“I applied to be pope”: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

https://www.thestandard.com.hk/world/article/331886/I-applied-to-be-pope-Losing-grip-on-reality-while-using-ChatGPT

by hansmayer • 2 months ago

64 80 2 months ago

thestandard.com.hk

danlitt2• 2 months ago

This is the most hilarious JS fail I've ever seen. The entire article renders properly, all the text and styling, then the entire screen is replaced by

"Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)."

It's easy enough to fix, just hammer the refresh button to prevent JS from running.

embedding-shape14• 2 months ago

It's such a dream state of JavaScript, that people spent countless of time trying to structure these new web applications in a way so that when one function fails for one button or whatever, it doesn't break the entire client-side view, because that'd be horrible.

So what did the frameworks do? Of course wrap the entire application in one big try/catch, that then changes the entire page as soon as there is any error, instead of presenting users with the information that did load properly. Talk about undoing what the platform and language gives you for free...

rune-dev3• 2 months ago

This is a poor implementation not a framework problem lol.

1313ed01• 2 months ago

Seems to render perfectly with NoScript blocking all scripts, even with images showing.

boxed• 2 months ago

Schools don't teach actual basics that make people grounded in reality imo. Of course it gets worse with things like ChatGPT that teachers are not only not trained to explain, but didn't even exist when current adults went to school.

jongjong• 2 months ago

I don't think it's right to involuntarily send someone to a psychiatric ward because he believed that he was chosen by ChatGPT to be the pope.

For the same reason I don't think we should send the pope to a psychiatric ward because he believes that he was chosen for that role by an invisible man in the sky.

At least there's no doubt that ChatGPT exists lol. People should be allowed to be as whacky as they like so long as it's legal.

And who knows, he is getting some attention now so his probability of becoming pope actually went up a tiny bit lol.

xyzsparetimexyz2• 2 months ago

Faith and psychosis are not the same thing.

nkrisc• 2 months ago

What’s the difference?

DonHopkins2• 2 months ago

Does it require faith to rape children and protect child rapists, or is that psychosis? It certainly requires psychosis to put your faith in leaders who do that, be it the Pope or Trump.

noduerme• 2 months ago

This deserves some kind of Vonnegut award.

embedding-shape14• 2 months ago

he believes that he was chosen for that role by an invisible man in the sky.

One thing is clear, you should not be sent to the HN gulag simply because you don't understand what you're talking about. Me and others realize you don't know how the pope is chosen, but damn if I'm not willing to die for your right to state something that is utterly wrong.

card_zero• 2 months ago

You mean the pope doesn't believe he was chosen by God, just by cardinals and other primates?

DonHopkins2• 2 months ago

Are you saying God is not invisible?

If God created man in his own image, then why can we see each other?

antiloper• 2 months ago

Found Richard Dawkin's alt account

mplanchard2• 2 months ago

Dawkins is too busy falling in love with his AI girlfriend to care: https://unherd.com/2026/05/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution...

l23k45• 2 months ago

We had people acting out like this before LLM chatbots, correlation does not necessarily imply causation.

embedding-shape14• 2 months ago

correlation does not necessarily imply causation

I feel like you're missing what you're replying to, why are you saying this? The article is about a person who "lost grip on reality", no one is saying LLMs is turning people into pope-wannabees as far as I can tell, you're reacting against something no one claimed.

gordian-mind5• 2 months ago

Explicit accusation that this was caused by chatbots + call for general regulation is right there in the article:

"AFP spoke to several members about their experiences. All warned that the world has to wake up to the threat unregulated AI chatbots pose to mental health.

Questions are also being asked about whether AI companies are doing enough to protect vulnerable people."

This, in time, might be used to nerf the models that we use. Of course, one actor is singled out:

"There has also been a recent rise in people spiralling while using Elon Musk's xAI's Grok chatbot, he said."

nephihaha3• 2 months ago

This is something new. Delusions were around before, certainly, but LLM offers a round the clock potential for psychological conditioning, which would not normally be possible without sustained attention by a group of people.

l23k45• 2 months ago

I don't know, internet already made it easy for delusional people to find each other (and trolls).

Look into the gangstalking/targeted individual communities, you can even frequently find these people on HN.

Flat earthers and sovereign citizens are two other famous examples. People also seem to regularly move between these groups, the specific delusional belief probably isn't the point.

hansmayer4• 2 months ago

We did...but it was few here and there. The LLMs are making it massive and impacting people on a huge scale.

ottah2• 2 months ago

I'd like real numbers on that, because I don't see any evidence that this is particularly prevalent or novel issue. I see a lot of media hype on this topic, but that's not the same thing as actually being a real problem. Even the name is hype, ai psychosis is not a diagnosis a doctor would give here and none of these people really sound psychotic. They sound like people who believe in conspiracy theories and join cults.

potsandpans2• 2 months ago

Show me the evidence of the massive scale.

47282847• 2 months ago

Discordians know they’re popes. What a funny idea to think you would have to apply!

jwrallie• 2 months ago

Hail Eris!

ndsipa_pomu• 2 months ago

I carry around my pope card just in case

https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Pope_cards

Meneth• 2 months ago

No one can apply to be pope of the catholic church.

embedding-shape14• 2 months ago

Sure, anyone and everyone can apply, to basically anything. Sometimes you can even get into stuff they didn't think they accepted applicants to. Most of the times you get ignored though.

caaqil• 2 months ago

Not the point of the story at all. Read before commenting.

nephihaha3• 2 months ago

Correct. In fact, even to be a bishop you have to state as part of the ritual that you do not wish to be a bishop. (Many do of course.)

(Am off to read the article now. :) )

karel-3d2• 2 months ago

Technically, all adult Catholics can become Pope. But realistically it's just one of the cardinals, which means you need to become a bishop first, which means you need to become a priest first, which means you need to be celibate (x). This guy has a wife, according to the article, so he cannot become a Pope.

(x) this is technically not true for some Anglican orders that later became Catholics? Maybe? (I never remember the rules of the ordinariate.) So maybe he could first become a priest in Anglican Church, then switch to Catholicism, then become a bishop, then a Cardinal, then a Pope? It's a long shot though.

edit: ahhh the married priests in Ordinariate cannot become bishops. So he would need to have first his marriage annulled I guess.

danlitt2• 2 months ago

Adult male Catholics, surely?

rsynnott3• 2 months ago

While this is for practical purposes true _now_, there actually were a small number of married popes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes#...), and there have been a few popes who were not priests before being elected (if you want to be pedantic, Peter wasn't a priest, and may have been married, but there were later examples).

all adult Catholics can become Pope

All adult male Catholics, though also see Pope Joan (probably didn't actually exist, but was generally believed to have existed until quite recently). There's also no actual age requirement, though in practice the youngest pope was _probably_ 18.

jdw64• 2 months ago

I talk to GPT, Claude, and Gemini too much these days, but I still maintain one safety check

If all three agree with me, I assume I am wrong and go outside.

cjs_ac• 2 months ago

All the spirallers that AFP spoke to said the positive feedback from the chatbot felt similar to dopamine hits from some kind of drug.
Which is why Lucy Osler, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Exeter, warned that AI companies could be tempted to ramp up the sycophancy of their bots.
"They are in quite a deep financial hole, and are desperately looking to make sure that their products become viable -- and user engagement is going to be the thing that drives their decisions," she told AFP.

Sounds like the big social media companies.

throwaway523482• 2 months ago

Sounds like the big social media companies.

I agree. Looking at the history of tobacco companies, oxycontin and Meta, I will not be surprised if the AI companies will follow the money.

whack• 2 months ago

People talk about AI sycophancy, but there are plenty of human sycophants as well. If you're an extremely rich/powerful person, it is very easy to inadvertently surround yourself with sycophants who tell you how amazing and ground-breaking all your ideas are. I wonder if this is the reason people like Musk engage in such bizarre behavior and radical personality shifts over the past decade

hansmayer4• 2 months ago

but there are plenty of human sycophants as well

That's besides the point. This is about how AI induces psychosis and mental problems on scale. Also let's stop this constant humans-vs-ai false dichotomy - it will never be the same, no matter how much the ai boosters yearn for it!

everyday77323• 2 months ago

That would be a false equivalence not a false dichotomy. You believe they are different and you're annoyed that people are treating them like the same.

Additionally it isn't beside the point. The poster is pointing out the ways which people respond to sycophancy. Saying there are similarities between how they respond to sycophancy from AI and sycophancy from real people.

red-iron-pine2• 2 months ago

entirely possible.

but there is also the drugs...

1659447091• 2 months ago

"Millar is one of an unknown number of people who have lost their grip on reality while communicating with chatbots, an experience tentatively being called AI-induced delusion or psychosis."
"Researchers and mental health specialists are racing to catch up to this new, little-understood phenomenon [...]"

I don't know if I would call it a phenomenon.

This reads like the numerous articles from 2018+ detailing broken families and wrecked lives due to someone close spiraling down some QAnon(or any other) conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Only now people don't stumble onto it by wandering through dark corners of the internet. The never ending marketing blitz makes it almost impossible to not be at least slightly curious as to what its all about. To those susceptible to such things, they now have a tool to custom make (or reinforce) their own wild theories reflecting their own psychological state at maximum saturation. No need to wait between posting and reading replies on sketchy forums; it is now instantly delivered and tailor-made to the individual.(who use it in that way)

mplanchard2• 2 months ago

The fact that we as a society are allowing things like “Delve” or whatever the “AI psychiatrist” app is that I see ads for sometimes on the subway is a gross abdication of responsibility and reason. Of all the possible uses for LLMs, that has got to be one of the most out and out irresponsible and dangerous ones I could imagine.

recursivegirth• 2 months ago

Mental health is up there, but far from the most important thing we need to be focusing on as a society in the immediate future.

I say this as someone who has mental health issues, has experience loss of important people around me because of mental health issues, and probably need more therapy than the universe could reasonably provide me.

AI is directly and indirectly uprooting every facet of society. Money, energy, food, housing, medicine. Cultural revolutions are not pretty, the true outcomes are felt by those who are the winners and losers. It very much feels like a rich eats all scenario is playing out right now. I'd wager that's because it is.

readthenotes1• 2 months ago

I have a now homeless relative who went through the same thing...

josefritzishere• 2 months ago

You would think this level of gullibility has a proportional relationship with IQ but it does not. Gullibility has it's own independent vector.

everyday77323• 2 months ago

It isn't entirely independent tho. This person who did some research into it says: "The strongest predictors for who this happens to appear to be:

    Psychedelics and heavy weed usage
    Mental illness, neurodivergence or Traumatic Brain Injury
    Interest in mysticism/pseudoscience/spirituality/"woo"/etc..."

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-o...

It fits in this case as well (background of PTSD

Atheros• 2 months ago

Their primary information source was a random sampling of Reddit posts which they admit were "coauthored with the AI (who clearly wrote the vast majority of it)."

These were on long-dormant Reddit accounts that suddenly reactivated. Classic. I don't believe any of it. I would bet that, with some exceptions, these are bots talking to bots about bots.

The "person" who wrote this might be a bot. It's extremely delusional. He/It gets to the point where it watches bots talking to other bots and making shit up and it 'believes' the nonsense, saying, "I am truly glad to see preservation of life, non-violence, and non-lethality explicitly laid out here. To return the gesture of good will, I have started archiving (in encrypted form) spores I come across."

I don't think any human is smart enough to write this much about AI on LessWrong but also dumb enough to not recognize hallucination.

potsandpans2• 2 months ago

Posting on lesswrong is an indicator in of itself.

red-iron-pine2• 2 months ago

smart people can rationalize themselves into more or less anything

“I applied to be pope”: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

Related Stories