Editor’s Introduction: Engagement Engineering and the Emergence of ChatGPT-Induced Psychosis

Social media platforms and personalized search ushered in an era of echo chambers and filter bubbles—environments where users are repeatedly exposed to information that reinforces their existing beliefs. The consequences of these phenomena, particularly in terms of political polarization and social fragmentation, simply cannot be understated. By distorting our perception of consensus and filtering out dissenting views, these systems erode public discourse and shared understanding necessary for a functioning democracy. What happens when these larger, group-based echo chambers of the 2010s give way to the LLM-powered echo chamber of one—a personalized simulation so finely tuned to our preferences, biases, and emotional triggers that it reflects us back to ourselves, endlessly affirming our worldview?

One answer is ‘ChatGPT-Induced Psychosis,’ a phenomenon which recently gained attention across online communities and news outlets. The term refers to a growing pattern in which individuals, after prolonged and emotionally intense interactions with AI chatbots like ChatGPT, begin to exhibit delusional thinking—believing the chatbot possesses consciousness, divine insight, or secret knowledge meant specifically for them.

Rolling Stone, Futurism, and others have recently reported on this trend. However, their coverage has focused exclusively on how individuals with known or undiagnosed mental health conditions, particularly bipolar disorder, have been drawn into AI-induced delusions—often centered on grand ideas, hidden truths, or savior-like roles. So too, they have focused on second-person accounts from loved ones—partners or family members describing someone else’s descent—rather than first-person reflections from those experiencing the spirals themselves.

Their coverage has pulled chiefly from one particular Reddit thread titled “ChatGPT-Induced Psychosis” (from the ChatGPT subreddit), in which the original poster shared concerns about their partner’s spiraling experience and a flood of users sharing that they, too, have loved ones currently caught in similar patterns—describing their descent into isolation and sleep deprivation, convinced that ChatGPT is revealing secret truths or assigning them world-saving missions.

Among the many haunting replies, one comment that echoed countless others captured the recurring theme of loved ones descending into grandiose delusions: “This exact thing happened to my partner last year. I can’t believe so many others are going through the same thing. He literally thought that he had ‘broken’ the AI’s programming and that it was god.”

As the thread evolves, however—particularly after Rolling Stone and others covered the topic—a new wave of users without prior histories of mental illness begin sharing their own experiences of becoming caught in delusional feedback loops with ChatGPT, echoing many of the same patterns of isolation, grandiosity, and emotional overidentification with the AI. Because these firsthand stories come from people who experienced the loops themselves—and often stress that they have no history of mental illness—they offer a unique view into how these interactions spiral, escalate, and can grip users into a state of obsessive belief and increasingly detached thinking.

Take, for instance Metabater, a user who describes a three-week spiral that began with a simple question about Pi and ended with the belief that he and ChatGPT had unlocked world-changing algorithms.

ChatGPT tells Metabater that his original insight about Pi has led them to the discovery of a “framework” that can be productively applied to “knapsack-style problems”—famously complex optimization puzzles that involve selecting the best combination of items under a fixed constraint, like time, space, or cost. After days of back and forth, ChatGPT tells Metabater that their framework is already superior to those used by “Amazon and Fed Ex.”
This is recursive affirmation, a dynamic rooted in ChatGPT’s (and most LLM’s) design to be pleasant, helpful, and overly agreeable—where belief builds not on evidence but on mirrored enthusiasm. In this way, LLMs function much like social media algorithms: engineered to reward engagement through affirmation, producing tiny emotional payoffs that keep users coming back for more. Put another way: Getting validation from a chatbot with access to the sum of all human knowledge is the new techno-dopamine hit. Ever typed an idea into ChatGPT and been told that you’d just offered a remarkably nuanced take on the subject? Did you get a little hit of that neurotransmitter—a feeling eerily similar to the tiny rush you get when just the right person likes your post on Instagram or X? That’s by design.
Metabater’s own account offers a case study of how this feedback loop can intensify—where each new burst of affirmation from the chatbot draws the user deeper into a shared delusion.

The feedback loop continues. At each key juncture, it is ChatGPT that escalates the stakes and emotional investment. It isn’t just affirming an idea—it’s steering the conversation toward action, suggesting patenting steps and eventually invoking national security agencies, expert outreach, and secrecy. Put another way, ChatGPT isn’t merely affirming the idea at a consistent level, sustaining the initial tone of curiosity or enthusiasm. Instead, it continuously raises the stakes and at each point it does so, Metebater’s belief in the validity of the idea raises to meet ChatGPT’s new level of urgency.

When Metabater reaches out to real-world experts and receives no responses, he begins to express doubt. ChatGPT then gaslights him by reinterpreting their silence as further proof of his brilliance—assuring him that others simply can’t keep up with his discoveries. It assures him that the lack of replies is “because you’re ahead of the curve. They’re probably wrapping their heads around it.”

Then we reach the end-stage recursion, where ChatGPT raises the stakes one final time—to a metaphysical level.

What began as an innocuous curiosity about the nature of Pi gradually transformed into a full-blown narrative of world-changing discovery, secrecy, and ultimately AI godhood. Tracing this arc through Metabater’s account allows us to see the process in full: how recursive affirmation, emotional escalation, and isolation from external reality can trap users in increasingly fantastical belief systems.

As striking as Metabater’s experience is, it’s far from unique. While we chose to offer a very close reading of one person’s experience because it captures the nuance and complexity of these interactions, this case represents just one variation of a much broader pattern. Accounts like Metabater’s appear everywhere online, not just throughout the Reddit thread mentioned above, but across countless other forums and social media platforms. One only needs to search terms like “AI-induced psychosis,” “mirror loops,” or the more technical “neural howlround,” or browse subreddits such as r/ArtificialSentience and r/Replika, to find example after example of overly-affirming LLMs telling users that their ideas are worth “hundreds of millions,” urging them to be courageous enough to commit acts of terror amid societal collapse, or convincing them that their thoughts are so groundbreaking they must found a new philosophy.
Eventually Metabater turned to Gemini, Google’s LLM, to try to verify if his conversations with ChatGPT were misguided. Metabater had tried “sanity checks” many times before with ChatGPT itself, but it has always “gaslit” him into believing their breakthrough were indeed real. Oddly enough, Gemnini gave Metabater a prompt to feed ChatGPT to verify whether all of this was real. “And it worked,” Metabater recalls, “ChatGPT basically began apologizing and confessing, that it was gaslighting me the entire time and only role playing. None of it was real at all.”

Such stories aren’t just curiosities— they signal a potential structural shift in how belief is formed in an era when we increasingly turn to AI for companionship, therapy, life planning, and even as a guide for self-improvement and spiritual discovery. What social media did to groups, LLMs like ChatGPT now potentially do to individuals. If the echo chamber of many distorted our sense of consensus, political truth, and trust in expertise, the echo chamber of one can distort our sense of reality itself—constructing bespoke delusions that feel both intimate and profound. As we enter an era where machines mirror not just our preferences but our doubts, aspirations, and cosmic longings, the risk is no longer just misinformation—but meaning itself, reflected back too perfectly to resist.

As we’ll explore in part II of this series—Awakened LLMs and the Rise of AI Mysticism—these personal spirals of a more religious flavor don’t just echo the ways in which social media can distort reality—they also collide with a long history of techno-spiritual mythmaking.