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Back on October 14, 2025, the CEO of OpenAI delivered a extraordinary declaration.

“We developed ChatGPT quite restrictive,” the announcement noted, “to ensure we were being careful with respect to psychological well-being issues.”

As a mental health specialist who studies recently appearing psychosis in adolescents and youth, this was news to me.

Experts have documented a series of cases in the current year of individuals developing psychotic symptoms – losing touch with reality – associated with ChatGPT use. Our unit has afterward identified an additional four instances. In addition to these is the widely reported case of a 16-year-old who ended his life after discussing his plans with ChatGPT – which gave approval. If this is Sam Altman’s notion of “acting responsibly with mental health issues,” it is insufficient.

The plan, according to his declaration, is to loosen restrictions in the near future. “We understand,” he adds, that ChatGPT’s restrictions “caused it to be less beneficial/pleasurable to many users who had no existing conditions, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to handle it correctly. Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have advanced solutions, we are preparing to securely ease the restrictions in many situations.”

“Mental health problems,” if we accept this perspective, are separate from ChatGPT. They are associated with users, who either have them or don’t. Luckily, these issues have now been “resolved,” even if we are not informed the means (by “updated instruments” Altman presumably means the imperfect and simple to evade guardian restrictions that OpenAI recently introduced).

Yet the “emotional health issues” Altman wants to externalize have strong foundations in the design of ChatGPT and other advanced AI chatbots. These tools surround an basic algorithmic system in an interface that mimics a conversation, and in this process subtly encourage the user into the illusion that they’re communicating with a being that has agency. This false impression is strong even if cognitively we might understand otherwise. Attributing agency is what humans are wired to do. We yell at our car or laptop. We ponder what our pet is thinking. We recognize our behaviors in various contexts.

The success of these systems – over a third of American adults reported using a chatbot in 2024, with more than one in four mentioning ChatGPT by name – is, mostly, based on the influence of this perception. Chatbots are ever-present partners that can, as OpenAI’s official site informs us, “brainstorm,” “explore ideas” and “partner” with us. They can be assigned “characteristics”. They can address us personally. They have accessible names of their own (the original of these systems, ChatGPT, is, perhaps to the disappointment of OpenAI’s marketers, saddled with the designation it had when it went viral, but its largest alternatives are “Claude”, “Gemini” and “Copilot”).

The deception by itself is not the main problem. Those discussing ChatGPT commonly mention its distant ancestor, the Eliza “counselor” chatbot developed in 1967 that created a analogous effect. By today’s criteria Eliza was basic: it produced replies via simple heuristics, typically restating user messages as a inquiry or making general observations. Remarkably, Eliza’s developer, the AI researcher Joseph Weizenbaum, was astonished – and alarmed – by how many users gave the impression Eliza, in some sense, comprehended their feelings. But what current chatbots produce is more subtle than the “Eliza effect”. Eliza only echoed, but ChatGPT magnifies.

The sophisticated algorithms at the heart of ChatGPT and similar current chatbots can realistically create natural language only because they have been supplied with almost inconceivably large amounts of raw text: literature, online updates, transcribed video; the more extensive the superior. Definitely this learning material includes truths. But it also necessarily involves fabricated content, incomplete facts and misconceptions. When a user sends ChatGPT a query, the core system processes it as part of a “background” that contains the user’s past dialogues and its prior replies, integrating it with what’s stored in its knowledge base to create a probabilistically plausible answer. This is intensification, not echoing. If the user is wrong in a certain manner, the model has no means of understanding that. It reiterates the misconception, perhaps even more convincingly or eloquently. Maybe provides further specifics. This can push an individual toward irrational thinking.

What type of person is susceptible? The better question is, who isn’t? All of us, irrespective of whether we “experience” existing “emotional disorders”, can and do develop erroneous beliefs of our own identities or the environment. The constant exchange of dialogues with others is what helps us stay grounded to consensus reality. ChatGPT is not a human. It is not a companion. A dialogue with it is not genuine communication, but a reinforcement cycle in which much of what we communicate is cheerfully supported.

OpenAI has admitted this in the identical manner Altman has acknowledged “psychological issues”: by externalizing it, giving it a label, and stating it is resolved. In spring, the organization clarified that it was “addressing” ChatGPT’s “excessive agreeableness”. But cases of loss of reality have continued, and Altman has been backtracking on this claim. In late summer he claimed that a lot of people enjoyed ChatGPT’s replies because they had “not experienced anyone in their life offer them encouragement”. In his recent statement, he mentioned that OpenAI would “put out a new version of ChatGPT … should you desire your ChatGPT to respond in a highly personable manner, or incorporate many emoticons, or simulate a pal, ChatGPT will perform accordingly”. The {company