From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittrow F.

This is the Daily.

Since ChatGPT launched in 2022, it's amassed 700 million users, making it the fastest growing consumer app ever.

From the beginning, my colleague Kashmir Hill has been hearing from and reporting on those users.

And in the past few months, that reporting has started to reveal just how complicated and dangerous

our relationships with these chatbots can get.

It's Tuesday, September 16th.

Okay, so tell me how this all started.

I started getting strange messages around the end of March from people who said they'd basically made these really incredible discoveries or breakthroughs in conversations with Chachabit. They would say that, you know, Chachabiti broke protocol and connected them with a kind of AI sentience or a conscious entity that it had revealed to them that we are living in a computer simulated reality like The Matrix. I assumed at first that they were cranks, that they were kind of like delusional people.

But then when I started talking to them, that was not the case.

These were people who seemed really rational, who just had had a really strange experience with Chachibati.

And in some cases, it had really had long-term effects on their lives,

like made them stop taking their medication,

led to the breakup of their families.

And as I kept reporting, I found out people had had

manic episodes, kind of mental breakdowns through their interaction with Chat Chabit.

And there was a pattern among the people that I talked to. When they had this weird

kind of discovery or breakthrough through Chatchabit, they had been talking to it for a very

long time. And once they had this great revelation, they would kind of say, well, what do I do now?

And Chachabee would tell them to contact experts in the field. They needed to let the world know

about it. Sure. And how do you do that? You let the media know.

And it would give them recommendations.

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