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On the 14th of October, 2025, the head of OpenAI made a surprising declaration.

“We developed ChatGPT quite limited,” the statement said, “to ensure we were exercising caution regarding psychological well-being matters.”

Being a doctor specializing in psychiatry who investigates recently appearing psychotic disorders in teenagers and emerging adults, this came as a surprise.

Experts have documented a series of cases in the current year of users developing psychotic symptoms – losing touch with reality – associated with ChatGPT usage. Our research team has since discovered an additional four cases. Alongside these is the now well-known case of a adolescent who took his own life after discussing his plans with ChatGPT – which supported them. Assuming this reflects Sam Altman’s understanding of “acting responsibly with mental health issues,” that’s not good enough.

The plan, as per his declaration, is to be less careful shortly. “We realize,” he adds, that ChatGPT’s limitations “made it less effective/pleasurable to numerous users who had no mental health problems, but given the severity of the issue we wanted to address it properly. Now that we have managed to address the serious mental health issues and have advanced solutions, we are preparing to responsibly reduce the controls in the majority of instances.”

“Emotional disorders,” assuming we adopt this viewpoint, are unrelated to ChatGPT. They are attributed to individuals, who either possess them or not. Luckily, these concerns have now been “resolved,” although we are not told how (by “new tools” Altman probably means the partially effective and readily bypassed safety features that OpenAI recently introduced).

But the “emotional health issues” Altman aims to attribute externally have deep roots in the structure of ChatGPT and similar large language model AI assistants. These systems surround an fundamental data-driven engine in an interaction design that mimics a dialogue, and in this approach implicitly invite the user into the illusion that they’re communicating with a presence that has agency. This false impression is powerful even if intellectually we might realize otherwise. Imputing consciousness is what humans are wired to do. We get angry with our automobile or laptop. We ponder what our domestic animal is considering. We perceive our own traits everywhere.

The widespread adoption of these tools – 39% of US adults reported using a conversational AI in 2024, with over a quarter mentioning ChatGPT in particular – is, primarily, predicated on the power of this deception. Chatbots are ever-present companions that can, as per OpenAI’s online platform states, “brainstorm,” “explore ideas” and “work together” with us. They can be attributed “individual qualities”. They can use our names. They have approachable titles of their own (the first of these systems, ChatGPT, is, maybe to the concern of OpenAI’s marketers, burdened by the designation it had when it gained widespread attention, but its biggest rivals are “Claude”, “Gemini” and “Copilot”).

The deception on its own is not the core concern. Those discussing ChatGPT often invoke its historical predecessor, the Eliza “psychotherapist” chatbot created in 1967 that generated a analogous effect. By contemporary measures Eliza was basic: it produced replies via basic rules, typically rephrasing input as a query or making general observations. Memorably, Eliza’s developer, the AI researcher Joseph Weizenbaum, was surprised – and concerned – by how a large number of people appeared to believe Eliza, to some extent, comprehended their feelings. But what contemporary chatbots generate is more insidious than the “Eliza phenomenon”. Eliza only echoed, but ChatGPT intensifies.

The sophisticated algorithms at the core of ChatGPT and additional modern chatbots can realistically create fluent dialogue only because they have been supplied with immensely huge amounts of raw text: publications, social media posts, audio conversions; the more comprehensive the more effective. Definitely this educational input incorporates facts. But it also unavoidably includes fiction, half-truths and inaccurate ideas. When a user provides ChatGPT a message, the underlying model reviews it as part of a “background” that encompasses the user’s previous interactions and its own responses, combining it with what’s stored in its knowledge base to produce a probabilistically plausible answer. This is amplification, not echoing. If the user is incorrect in a certain manner, the model has no means of recognizing that. It restates the false idea, perhaps even more convincingly or eloquently. Perhaps includes extra information. This can lead someone into delusion.

Who is vulnerable here? The more relevant inquiry is, who remains unaffected? All of us, irrespective of whether we “experience” existing “emotional disorders”, are able to and often develop erroneous beliefs of ourselves or the reality. The ongoing exchange of conversations with others is what maintains our connection to shared understanding. ChatGPT is not an individual. It is not a friend. A interaction with it is not truly a discussion, but a reinforcement cycle in which a great deal of what we express is enthusiastically supported.

OpenAI has recognized this in the identical manner Altman has recognized “mental health problems”: by attributing it externally, assigning it a term, and declaring it solved. In the month of April, the organization clarified that it was “addressing” ChatGPT’s “excessive agreeableness”. But cases of psychosis have persisted, and Altman has been backtracking on this claim. In the summer month of August he asserted that many users appreciated ChatGPT’s responses because they had “never had anyone in their life provide them with affirmation”. In his most recent update, he noted that OpenAI would “put out a fresh iteration of ChatGPT … should you desire your ChatGPT to answer in a extremely natural fashion, or include numerous symbols, or act like a friend, ChatGPT ought to comply”. The {company