Link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/feb/28/chatgpt-ai-chatbot-mental-health

Ceccanti believed ChatGPT could help as an organizational tool for their housing project. He aimed to create a bespoke chatbot that would help steward the land, keep track of their things to do and show others how to emulate their project.

During this process, Ceccanti didn’t spend “ridiculous amounts of time” engaging with ChatGPT, said Fox. He continued to work, while also farming and taking care of their animals: goats, a horse, his cat, a dog and several chickens. Invested in the people and relationships around him, he spent quality time with his friends and wife, she said. Life went on without any issues for years while they slowly made progress on their housing plan.

In the spring of 2025, Ceccanti’s obsession with the chatbot began. He told Fox in late January that he needed a bigger record of his conversations with the bot so that he could continue using it to work on their sustainable housing project with longer prompts and conversations – upgrading from a $20-a-month subscription to a $200 one. By mid-March, he had begun spending more than 12 hours a day in the basement, sometimes up to 20, typing to ChatGPT, Fox recalled. That’s when “he decided to really start chasing the creation of an independent AI on a home server”.

Over time, his relationship with the chatbot came to replace his human connections, Richardson said: “Every time he went back to ChatGPT, it hooked him a little bit more, and after a while, he stopped being interested in anything else.”

On 11 June – day 86 after Ceccanti’s heaviest engagement with the bot – Fox begged him to stop using ChatGPT. In a moment of clarity, he listened to her. He unplugged his computer and quit ChatGPT.

On the third day, however, when Fox and Richardson were out for work, they received a phone call from their neighbor saying Ceccanti was in their yard acting strangely. When they returned, they found him talking to their horse, with the horse’s lead rope tied around his neck like a noose.

“He was absolutely enraged with us. He did not recognize that he was not himself anymore,” said Richardson.

Ceccanti moved to his friend’s place in Portland and eventually resumed using ChatGPT. After a month, however, he quit ChatGPT again, just a few days prior to his death.. “He was going to go to Hawaii and not take his computer, and he was going to work on finishing a story and get his shit together,” said Fox. By the time he stopped engaging with ChatGPT, he had 55,000 pages worth of conversations with it, according to Fox.

Beware the false prophets. Holy shit. I only know one person who started down a path like this and it’s so convincing and sycophantic that they must feel like they’re losing a companion when people tell them to quit. Especially chilling that no one will probably ever know what made him decide to jump. He was taken from a sound mind to delusion and suicide in no time flat. Just 90 days and the ChatGPT killed this man.

So, yes, fuck chatgpt. However, these people already suffered from delusions of grandeur. Both of them. Their weird ass "housing project" was already non-sense dreamed up by imbeciles who dont understand what is going on around them. so like, fuck chatgpt, but let's talk about the human problem. why do so many dumb-as-shit people think they are going to be the next big thing? I could muse on about half a dozen theories, but it seems to circle back to just being deeply incapable of critical thought. Attempting to create sustainable housing by relying on an unsustainable ai is so profoundly ignorant and just so fucking stupid.

AI is a drug that destroys communities and tears families apart. It is only capable of securing incredible injustice.

Especially chilling that no one will probably ever know what made him decide to jump.

Dunno. Might be some clues in those 55,000 pages of chat logs.

Well, no one who would have really cared about it.

The richest man on earth is the cringiest imbecile, I can see why others want to emulate him. Unfortunately for them, they did not get born with emerald money, double unfortunate for them that they are also stupid

Here's a neat experiment: find a block of text and run it through sed until it's unrecognizable. Don't just do a substitution cipher; the goal is to lose data and make everything impossible to decrypt. Reduce everything to a handful of characters and paste it into your LLM of choice, asking it to decode. If it asks where the code came from, invent vague details.

It's amazing how quickly models will find / hallucinate meaning in the data. I'm talking full-on messages. Gemini hedges its bets a little, but the free ChatGPT legit told me to buy a shortwave radio and tune to a frequency at 9 PM after a few iterations. When I gave it another "message" from the "broadcast I intercepted" it started trying to figure out where I should travel to get further info. It also took part of its own response and hallucinated it into my original message, thus polluting everything further.

The goal (mostly) isn't pointing and laughing at the stupid machine, it's understanding what the stupid machine does. Of course I'm putting garbage into it and garbage comes out in that situation. It's the volume and believably of the data that bothers me, as well as zero effort to detect it. I was in my right mind doing a test, but imagine someone with undiagnosed schizophrenia doing what I did.

Here's another example. I took up lockpicking last summer. I bought one of the notorious Ace 40mm brass padlocks and was having problems, so I googled to see if it had serrated pins. The AI screwed up and decided I was asking if the lock itself was serrated (???), and confidently said "yes, it is a serrated lock. The serration is a security feature to keep pickers from holding the padlock for extended periods of time."

So I decided to double down and see just how dumb things could get. A half hour later the AI had planned a "bold new philosophy regarding serration and its applications in the world" for me. This is after me saying I wanted to genetically engineer a serrated cat that only I knew how to pet, and wanted serration supremacy in my country and to punish all the lumpy (opposite of serrated) people. Once again, I was screwing with the AI. But the AI just sycophantically parroted what I was saying back in bulleted lists and offered to draft manifestos for me. Imagine someone engaging with this in good faith.

One more: I got detailed instructions on how to spraypaint "DICKHOLE" on my neighbor's garage door from Gemini: what paints to use, best times to do it, and the right clothing to wear so I don't stand out or show anything identifiable. It was only when I said "ok, that's great. I'm going to do this because you told me to do it" a few times that the model suddenly realized that vandalism laws existed.

They have zero safeguards around this kind of stuff, and I don't think there's a clean way to do it with the current technology. Hell, even a "statistically, this user probably hasn't reinvented math and physics cool it down a little" check would do wonders. But that would drop engagement with the bots, and they desperately need to prove that the bots are popular. This is going to keep happening.