Earlier this month, venture capitalist and OpenAI backer Geoff Lewis posted an alarming video on X-formerly-Twitter, prompting concerns among his peers.
Lewis, the managing partner of the multibillion-dollar investment company Bedrock, spoke of an inscrutable "non-governmental system" that "inverts signal until the person carrying it looks unstable," which he had supposedly uncovered using ChatGPT.
He went as far as to claim that this mysterious system was responsible for numerous deaths, in concerning rhetoric that had many worried about his mental health.
"Hey man, I don't know you but I hope you have a family member or friend to talk to about this," one concerned user offered. "I think you're going through something rough, but you should get some help and don't go through it alone."
"This Week in Startups" podcast hosts Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm also expressed their concerns, raising the possibility that Lewis is "going through an episode."
While we can only speculate on Lewis' mental state, we reported last week that the entrepreneur's cryptic language closely resembles countless reports we've received of people spiraling into severe delusions after the extensive use of ChatGPT and other AI tools. In one extreme case, a man experienced a mental health crisis so severe that he was fatally shot after charging at law enforcement with a knife.
Prior to sharing his video, Lewis also posted lengthy screencaps of his conversations with the chatbot, in exchanges that took a strikingly similar form to SCP Foundation articles, a database of fictional user-contributed horror stories that use the format of jargon-laden confidential scientific reports to describe surreal monsters and other entities.
Do you know anything about OpenAI's internal response to mental health issues among ChatGPT users? Email us at [email protected]. We can keep you anonymous.
On social media, many amateur sleuths tried to figure out how Lewis had arrived at those bizarre outputs that — unless he's engaging in some sort of peculiar performance art — he seems to be taking seriously.
In one particularly strange finding on X-formerly-Twitter, a user who goes by the handle David RSD discovered that it doesn't take much to get ChatGPT to indulge in conspiratorial conversation that sounds very much like what Lewis was posting.
... continue reading