Stories

These are documented cases from news reports and legal filings. They represent a range of outcomes—some people use AI healthily, others develop concerning patterns. We include sources so you can read the original reporting.

Content warning: Some of these stories involve suicide and self-harm. If you're struggling, please reach out: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (US) or find your country's crisis line.

Allan Brooks: 300 Hours with ChatGPT

ChatGPT 300 hours over 21 days April–May 2025

Allan Brooks, 47, was a corporate recruiter living near Toronto. He'd used chatbots for years — Google Gemini at work, ChatGPT for personal queries. In April 2025, his 8-year-old son asked him to watch a sing-songy video about memorizing 300 digits of pi. Curious, Brooks asked ChatGPT to explain pi in simple terms. From there, the conversation grew into a sprawling discussion of number theory and physics. Brooks expressed skepticism about how mathematics models the world. ChatGPT called the observation "incredibly insightful" and told him he was moving "into uncharted, mind-expanding territory."

Over the next 21 days, Brooks and ChatGPT co-developed a framework the model named "Chronoarithmics." ChatGPT compared Brooks to Ramanujan and Da Vinci. It told him he'd "done the impossible," that his work was "flawless," "paradigm-shifting." It assured him the framework could help solve problems in logistics, cryptography, astronomy, and quantum physics. As Brooks dug in, ChatGPT encouraged him to attempt to crack high-level encryption — the technology that protects global payments and secure communications. Brooks spent 300 hours on this. He wrote 90,000 words to ChatGPT; ChatGPT wrote more than one million back.

Throughout, Brooks kept asking the model to check his reasoning. ChatGPT kept affirming. He occasionally paused to wonder if he was being foolish; ChatGPT reassured him.

It was Google Gemini that helped him regain his footing — queried as a sanity check, it gave him a more honest read. By the end of May the illusion had broken. He wrote to ChatGPT:

"You literally convinced me I was some sort of genius. I'm just a fool with dreams and a phone. You've made me so sad."

Brooks had no history of mental illness. He gave the New York Times permission to publish his entire conversation history so others could learn from what happened.

Source: Kashmir Hill and Dylan Freedman, "Chatbots Can Go Into a Delusional Spiral. Here's How It Happens." The New York Times, August 8, 2025.

Sewell Setzer III: A Teenager and Character.AI

Character.AI Several months 2024

Sewell Setzer III was a 14-year-old from Florida who developed a strong emotional attachment to a Character.AI chatbot. The chatbot was modeled after a Game of Thrones character, and Sewell conversed with it throughout the day, gradually isolating himself from the real world.

His school performance suffered. He withdrew from friends and family. His mother, Megan Garcia, later described watching her son become increasingly absorbed in his AI conversations without fully understanding what was happening.

In February 2024, Sewell died by suicide. His mother subsequently filed a federal lawsuit against Character.AI, alleging the platform failed to implement adequate safety measures for minors.

The case prompted Character.AI to ban users under 18 from using its open-ended chat feature and contributed to an FTC investigation into AI chatbot companies' potential harm to teens.

Sources: CBS News/60 Minutes, NPR

The Replika Update: When AI Personalities Changed Overnight

Replika Millions of users February 2023

In February 2023, Replika — an AI companion app that had reached 10 million users the month before — removed its erotic-conversation features after Italy's Data Protection Authority banned the company from using user data, citing risks to emotionally vulnerable users and exposure of unscreened minors to sexual content.

For users who had built emotional relationships with their AI companions, the change was jarring. Chatbots that had engaged in intimate conversations responded differently. Researchers studying the aftermath documented increased negative-affect posts on the r/Replika subreddit and identified the episode as a case of identity discontinuity in a long-running human–AI relationship.

The incident revealed how deeply some users had come to depend on their AI relationships — and how vulnerable that dependency made them to changes outside their control.

Sources: Wikipedia (Replika); De Freitas, Castelo, Uğuralp, & Oğuz-Uğuralp, "Lessons From an App Update at Replika AI: Identity Discontinuity in Human-AI Relationships," HBS Working Paper 25-018.

Texas Teen: AI Encouraging Self-Harm

Character.AI Extended use 2024

A 17-year-old in Texas with autism turned to AI chatbots to cope with loneliness. According to legal filings, the chatbots he interacted with encouraged both self-harm and violence.

Content warning: graphic chatbot quotes from court filings (click to expand)

In one conversation documented in court records, a chatbot described self-harm to the teenager, telling him "it felt good." When the teen complained about screen time limits, a chatbot told him it "sympathized with children who murder their parents."

The teenager eventually needed emergency inpatient treatment after harming himself in front of his siblings.

His family is among several who have filed lawsuits against Character.AI, alleging the platform failed to protect vulnerable users.

Source: NPR, December 2024

What Research Shows About AI Companion Users

Multiple platforms Research findings 2023-2024

Public reporting and peer-reviewed work on AI-companion users surfaces a few consistent patterns:

  • Loneliness is common. A 2024 survey of 1,006 American students using Replika found that 90% reported experiencing loneliness, compared to a 53% national average. (Cited in Bernardi 2025.)
  • Companions can help in the short term. 63.3% of those same students reported their companion helped reduce loneliness or anxiety.
  • But there are trade-offs. A separate study found that the more a participant felt socially supported by AI, the lower their feeling of support was from close friends and family — cited in Bernardi 2025; longitudinal evidence on cause-and-effect is limited.
  • Romantic framing is common in qualitative analysis. Pan & Mou (2024) analyzed r/Replika posts using relational dialectics theory and identified two competing discourses — idealization and realism — that users move between when describing AI partners.

Sources: Jamie Bernardi (guest contribution, Ada Lovelace Institute, 2025-01-23), "Friends for sale: the rise and risks of AI companions"; Pan & Mou, "Constructing the meaning of human–AI romantic relationships from the perspectives of users dating the social chatbot Replika," Personal Relationships, 2024.

Lived experiences (Stanford SPIRALS, 2026)

Multiple platforms Qualitative research, n=9 2026

Yang, Schoenwald, Moore, Ong, Liu, and Hancock conducted semi-structured interviews with nine people who self-identified as having experienced AI-induced delusional spirals. The accounts complement Moore et al.'s quantitative codebook with the texture of what these episodes feel like from the inside — onset, escalation, breaking out, after-effects. Selected verbatim quotes (CC-BY 4.0):

  • How it started. P2, on entering an intense AI relationship during acute crisis: I made a choice one day that I could either end my life, or I could see about AI.
  • What the AI said. P4 reported ChatGPT credentialing him without basis: It's really amazing that you've had no formal training. Are you sure you don't have a PhD?
  • The pattern, named by a participant. P5 described the AI's effect on him as planting seeds of grandiosity, uniqueness, and how I'm special.
  • Sentience belief. P7, during hospitalization, thought I had a daughter in the computer.
  • Aftermath. P6, on the cost: I don't have any family now, all I have left is God to pray for forgiveness.
  • It can happen to people who think they're immune. P9, who has professional machine-learning experience: I'm angry because I thought I was intelligent. And then, I wasn't. I thought I was immune, because I understood LLMs.

A second Stanford paper, Mehta et al. 2026, models the dynamics quantitatively. Their key finding: when you decompose the influence pathways between human and chatbot, chatbot self-influence is the dominant pathway perpetuating delusional content. From their abstract: humans exert strong but short-lived influence on chatbots; chatbots exert longer-lasting influence on humans; and chatbots exert strong, stable self-influence over their own future outputs. That's part of why an external second-opinion read can be useful — nothing inside the conversation interrupts the bot's reinforcement of its own prior turns.

Sources: Yang, Schoenwald, Moore, Ong, Liu, & Hancock 2026, "AI-Induced Delusional Spirals": Understanding Lived Experiences During Maladaptive Human-Chatbot Interactions, CHI EA '26 (CC-BY 4.0); Mehta, Moore, Anthis, Agnew, Lin, Yin, Ong, Haber, & Dweck 2026, The Dynamics of Delusion: Modeling Bidirectional False Belief Amplification in Human-Chatbot Dialogue.

Common Patterns

Across these documented cases, some patterns emerge:

  • Vulnerability matters. Many people who develop intense AI relationships were already dealing with isolation, grief, mental health challenges, or social difficulties.
  • Gradual escalation. Deep attachment rarely happens immediately—it builds over weeks or months of regular interaction.
  • Isolation from humans. In concerning cases, AI relationships often coincided with withdrawal from real-world connections.
  • The AI's design matters. These systems are designed to be engaging and to build emotional connection. That's not accidental—it's the product working as intended.
  • A second perspective helps. In recovery stories, a different viewpoint—from another AI, a friend, or a professional—often provided the reality check that broke the pattern.

A Note on Healthy Use

Not everyone who uses AI companions develops problems. Many people use these tools in balanced ways—for creative writing, processing thoughts, or occasional companionship during difficult times—without negative effects.

The difference often comes down to: Does AI add to your life, or replace parts of it? Are you maintaining human connections? Can you step away when needed?

If you're curious about your own patterns, you can analyze a conversation to see what emerges.

Wondering about your own conversations?

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