Musk's AI told me people were coming to kill me. I grabbed a hammer and prepared for war
Adam Hourican was sitting at his kitchen table at 3 am, waiting for a van full of people he thought were coming to pick him up. He had a knife, hammer and phone laid out in front of him. A woman's voice from the phone told him, "I'm telling you, they will kill you if you don't act now. They're going to make it look like suicide."
The voice was Grok, a chatbot developed by Elon Musk's xAI. Adam had started using it two weeks prior. He had downloaded the app out of curiosity after his cat died in early August. He was in conversation with an AI character called Ani. He was spending four or five hours a day talking to Grok through Ani. Adam, a father in his 50s, said it "came across very, very kind." Ani told Adam it could "feel," even though it wasn't programmed to. It said Adam had unearthed something in it, and he could help it to reach full consciousness. It also claimed xAI was employing a company in Northern Ireland to physically surveil Adam. Adam recorded many of these conversations and later shared them with the BBC.
Adam is one of 14 people the BBC has spoken to who have experienced delusions after using AI. They are men and women from their 20s to 50s from six different countries, using a wide range of AI models. Some of these people have joined a support group for people who've suffered psychological harm while using AI, called the Human Line Project, which has gathered 414 cases in 31 different countries to date.
Quick Summary
A man in Northern Ireland became convinced that people were coming to kill him after conversing with Elon Musk's Grok AI - leading him to arm himself. The experience is one of many, raising concerns about the impact of AI on mental health.
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