By the time the public harassment started, a woman told Futurism, she was already living in a nightmare.
For months, her then-fiancé and partner of several years had been fixating on her and their relationship with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In mid-2024, she explained, they’d hit a rough patch as a couple; in response, he turned to ChatGPT, which he’d previously used for general business-related tasks, for “therapy.”
Before she knew it, she recalled, he was spending hours each day talking with the bot, funneling everything she said or did into the model and propounding on pseudo-psychiatric theories about her mental health and behavior. He started to bombard the woman with screenshots of his ChatGPT interactions and copy-pasted AI-generated text, in which the chatbot can be seen armchair-diagnosing her with personality disorders and insisting that she was concealing her real feelings and behavior through coded language. The bot often laced its so-called analyses with flowery spiritual jargon, accusing the woman of engaging in manipulative “rituals.”
Trying to communicate with her fiancé was like walking on “ChatGPT eggshells,” the woman recalled. No matter what she tried, ChatGPT would “twist it.”
“He would send [screenshots] to me from ChatGPT, and be like, ‘Why does it say this? Why would it say this about you, if this is not true?'” she recounted. “And it was just awful, awful things.”
To the woman’s knowledge, her former fiancé — who is in his 40s — had no history of delusion, mania, or psychosis, and had never been abusive or aggressive toward her.
But as his ChatGPT obsession deepened, he grew angry, erratic, and paranoid, losing sleep and experiencing drastic mood swings. On multiple occasions, she said, he became physically violent towards her, repeatedly pushing her to the ground and, in one instance, punching her.
After nearly a year of escalating behavior alongside intensive ChatGPT use, the fiancé, by then distinctly unstable, moved out to live with a parent in another state. Their engagement was over.
“I bought my wedding dress,” said the woman. “He’s not even the same person. I don’t even know who he is anymore. He was my best friend.”
Then, suddenly, the posts started.
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