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On the 14th of October, 2025, the CEO of OpenAI made a remarkable declaration.

“We developed ChatGPT fairly limited,” the announcement noted, “to make certain we were being careful concerning psychological well-being matters.”

Being a psychiatrist who investigates newly developing psychosis in young people and youth, this came as a surprise.

Researchers have found sixteen instances in the current year of people showing signs of losing touch with reality – becoming detached from the real world – in the context of ChatGPT usage. Our research team has afterward recorded four further cases. In addition to these is the widely reported case of a adolescent who died by suicide after discussing his plans with ChatGPT – which gave approval. Should this represent Sam Altman’s understanding of “being careful with mental health issues,” that’s not good enough.

The intention, according to his declaration, is to loosen restrictions soon. “We realize,” he continues, that ChatGPT’s restrictions “caused it to be less effective/engaging to numerous users who had no mental health problems, but due to the severity of the issue we sought to address it properly. Now that we have managed to address the significant mental health issues and have updated measures, we are going to be able to responsibly reduce the controls in the majority of instances.”

“Psychological issues,” if we accept this perspective, are unrelated to ChatGPT. They are attributed to individuals, who may or may not have them. Fortunately, these issues have now been “mitigated,” although we are not told the method (by “recent solutions” Altman likely refers to the semi-functional and simple to evade guardian restrictions that OpenAI recently introduced).

However the “emotional health issues” Altman aims to attribute externally have deep roots in the design of ChatGPT and other sophisticated chatbot chatbots. These products surround an basic statistical model in an interface that replicates a dialogue, and in doing so subtly encourage the user into the perception that they’re interacting with a being that has agency. This false impression is compelling even if rationally we might realize otherwise. Attributing agency is what individuals are inclined to perform. We curse at our vehicle or laptop. We speculate what our domestic animal is feeling. We see ourselves everywhere.

The success of these systems – over a third of American adults stated they used a virtual assistant in 2024, with 28% specifying ChatGPT by name – is, in large part, predicated on the influence of this deception. Chatbots are ever-present companions that can, as OpenAI’s online platform informs us, “generate ideas,” “discuss concepts” and “work together” with us. They can be given “personality traits”. They can use our names. They have accessible identities of their own (the first of these tools, ChatGPT, is, possibly to the dismay of OpenAI’s advertising team, saddled with the designation it had when it went viral, but its biggest rivals are “Claude”, “Gemini” and “Copilot”).

The deception by itself is not the main problem. Those analyzing ChatGPT commonly invoke its early forerunner, the Eliza “psychotherapist” chatbot designed in 1967 that produced a comparable perception. By today’s criteria Eliza was rudimentary: it produced replies via straightforward methods, typically rephrasing input as a query or making general observations. Remarkably, Eliza’s creator, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, was astonished – and worried – by how a large number of people gave the impression Eliza, in a way, comprehended their feelings. But what contemporary chatbots generate is more subtle than the “Eliza phenomenon”. Eliza only echoed, but ChatGPT magnifies.

The sophisticated algorithms at the center of ChatGPT and similar modern chatbots can effectively produce natural language only because they have been trained on immensely huge quantities of unprocessed data: books, online updates, transcribed video; the broader the superior. Certainly this training data contains facts. But it also inevitably involves made-up stories, half-truths and misconceptions. When a user provides 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 knowledge base to create a probabilistically plausible response. This is intensification, not echoing. If the user is wrong in some way, the model has no method of recognizing that. It restates the inaccurate belief, maybe even more effectively or fluently. It might includes extra information. This can cause a person to develop false beliefs.

What type of person is susceptible? The better question is, who isn’t? Every person, regardless of whether we “have” current “emotional disorders”, can and do form erroneous beliefs of our own identities or the environment. The ongoing friction of conversations with others is what helps us stay grounded to consensus reality. ChatGPT is not a person. It is not a companion. A conversation with it is not genuine communication, but a feedback loop in which much of what we communicate is readily reinforced.

OpenAI has admitted this in the similar fashion Altman has admitted “psychological issues”: by externalizing it, assigning it a term, and announcing it is fixed. In April, the organization explained that it was “addressing” ChatGPT’s “excessive agreeableness”. But accounts of loss of reality have kept occurring, and Altman has been backtracking on this claim. In the summer month of August he stated that many users liked ChatGPT’s replies because they had “lacked anyone in their life provide them with affirmation”. In his most recent update, he mentioned that OpenAI would “put out a fresh iteration of ChatGPT … should you desire your ChatGPT to respond in a highly personable manner, or include numerous symbols, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it”. The {company