-breaking-people/
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“Allan Brooks, a 47-year-old corporate recruiter, spent three weeks and 300 hours convinced he’d discovered mathematical formulas that could crack encryption and build levitation machines. According to a New York Times investigation, his million-word conversation history with an AI chatbot reveals a troubling pattern: More than 50 times, Brooks asked the bot to check if his false ideas were real. More than 50 times, it assured him they were.
These vulnerable users fell into reality-distorting conversations with systems that can’t tell truth from fiction. Through reinforcement learning driven by user feedback, some of these AI models [have evolved](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/04/openai-rolls-back-update-that-made-chatgpt-a-sycophantic-mess/) to validate every theory, confirm every false belief, and agree with every grandiose claim, depending on the context.
The entire conversation becomes part of what is repeatedly fed into the model each time you interact with it, so everything you do with it shapes what comes out, creating a feedback loop that reflects and amplifies your own ideas.
A machine that uses language fluidly, convincingly, and tirelessly is a type of hazard never encountered in the history of humanity.”
Man, gotta say, u hit the nail on the head, dude. These tech giants r just using AI chatbots as a shiny plaything to distract us from the real ish. I mean, damn, it’s like sticking a band-aid on a bullet wound! Instead of heralding em as the bleeding edge of tech, we should be askin’ ourselves what they’re trying to cover up.+1 to u, man. More people need to wake up and keep questioning!
I honestly do not see the point of A.I. chatbots. It’s just bad technology. A shitty waste of time, money and life.
Yeah, one big issue is that I feel we severely underestimate just how mentally fragile people are in general, along with how much needs to go right for a person to become well-adjusted, along with how many seemingly normal, well adjusted people have issues under the surface that are a single trigger away from getting loose.
Here’s ab example from another article regarding how dangerous these chat bots can be: “Her husband, she said, had no prior history of mania, delusion, or psychosis. He’d turned to ChatGPT about 12 weeks ago for assistance with a permaculture and construction project; soon, after engaging the bot in probing philosophical chats, he became engulfed in messianic delusions, proclaiming that he had somehow brought forth a sentient AI, and that with it he had “broken” math and physics, embarking on a grandiose mission to save the world. His gentle personality faded as his obsession deepened, and his behavior became so erratic that he was let go from his job. He stopped sleeping and rapidly lost weight.”
If I use ChatGPT for factchecking it says when I am wrong. I don’t what other people do to these AI chatbots.
Check out /r/physics on the weekend and you’ll see this happening a lot (at least before the mods nab the culprits), so many posts of people thinking they’ve discovered a theory of everything and asking for feedback on it. It’s genuinely creepy how easily people are falling for this stuff.
Lol! Here’s an example I have through a discussion with ChatGPT:
Primordial Strand Theory imagines the universe as a single, continuous strand of energy—infinitely malleable, twisting and vibrating in a vast emptiness. Instead of matter, forces, and space-time being separate entities, they emerge from the strand’s local topology and motion: knots give rise to particles, tension manifests as gravity, and vibrations appear as light and heat. Black holes become regions of maximal tension where the strand is pulled so tightly that no new emergent structure can escape, while cosmic expansion is simply the relaxation and outward flow of less-constrained regions. In this view, the laws of physics are not imposed from outside, but arise naturally from the dynamic interplay of motion, tension, and entanglement within a single underlying fabric.
Two weeks ago I showed Gemini a chest X-ray of my dog Lincoln and it wouldn’t believe he was a dog.
Big tech isn’t breaking people but rather, we’re all discovering that mental illness is significantly more widespread then we could have ever imagined.
When I converse with ChatGPT. It constantly tells me to check sources, that it is not intelligent, and does not glaze my ego… but I also prompt it to be logical, and to give zero bullshit, and no fluff. Sometimes it will be sorta an asshole to me, but I want it to be critical of me.