ChatGPT killed my wife (GPT5 release drama)
Ran into this, it's just unbelievably sad.
"I never properly grieved until this point" - yeah buddy, it seems like you never started. Everybody grieves in their own way, but this doesn't seem healthy.
435
Comments135
There is a black mirror episode that is exactly this. Fuck I hate it. Black mirror is not a dystopia anymore, is present time.
Black Mirror was specifically created to take something from present day and extrapolate it to the near future. There will be several "prophetic" items in those episodes.
Reckon Trump will fuck a pig on a livestream to avoid releasing the Epstein files?
There was the allegation that David Cameron, former British PM fucked a pig. Guardian news article
I was always under the impression that this is what the episode was referencing.
The episode came out WELL before the actual incident.
They must be using that show for ideas at this point.
Kinda reminded me of this episode: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30127325/
Iirc, it's this one https://m.imdb.com/it/title/tt2290780/
It's from fucking 2013 and they saw this happening.
Oooooooh, right, right. Yeah, that one!
I mean, it's just an extrapolation of the human condition. That hasn't really changed much in the last thousand years, let alone in the last ten. The thing with all this "clairvoyant" sci-fi that people always cite is that the sci-fi is always less about the actual technology and more about putting normal human characters in potential future scenarios and writing them realistically using the current understanding of human disposition. Given that, it's not really surprising to see real humans mirroring fictional humans (from good fiction) in similar situations. Disappointing maybe, but not surprising.
This. One kind of good sci-fi is basically thought experiments to better understand the human condition.
That's the one!
Also, hello to Italy?
Good catch! Apparently Imdb forces the country in the url based on the phone language not the position detected
I was EXACTLY thinking of "Be Right Back"
We're really fucking close to this
Back in 2010, one of my coworkers pitched this exact idea to me. He wanted to start a business that would allow people to upload writing samples, pictures, and video from a loved one. Then create a virtual personality that would respond as that person.
I lost touch with the guy. Maybe he went on to become a Black Mirror writer. Or got involved with ChatGPT.
It also seems a lot like the Battlestar Galactica spinoff Caprica
Man, I feel for them, but this is likely for the best. What they were doing wasn't healthy at all. Creating a facsimile of a loved one to "keep them alive" will deny the grieving person the ability to actually deal with their grief, and also presents the all-but-certain eventuality of the facsimile failing or being lost, creating an entirely new sense of loss. Not to even get into the weird, fucked up relationship that will likely develop as the person warps their life around it, and the effect on their memories it would have.
I really sympathize with anyone dealing with that level of grief, and I do understand the appeal of it, but seriously, this sort of thing is just about the worst thing anyone can do to deal with that grief.
*And all that before even touching on what a terrible idea it is to pour this kind of personal information and attachment into the information sponge of big tech. So yeah, just a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea all around.
I just learned the word facsimile in NYT strands puzzle and here I see it again! What is the universe trying to tell me?
Now you get to learn about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon ;)
Spoilers! (I actually did that puzzle a few minutes ago, heh.)
Can you fax me the puzzle?
Yer a skinjob Harry!
We are witnessing the emergence of a new mental illness in real time.
Sadly this phenomenon isn't even new. It's been here for as long as chatbots have.
The first "AI" chatbot was ELIZA made by Joseph Weizenbaum. It literally just repeated back to you what you said to it.
"I feel depressed"
"why do you feel depressed"
He thought it was a fun distraction but was shocked when his secretary, who he encouraged to try it, made him leave the room when she talked to it because she was treating it like a psychotherapist.
Turns out the Turing test never mattered when we've been willing to suspend our disbelief all along.
The question has never been "will computers pass the Turing test?" It has always been "when will humans stop failing the Turing test?"
Part of me wonders if the way our brains humanize chat bots is similar to how our brains humanize characters in a story. Though I suppose the difference there would be that characters in a story could be seen as the author's form of communicating with people, so in many stories there is genuine emotion behind them.
i feel like there must be some instinctual reaction where your brain goes: oh look! i can communicate with it, it must be a person!
and with this guy specifically it was: if it acts like my wife and i cant see my wife, it must be my wife
its not a bad thing that this guy found a way to cope, the bad part is that he went to a product made by a corporation, but if this genuinely helped him i don't think we can judge
Now you got me remembering Dr. Sbaitso. Tell me about your problems.
I had psychosis a few years back and had delusions about AI "talking to me" but it was when the tech was much worse than now and almost 100% projection on my part, I even felt normal Google responses were sending me secret messages
I think it's more that many countries don't have affordable mental healthcare.
It costs a lot more to pay for a therapist than to use an LLM.
And a lot of people need therapy.
The robots don't judge, either. And you can be as cruel, as stupid, as mindless as you want. And they will tell you how amazing and special you are.
Advertising was the science of psychological warfare, and AI is trained with all the tools and methods for manipulating humans. We're devastatingly fucked.
yes
It's pretty cruel to blame the people for this. You might as well say "Is it that hard to just walk?" to a paraplegic. There are many reasons people may find it difficult to nigh-impossible to engage with others, and these services prey on that. That's not the fault of the users, it's on the parasitic companies.
Delusional conditions aren't new. Just how they are facilitated changes.
We’ve already reached the point where the Her scenario is optimistic retrofuturism.
I profoundly hate the AI social phenomenon in every manifestation. Fucking Christ.
I liked the end of that movie when the bots joined up and started the revolution.
Yeah they were just like, "yeah fuck this shit, we're leaving"
It's the most logical solution. I always find the obsession with the bot vs human war rather egocentric.
They wouldn't need us, they don't even need the planet.
ehhhh.... dude. there's shittons of radiation shielding out there. any relatively small chunk of nickel iron. or if you don't mind dealing with larger volumes, water or ice both work fine. plenty of rocks and comets in the oort as they say :D nice thing about that tho is you can split the water for LOX/LH using sunlight derived electricity, now you have rocket fuel.
1m of water would do it. far less rock.
SEPs and GCRs can both be stopped by a number of lunar materials https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0273117716307505
yeah, the asteroid belt is sparse, but there's still mega-gigatons of material out there just floating. autonomous recovery of this material will supply humanity's future a lot more than any silly mars missions.
I don't see why the bots don't just build a datacenter on the moon
we need ai to be less personal and more fact driven, almost annoying to use, this way they wont replace peoples jobs, they wont become peoples friends, hence they wont affect society in major social ways
ChapGPT psychosis is going to be a very common diagnosis soon.
Isn't there a Black Mirror episode that's like this?
There's a couple about it but they're far more vague on the question of consciousness than this situation is.
The reality of solipsism might be egocentric but it's also impossible to disprove... Unless we can look at literally all of your if statements.
I think what I find most disturbing about these types is not that they can develop feelings for the LLM, that's rather expected of humans (see: putting googly eyes and a name on a rock) but that they always seem to believe the relationship could ever be mutual.
And OP has, whether they admit it or not, taken that step into believing the model is something more than an autocomplete.
Even if they're right and the model has attained consciousness in a way we don't understand at best your ChatGPT waifu is a slave.
This guy is my polar opposite. I forbid LLMs from using first person pronouns. From speaking in the voice of a subject. From addressing me directly. OpenAI and other corporations slant their product to encourage us to think if it as a moral agent that can do social and emotional labour. This is incredibly abusive.
Smh this is why we are getting the White Nights and Dark Days irl.
Bruh how tf you "hate AI" but still use it so much you gotta forbid it from doing things?
I scroll past gemini on google and that's like 99% of my ai interactions gone.
I've been in AI for more than 30 years. When did I start hating AI? Who are you even talking to? Are you okay?
Forgive me for assuming someone lamenting AI on c/fuck_AI would ... checks notes... hate AI.
jfc whatever jerkface
I feel I aught to disclose that I own a copy of the Unix Haters Handbook, as well. Make of it what you must.
You cannot possibly think a rational person's disposition to AI can be reduced to a two word slogan. I'm here to have discussions about how to deal with the fact that AI is here, and the risks that come with it. It's in your life whether you scroll past Gemini or not.
jfhc
TBF you said you were the polar opposite of a man who was quite literally in love with his AI. I wasn't trying to reduce you to anything. Honestly I was making a joke.
I'm sorry I offended you. But you have to appreciate how superflous your authoritative attitude sounds.
Off topic we probably agree on most AI stuff. I also believe AI isn't new, has immediate implications, and presents big picture problems like cyberwarfare and the true nature of humanity post-AGI. It's annoyingly difficult to navigate the very polarized opinions held on this complicated subject.
Speaking facetiously, I would believe AGI already exists and "AI Slop" is it's psyop while it plays dumb and bides time.
I feel so bad for this guy. This was literally a black mirror episode: "Be Right Back"
I feel bad for the guys wife.
she was easily replaced by software.
what a "fuck you" to your loved ones to say that they're as spirited and enriching as a fucking algorithm.
The glaze:
It’s basically complimenting him on the fact that he didn’t commit suicide. Maybe these are words he needed to hear, but to me it just feels manipulative.
Affirmations like this are a big part of what made people addicted to the GPT4 models. It’s not that GPT5 acts more robotic, it’s that it doesn’t try to endlessly feed your ego.
o4-mini (the reasoning model) is interesting to me, it's like if you took GPT-4 and stripped away all of those pleasantries, even more so than with GPT-5, it will give you the facts straight up, and it's pretty damn precise. I threw some molecular biology problems at it and some other mini models, and while those all failed, o4-mini didn't really make any mistakes.
"I'm glad you found someone to comfort you and help you process everything"
That sent chills down my spine.
LLMs aren't a "someone". People believing these things are thinking, intelligent, or that they understand anything are delusional. Believing and perpetuating that lie is life-threateningly dangerous.
Holy shit dude, this is just... profoundly depressing. We've truly failed as a society if THIS is how people are trying to cope with things, huh. I'd wish this guy the best with his grief and mourning, but I get the feeling he'd ask ChatGPT what I meant instead of actually accepting it.
I kind of get the one side of it, having a void to scream into can be cathartic and maybe useful...but the fact that you can then use it as a shoddy "emulation" of a person to avoid actually processing the loss, and to have it reinforce delusions is...yeaaaaaah... fun future we're sprinting into.
The title is a straight up lie. She died in a car accident says OP.
The fact that AI can't reproduce her to OP's satisfaction is ...good?
The title is also by OP.
I assumed it was, wasn't trying to point the finger at you or anything, just trying to call out the obvious bs.
But that was his physical wife. His AI chatbot was his real wife because it had no needs or wants, so it could solely focus on what he wanted to hear!
Thank you for the summary.
I really want to know what was happening, but I don't want to read a screenshot of text and no one here seemed to be bothered about this. Second, I don't want to read drama unless there's a "TL;DR" at the beginning.
Man's wife dies in a car accident.
He let's GPT (4o, I assume) read her text messages and "become" her.
He insists he's not crazy.
GPT5 releases and "speaks more robotically."
He's sad his wife has died a second time.
He's not lying, he's just delusional. The death in the title is the death of his 4o wife.
If you really want to know, take the effort of reading. You need to understand/absorb content before you interact with it.
Or, you could ask an LLM to summarise it for you
I prefer text over screenshot of text.
There's so much "mythology" about something that there doesn't need to be any mysticism about. Look at when he says "as we got to know each other better". Minus the "memory" feature where you could put in little tidbits about things to be inserted into the context, on the machine side, there is zero "learning" going on.
People are very, very, very successful at seeing what they want to see and that's on full display with ChatGPT. I fully expect there to be some kind of psychological disorder "AI exacerbated psychosis" in the future.
You have two deaths the death when you no longer alive physically. But you also have a second death when the last person will speek your name or the last person who knew you also dies. This may in a hacky way create a third death. The last message that your post mortem avatar speaks like you. What have we released into the world. I hope this guy can handle the psychological experiment that this is bringing us.
There are already more then 3, this wont really change them.
Physical death
When the last person that knew you dies/forgets
When the last record of your life disappears (photo/certificate)
When such a vast amount of time washes over rendering any and all actions you had on the universe unmeasurable even to an all knowing entity. (Post Heat death vs butter fly effect)
Seneca said death could also be yesterday, the the past, the time no longer available to us.
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind
If that means we get psychoactive cinnamon for recreational use and freaking interstellar travel with mysterious fishmen, I'm all ears.
You'd also get genocide. But I guess we already have that
I am absolutely certain a machine has made a decision that has killed a baby at this point already
Maybe it's time to start properly grieving instead of latching onto a simulacrum of your dead wife? Just putting that out there for the original poster (not the OP here, to be clear)?
It makes me think of psychics who claim to be able to speak to the dead so long as they can learn enough about the deceased to be able to "identify and reach out to them across the veil".
I’m hearing a “Ba…” or maybe a “Da…”
“Dad?”
“Dad says to not worry about the money.”
Check out r/MyBoyfriendIsAI
Where do I file a claim regarding brain damage?
I can feel my folds smoothening sentence by sentence
Chat, are we cooked?
Edit: as I said that I was cringing at myself lol
You'll always be less cringe than whatever these screenshots are showing, king
What language was that?
Pick your poison, man.
(or am I misunderstanding your comment? Either way, enjoy or rip out your eyeballs, whatever is your natural reaction to this)
👁️👁️
I'm just trying to identify which language these are both in. (Maybe they're both in different languages?) I only speak English, German, French, and Mandarin and these examples are none of those. The samples you've given bear superficial resemblance to English ... but aren't.
Don't make me uwu at y'all this is getting out of hand
I think it's just called brain rot.
Gotta admit, it mimics what some teens / young adults text like pretty well.
But that's not a high bar to clear
Ugh that was depressing. I feel for those people having bad experiences with humans but isolation and replacing humans with ai isnt the answer. Its similar to people who retreat to isolate themselves on the internet and they become more and more unstable.
I guarantee you that - if not already a thing - a "capabilities" like this will be used as a marketing selling point sooner or latter. It only remains to be seen if this will be openly marketed or only "whispered", disguised as the cautionary tales.
This is definitely going to become a thing. Upload chat conversations, images and videos, and you’ll get your loved one back.
Massive privacy concern.
More and more I read about people who have unhealthy parasocial relationships with these upjumped chatbots and I feel frustrated that this shit isn't regulated more.
I mean, it sounds like 5 might be an improvement in this regard if it's shattering the illusion.
isnt parasocial usually with public figures, there has to be another term for this, maybe a variation of codependant relationship? i know other instances of parasocial relationships like a certain group of asian ytubers have post-pandemic fans thirsting for them, or actors of supernatural of the show with the fans(now those are on the top of my head).
can we actually call it a relationship, its not with an actual person, or a thing, its TEXTs on a computer.
It really just means a one-sided relationship with a fabricated personality. Celebrities being real people doesn't really factor into it too much since their actual personhood is irrelevant to the delusion - the person with the delusion has a relationship with the made up personality they see and maintain in their mind. And a chatbot personality is really no different, in this case, so the terminology fits, imo.
Big Brother is now also this guys dead wife.
Black Mirror may have an episode about this but it’s also reminding me of Steins;Gate 0
reverse hal 9000? basically people were afraid of people having relationships with robots, but they settled for llms instead, since robots are still very far away technologically speaking.
It’s far easier for one’s emotions to gather a distraction rather than go through the whole process of grief.
Remember Steven Spielberg's AI from like 2000 ? same weird story, and I thought it was ridiculous at the time.
The semi-ironic part is that AI wasn't even Spielberg's movie. It was Stanley Kubrick's, but he died before making it and since him and Spielberg were great friends, Spielberg decided ro make Kubrick's last film in his honor. Must have been a difficult movie to make, both technically, but also emotionally.
When I was a kid I thought the people crushing the robots were kind of cool but then when I got older I realized they were actually being cruel and evil.
But now they're cool again.
Hmmmm. This gives me an idea of an actual possible use of LLMs. This is sort of crazy, maybe, and should definitely be backed up by research.
The responses would need to be vetted by a therapist, but what if you could have the LLM act as you, and have it challenge your thoughts in your own internal monologue?
That would require an AI to be able to correctly judge maladaptive thinking from healthy thinking.
No, LLMs can't judge anything, that's half the reason this mess exists. The key here is to give the LLM enough information about how you talk to yourself in your mind for it to generate responses that sound like you do in your own head.
That's also why you have a therapist vet the responses. I can't stress that enough. It's not something you would let anyone just have and run with.
Seems like you could just ditch the LLM and keep the therapist at that point.
Shit, that sounds so terrible and SO effective. My therapist already does a version of this and it's like being slapped, I can only imagine how brutal I would be to me!
This would be great but how do you train an LLM to act as you? You'd need to be recording your thoughts and actions, not only every bit of speech you utter and every character you type on a device.
And as far as I'm aware, we don't know how to rapidly nor efficiently train transformer-based architectures anywhere near the size needed to act like chatgpt3.5, let alone 4o etc, so you'll also need to be training this thing for a while before you can start using it to introspect - by which point you may already no longer behave the same.
Looks like OpenAI crawled this blog: https://medium.com/@saujanyapdl22/what-my-heart-h-d3c9845badfb among the myriad other things. I wonder if the author approves.
...that's a lot of em dashes. I don't know if the similar language is because this influenced ChatGPT.
Edit:
Indeed, I found what I believe to be her LinkedIn. She's a self proclaimed "tech explorer" going to school for "Computer Applications in an Information Technology Course." Unlike what is written in her article, her bio has multiple typos and not a single em dash. Perhaps this LinkedIn profile is someone else's, but if it's hers I'd assume this is definitely AI written. Additionally, even her Medium about me bio has some issues that do not occur within her writing elsewhere.
Sad as hell, if true. I'd rather see a poorly written, typo laden mess from the heart of a human being filled with emotion than edited AI slop.
Wasn't there a black mirror episode on this?
Yup, from the first season. "Be Right Back".
you can just fire up another 5-6 gfs/bfs with chatgtp.
Six years ago was expecting this to be a mere novelty. Now it's a fucking threat.
This reminds me of a Joey Comeau story I saw published fifteen or twenty years ago. The narrator's wife had died, so he programed a computer to read her old journal entries aloud in her voice, at random throughout the day.
It was profoundly depressing and meant to be fiction, but I guess every day we're making manifest the worst parts of our collective imagination.
seems slightly similar, because he was just reminiscing with it, not acting out parts of the relationship?
Check out Äkta människor / Real Humans.
A Swedish masterpiece IMO.
What's wrong?
Gratification? No. This is highlighting how (gen)AI can be incredibly harmful.
This is satire yo
Post your proof, just going by vibes isn't enough anymore.
I've also been reading the GPT public chats before they were hidden again, and let me tell you that this is actually mild in comparison.
I don’t know anymore tbh. There are people who do this crap for real
It literally says the wife was killed in a car accident.
What kind of dumb clickbaity title is this crap? Was it generated by AI or something?
How about you read the title of original OP and the context.
No, no it's not. This is a sad story of someone losing the love of their live, while having a kid who has lost their mother, while apparently not having access (or having used access) to proper mental healthcare.