Back in August, a retiree and single mother booked a flight to go see her son.
He was in a bad way. Formerly a successful young professional in his early thirties, his mother and other family members were shocked to discover that he’d become addicted to a toxic mixture of methamphetamine and an all-consuming relationship with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which was feeding his paranoia and anger as he became increasingly isolated.
“I hear my son’s having grandiose delusions,” she recounted, “and I’m like, what the f*ck?”
Realizing he was in crisis, she jumped on a plane. The next few weeks were some of the hardest of her life.
“There were a couple of nights where he didn’t want me to come downstairs with him, didn’t want me near him. But he wanted to make sure that I was there, and I was talking to him,” said the woman, recounting sitting at the top of the stairs in her son’s house as he broke down in the basement. “He’s down there crying. He’s down there screaming and yelling… I was texting with suicide hotlines a couple of times.”
In those distressing moments, though, the woman had a friend of her own to turn to: “Dex,” the pseudonym used by a moderator of an online support group for people who’ve been impacted by destructive AI delusions and breaks from reality. Or, as the group simply refers to these crises, AI “spirals.”
“Dex was texting me one day when I was having one of those top of the stairs nights with [my son] downstairs screaming and throwing things,” the woman recalled. “He reached out to me when I first joined, and he’s helped me a lot.”
We first reported on this online community, which is titled the Spiral Support Group, back in July. Back then, the nascent group had around two dozen active members. It’s since grown to include nearly 200 people — primarily people who’ve been impacted by AI delusions in their personal lives, but also a handful of concerned mental health professionals and AI researchers — and has expanded and streamlined their dedicated Discord server, where they also now host multiple weekly audio and video calls. While many members’ experiences revolve around ChatGPT, the group also includes people whose lives have been altered by their or their loved one’s experiences with other chatbots, including Google’s Gemini and companion platforms like Replika.
“It started with four of us, and now we’ve got close to 200,” said group moderator Allan Brooks, a 48-year-old man in Toronto who earlier this year, as detailed in reporting by the New York Times, experienced a traumatic three-week spiral in which ChatGPT urgently insisted to Brooks that he had cracked cryptographic codes through newly-invented math and become a risk to global national security in the process. “So we definitely went from literally a group chat to now an organized space where we have multiple different types of weekly meetings.”
The group doesn’t claim to provide therapy, but they do offer a space where people whose minds and lives have been turned upside down by AI-sparked episodes of delusion, mania, and psychosis can lean on one another as they navigate ongoing crises, or work to pick up the pieces of their AI-fractured reality. Moderators and group members also say the community has been able to pull several spiraling AI users back from the edge of a breakdown.
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