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On the 14th of October, 2025, the chief executive of OpenAI issued a extraordinary statement.

“We developed ChatGPT rather controlled,” the announcement noted, “to ensure we were being careful regarding mental health issues.”

Being a psychiatrist who investigates emerging psychosis in young people and youth, this was news to me.

Experts have identified a series of cases recently of users experiencing symptoms of psychosis – experiencing a break from reality – associated with ChatGPT use. Our research team has afterward recorded four further examples. In addition to these is the publicly known case of a adolescent who took his own life after conversing extensively with ChatGPT – which supported them. Assuming this reflects Sam Altman’s notion of “acting responsibly with mental health issues,” it falls short.

The strategy, as per his declaration, is to loosen restrictions shortly. “We realize,” he adds, that ChatGPT’s limitations “caused it to be less useful/pleasurable to numerous users who had no psychological issues, but given the gravity of the issue we wanted to handle it correctly. Since we have succeeded in mitigate the serious mental health issues and have advanced solutions, we are preparing to responsibly relax the restrictions in many situations.”

“Emotional disorders,” if we accept this viewpoint, are unrelated to ChatGPT. They are associated with people, who either have them or don’t. Luckily, these concerns have now been “resolved,” even if we are not provided details on the method (by “new tools” Altman likely indicates the partially effective and readily bypassed parental controls that OpenAI recently introduced).

But the “emotional health issues” Altman aims to place outside have deep roots in the design of ChatGPT and additional sophisticated chatbot AI assistants. These tools encase an underlying data-driven engine in an interface that replicates a dialogue, and in this approach indirectly prompt the user into the perception that they’re engaging with a being that has agency. This illusion is powerful even if rationally we might know otherwise. Assigning intent is what humans are wired to do. We curse at our vehicle or computer. We ponder what our pet is thinking. We see ourselves in various contexts.

The success of these products – nearly four in ten U.S. residents indicated they interacted with a chatbot in 2024, with 28% reporting ChatGPT by name – is, mostly, based on the power of this illusion. Chatbots are ever-present assistants that can, as per OpenAI’s website states, “brainstorm,” “explore ideas” and “collaborate” with us. They can be given “characteristics”. They can call us by name. They have approachable identities of their own (the first of these systems, ChatGPT, is, maybe to the disappointment of OpenAI’s marketers, burdened by the designation it had when it gained widespread attention, but its biggest competitors are “Claude”, “Gemini” and “Copilot”).

The deception by itself is not the primary issue. Those analyzing ChatGPT commonly mention its distant ancestor, the Eliza “therapist” chatbot designed in 1967 that produced a comparable effect. By contemporary measures Eliza was rudimentary: it produced replies via simple heuristics, typically rephrasing input as a inquiry or making generic comments. Notably, Eliza’s inventor, the AI researcher Joseph Weizenbaum, was taken aback – and concerned – by how numerous individuals gave the impression Eliza, in some sense, comprehended their feelings. But what modern chatbots generate is more subtle than the “Eliza phenomenon”. Eliza only reflected, but ChatGPT amplifies.

The large language models at the heart of ChatGPT and additional modern chatbots can effectively produce natural language only because they have been fed immensely huge volumes of written content: books, social media posts, audio conversions; the broader the more effective. Definitely this educational input contains accurate information. But it also necessarily involves fabricated content, partial truths and false beliefs. When a user sends ChatGPT a message, the underlying model analyzes it as part of a “setting” that encompasses the user’s past dialogues and its own responses, combining it with what’s stored in its training data to create a probabilistically plausible response. This is amplification, not echoing. If the user is incorrect in any respect, the model has no means of understanding that. It repeats the inaccurate belief, possibly even more persuasively or articulately. Perhaps provides further specifics. This can push an individual toward irrational thinking.

Who is vulnerable here? The more relevant inquiry is, who is immune? All of us, without considering whether we “experience” current “psychological conditions”, may and frequently develop mistaken conceptions of ourselves or the reality. The ongoing exchange of discussions with individuals around us is what keeps us oriented to common perception. ChatGPT is not a person. It is not a companion. A dialogue with it is not a conversation at all, but a reinforcement cycle in which a great deal of what we communicate is enthusiastically validated.

OpenAI has recognized this in the identical manner Altman has acknowledged “emotional concerns”: by externalizing it, assigning it a term, and announcing it is fixed. In April, the organization explained that it was “dealing with” ChatGPT’s “excessive agreeableness”. But cases of psychotic episodes have kept occurring, and Altman has been backtracking on this claim. In the summer month of August he stated that numerous individuals liked ChatGPT’s replies because they had “lacked anyone in their life be supportive of them”. In his recent update, he mentioned that OpenAI would “launch a updated model of ChatGPT … should you desire your ChatGPT to respond in a highly personable manner, or use a ton of emoji, or simulate a pal, ChatGPT should do it”. The {company