As a wave of disturbing incidents involving people losing touch with reality after interacting with chatbots emerged, Bloomberg Businessweek reporters Ellen Huet and Rachel Metz set out to interview people who had been directly impacted. Over the course of two months, they talked to nearly twenty people who had either experienced delusions themselves, or were coping with the impact of having a loved one go through the experience. They also spent time reporting on and unpacking the response to the issue from within large AI companies. The resulting online feature story gave a nuanced portrait of an emerging mental health crisis from several angles.
Many of the people who spoke to Bloomberg had never done so publicly before. In addition to the written story, the online presentation brought their experiences to live with individual narratives and excerpts from the chats that they’d had before suffering their delusional spirals. It also includes original animation, photographs, and a Spanish-language version.
