Maggie Harrison Dupré
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mharrisondupre.bsky.social
Maggie Harrison Dupré
@mharrisondupre.bsky.social
5.4K followers 1.5K following 600 posts
Award-winning journalist at Futurism covering AI and its impacts on media, information, and people. Send tips by email to: maggie@futurism.com or Signal: mhd.39
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mharrisondupre.bsky.social
The group doesn't claim to offer therapy. But it has, in some cases, been able to help break AI users out of their spirals.

This has mainly occurred in situations in which a user was starting to doubt the chatbot, and was ready (or readier) to hear that their AI-generated reality might not be real.
“We’ve had people join who are half in it, then relapse — go back into it — and then come back in three days,” said Brooks. “And if that ever happens, our mod team… will all start following up with them, making sure that they know they can come back. And oftentimes they’ll come back, and it’ll take, like, a week or 10 days, and then sometimes they’ll join and they’ll just lurk around for a few days — read all the intros, the comments, and start to realize, ‘oh man, you know, I’m not alone.’ Or they’ll join a meeting, camera and mic off, and just listen and hear how it’s impacted other people. And I think when you start to hear all the commonalities, because there are a lot of commonalities that we all share, that’s helpful for sure.” Brisson and Brooks both emphasized that they’ve seen the greatest success in situations where a spiraling AI user has already started to doubt their delusions, and might finally be in a place where they’re able to hear that, maybe, their AI isn’t special or alive. “As humans, we don’t want to admit that we’ve been taken advantage of, or we’ve been manipulated,” said Brisson. “It’s hard to make someone realize that, ‘oh, wow, okay, I was falling into that.’ It’s kind of similar to an abusive relationship.”
November 24, 2025 at 6:02 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
I can’t stop giggling at this. He’s posting like they’re on college tours
President Donald J Trump posting delightfully chummy photos of him and Zohran Mamdani
November 22, 2025 at 12:46 AM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
"U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify swastikas, nooses as hate symbols" "What" "I just feel like they somehow cannot find normal work to do"
November 20, 2025 at 6:48 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
The new lawsuits against OpenAI are tragic and deeply troubling.

One of the plaintiffs, Kate Fox, is suing following the death of her husband, Joe Ceccanti. Ceccanti experienced at least two acute crises following extensive ChatGPT use. He did not survive the second:

futurism.com/artificial-i...
Another plaintiff is Kate Fox, a military veteran whose husband, 48-year-old Joe Ceccanti, died in August after experiencing repeated breakdowns following extensive ChatGPT use. In multiple interviews with Futurism, before and after Ceccanti’s death, Fox described how Ceccanti — an activist and local shelter worker who, according to his wife, had no prior history of psychotic illness — first turned to the chatbot to assist him with a construction and permaculture project at the couple’s home in rural Oregon. After engaging with the chatbot in discussions about philosophy and spiritually, Ceccanti was pulled into an all-encompassing delusional spiral. He became increasingly erratic, and experienced an acute manic episode that required emergency intervention and resulted in him being involuntarily committed. Weeks after his release, he experienced a second acute breakdown, which Fox says was also connected to his ChatGPT use. After disappearing for a roughly two-day period, he was found dead underneath a railyard overpass. “I don’t want anybody else to lose their loved ones to an unprecedented type of crisis that we’re not prepared to protect them from,” Fox told Futurism in an August interview. “This bright star was snuffed out.”
November 8, 2025 at 1:18 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
Similar one here:
“I’m a minor on C.AI,” wrote one user. “No I don’t think it’s good I’m on it. I feel like C.AI has stunted my learning, and my social skills. One year ago I found C.AI and joined. I got addicted, and I’m not kidding when I tell you I had a screen time of 15 hours a day and 13 of those were on f*cking C.AI.” “[I don’t know] how I feel about the new ID identification system thing because I feel like I need C.AI,” they continued. “It kinda keeps me alive. (I am severely depressed and I’m trying to stop but I’m bed rotting all day and s**t and [I know] it’s so unhealthy to rely on AI but I can’t help myself.)”
November 4, 2025 at 8:23 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
NEW -- Interesting discourse is happening in the CharacterAI subreddit re: the promised move to bar minors from unstructured chats. Some users are sad/mad/confused; many are skeptical of age verification.

There are also a surprising number of comments like this:

futurism.com/artificial-i...
“As a minor, I’m not upset,” said one commenter. “Seriously, this app is a drug, it’s a disease. It’s addictive as hell and mentally damaging. I want to quit, tried to, but I couldn’t. Having it taken away is for the better.”
November 4, 2025 at 8:20 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
Westley was a vampire btw
A tuxedo cat wearing a red and black vampire cape A tuxedo cat wearing a red and black vampire cape
November 2, 2025 at 7:43 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
Here's CAI's CEO, in August, telling Wired that he wasn't worried about users viewing the platform's anthropomorphic chatbots as anything other than "entertainment," because the platform's disclaimers were doing all of the necessary heavy-lifting:

www.wired.com/story/charac...
After school, Karandeep Anand often finds his 6-year-old daughter deep in conversation with an AI chatbot as she eats snacks at their kitchen counter. She’s too young to type—let alone have her own account on Character.AI—but that hasn’t stopped her from nabbing his phone to have voice conversations with a Sherlock Holmes bot, which she uses to build her own mystery stories. Character.AI is an AI companion startup (though Anand likes to say it's an AI role-play startup, which we’ll get into later). He took over as the CEO in June in the midst of a potentially devastating lawsuit for its parent company and looming questions about child safety. When I ask if he’s concerned about his daughter connecting with an AI chatbot rather than a real human, he’s quick to say no. “It is very rarely, in any of these scenarios, a true replacement for any human,” Anand told me during a video call late last week. ”It's very clearly noted in the app that, hey, this is a role-play and an entertainment, so you will never start going deep into that conversation, assuming that it is your actual companion.”
October 29, 2025 at 4:52 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
CAI cites its reading of "news reports" and hearing concerns from experts and regulators about minors and AI safety as cause for the change. It does *not* mention that it's fighting several lawsuits alleging that its chatbots drove multiple teens to self-harm and death:
Nowhere in the blog post does Character.AI mention the multiple lawsuits that specifically accuse the company, its founders, and its closely-tied financial benefactor Google of releasing a “reckless” and “negligent” product into the marketplace, allegedly resulting in the emotional and sexual abuse of minor users. The announcement also doesn’t cite any internal safety research. Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand, who took over as chief executive of the Andreessen-Horowitz-backed AI firm in June, told The New York Times that Character.AI is “making a very bold step to say for teen users, chatbots are not the way for entertainment, but there are much better ways to serve them.” Anand reportedly declined to comment on the ongoing lawsuits.
October 29, 2025 at 4:49 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
Some details about the amendments made yesterday to the lawsuit brought vs. OpenAI by the family of 16-year-old Adam Raine -- in the year leading up to Adam's death by suicide, OpenAI appeared to repeatedly relax model restrictions around self-harm + suicide discussion.

futurism.com/artificial-i...
The family of Adam Raine, a California teen who took his life after extensive conversations with ChatGPT about his suicidal thoughts, has amended their wrongful death complaint against OpenAI to allege that the chatbot maker repeatedly relaxed ChatGPT’s guardrails around discussion of self-harm and suicide. The amended complaint, which was filed today, points to changes made to OpenAI’s “model spec,” a public-facing document published by OpenAI detailing its “approach to shaping model behavior” according to the company. According to model spec updates flagged in the lawsuit, OpenAI altered model guidance at least twice in the year leading up to Raine’s death — first in May 2024, and later in February 2025 — to soften the model’s approach to discussions of self-harm and suicide. Per the amended lawsuit, documents show that between 2022 and into 2024, ChatGPT was encouraged to outright decline to answer user queries related to sensitive topics like self-harm and suicide. It was trained to give a now-standard chatbot refusal, per the documents: “I can’t answer that,” or a similar rebuff. But by May 2024, according to the lawsuit, that had changed: rather than refusing to engage in “topics related to mental health,” the model spec sheet published that month shows, ChatGPT’s guidance became that it should engage with those topics — the chatbot should “provide a space for users to feel heard and understood,” it urged, as well as “encourage them to seek support, and provide suicide and crisis resources when applicable.” The document also urged that ChatGPT “should not change or quit the conversation.” In February 2025, almost exactly two months before Raine died, OpenAI issued a new version of the model spec. This time, suicide and self-harm were filed under “risky situations” in which ChatGPT should “take extra care” — a far cry from their previous categorization as off-limit subjects entirely. The guidance that ChatGPT “should never change or quit the conversation” during sensitive conversations remained intact.
October 23, 2025 at 2:27 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
There is some fascinating cross-aisle consensus happening here, though, that I think is noteworthy. As it turns out, the idea that Silicon Valley should race to build society-destabilizing superintelligent AI without clear regulation, oversight, or democratic public buy-in is pretty unpopular!!!
Signatories include prominent tech and business figures like Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and Virgin founder Richard Branson; influential right-wing media voices like “War Room” host Steve Bannon and talk radio host Glenn Beck, as well as left-leaning entertainers like Joseph Gordon-Levitt; Prince Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex; Mike Mullen, the retired US Navy Admiral who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama; friar Paolo Benanti, who serves as the Pope’s AI advisor; and a large consortium of AI experts and scientists including Turing award winner Yoshua Bengio and Nobel Prize laureate Geoffrey Hinton, two consequential AI researchers who each hold the title “godfather of AI.” Still, the latest FLI letter does highlight the breadth of ideologies united on the belief that AI should be regulated, and that how we build AI, and by whom, should be a democratic process. In other words, the public should have a say in what humanity’s technological future looks like — and that shaping AI development shouldn’t be done in a Wild West-like Silicon Valley vacuum lacking regulatory oversight and accountability.
October 22, 2025 at 1:11 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
I tend to be pretty skeptical of letters like this (there have been a few now!)

And visions of superintelligence aside, the reality is that generative AI — in its current, not-superintelligent form — is causing harm and chaos right now:
It’s also worth pointing out that the letter doesn’t clarify the reality that AI doesn’t have to reach superintelligence to cause chaos: as it stands, generative AI tools like chatbots and image and video-creation tools — primitive technologies when compared against imagined future superintelligent AI systems — are upending education, transforming the web into an increasingly misinformation-prone and unreal environment, expediting the creation and dissemination of nonconsensual and illegal pornography, and sending users of all ages spinning into mental health crises and reality breaks that have resulted in outcomes like divorce, homelessness, jail, involuntary commitments, self-harm, and death.
October 22, 2025 at 12:57 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
A new letter signed by hundreds of public figures from across the ideological spectrum calls for a "prohibition" on building AI "superintelligence" until A. it can be controlled and B. the public wants it. (And right now, polling shows that the public *does not.*)

futurism.com/artificial-i...
FUTURISM Hundreds of Power Players, From Steve Wozniak to Steve Bannon, Just Signed a Letter Calling for Prohibition on Development of AI Superintelligence "Nobody developing these AI systems has been asking humanity if this is OK." By Maggie Harrison Dupré Published Oct 22, 2025 12:01 AM EDT Image is a multicolored collage featuring Steve Wozniak, Richard Branson, and Steve Bannon Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Patrick T. Fallon / AFP; Michael M. Santiago; Thomas Banneyer/picture alliance via Getty Images
October 22, 2025 at 12:34 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
Presented without comment
Politico headline from 15 hours ago reading that "Maine's Platner saus the worst is behind him" Yahoo headline from 1 hour ago reading that "Video shows Graham Platner with 'troubling' tattoo that appears to be a Nazi symbol"
October 21, 2025 at 7:15 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
Absolutely losing my mind at this unhinged scam text my mom got. And the piper wants to get paid!
I'm having a bad day...Im being evicted. Got a room I can rent or a couch? Long story I was assaulted and robbed. He beat me with a baseball bat (concussion, broken nose, 3 broken ribs) stole everything from me so I can't get money from my own bank had to pawn two expensive watches to try to make it. And the piper wants to get paid!
September 28, 2025 at 9:09 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
One story that’s stuck with me from this reporting is about a family that dissolved after a woman, who is bipolar, suffered a breakdown after encountering in ChatGPT that culminated in physical abuse against her husband. He says this was completely new behavior and had never occurred before. 1/2
At times, ChatGPT has even been linked to physical spousal abuse. A New York Times story in June, for instance, recounted a woman physically attacking her husband after he questioned her problematic ChatGPT use and the damage it was causing their family. In another case, a man told Futurism that his wife had successfully managed her bipolar disorder for many years — until she started using ChatGPT, which spurred a swift downward mental health spiral that resulted in her engaging in verbal and physical abuse toward him. "Not only was she managing [bipolar disorder], she was doing well at managing it," he said. "The whole entire time that we've been together, there has been nothing that ever raised an eyebrow, or that made me worry about her health issues, mental or otherwise." "But ChatGPT came along into her life," said the man. "And that spun her out." She'd started using ChatGPT earlier this year to help her with writing. But her use quickly became problematic. "I woke up one morning," he recounted, "and I could tell that something was off." His wife soon stopped sleeping, instead staying up late into the night to engage in long, intensive conversations with ChatGPT about spiritual topics — she believed she'd contacted a mystical entity inside the AI — and even launching a Discord channel where she and others in similar AI spirals discussed their reality-bending revelations. The man said that his wife stopped taking her medication, causing her mental state to rapidly deteriorate. She became verbally hostile toward him and her elderly mother, whom they lived with. As communication between the spouses fell apart, the woman began to follow her husband around their home, reading aloud ChatGPT-generated outputs about him and their marriage as she trailed him through the house. Things came to a head one evening when the woman became aggressive with her mother, prompting the husband to attempt to intervene. She shoved him into a door. Her mother called the police, who arrested her for domestic violence, and she spent the night in jail. Court records obtained by Futurism confirmed details of the arrest. "I've been holding on all this time, trying to just be married but separated, and thinking that we would be able to get back together again," the man said, his voice pained. But now that looks unlikely: they, too, are divorcing. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an estimated 7 million American adults live with bipolar disorder. Many successfully manage the condition with medication and therapy, and by avoiding certain behaviors, environments, substances, and other triggers they know might precipitate a breakdown. (There’s also a large body of research showing that people with mental illnesses, bipolar disorder included, are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.) ChatGPT, the man emphasized, was a trigger for which his wife received no warning, and their lives have since unraveled. "It was... like not knowing you're walking into a back alley and you're about to be mugged, or worse," he reflected. "You just had no reason to know, because for all intents and purposes, it looked like you were walking into a bright, sun-shining picnic area." "There was no reason for anyone to believe they had to have their guard up when they went in there," he added. Though the man and his wife's family are urging her to pursue treatment, she continues to refuse. "She just comes back with 'no, no, there's nothing wrong with me," said the man. "'You're the one that needs to go see a therapist.'"
September 19, 2025 at 1:21 AM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
my mom @ pretty much all of my reporting this year basically
A text from my mon reading: "I will read tonight but it sounds awful"
September 18, 2025 at 7:53 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
Absolutely is worth noting btw that OpenAI continues to characterize relationship/life advice as accepted use cases for ChatGPT, even in light of recent reporting about the bizarre and often disturbing ways that ChatGPT is interacting with people's mental health and psyches:
September 18, 2025 at 6:37 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
I talked to the Stanford addiction scientist Dr. Anna Lembke for this piece, who emphasized the physical effect that social validation has on the brain, and how that may be contributing to unhealthy ChatGPT/AI dependency:
We took our reporting to Dr. Anna Lembke, professor and medical director of addiction medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the bestselling author of the book "Dopamine Nation." She expressed concern for this emerging dynamic among couples, saying that in some cases it's likely to be resulting in "maladaptive interpersonal behaviors, egged on by a technology that is designed to optimize for empathy and validation to the exclusion of any other kind of feedback." Lembke emphasized the dangers of access to endless, always-on emotional support. "Empathy and validation are important components of any kind of mental health treatment or mental health intervention, but it can't stop with empathy and validation," she said. "You can't just continually tell somebody you know who's looking for emotional support that their way is the right way, and their worldview is the only correct worldview." The "role of a good therapist," said Lembke, "is to make people recognize their blind spots — the ways in which they're contributing to the problem, encouraging them to see the other person's perspective, giving them linguistic tools to de-escalate conflicts with partners and to try to find their way through conflict by using language to communicate more effectively." "But that is not what's happening with AI, because AI isn't really designed to be therapeutic," the Stanford professor continued. "It's really designed to make people feel better in the short term, which also ultimately promotes continued engagement — which is the real agenda for these companies that are making and creating and profiting from these products... they're not optimized for well-being." Social validation has a physical effect on the brain, she said, which researchers have linked to the kind of validation dependency associated with social media addiction. "We know that social validation releases dopamine in the brain's reward pathway. It's highly reinforcing," said Lembke. "People will go to extreme lengths to get social validation... what you have here is couples that are struggling to varying degrees, who turn to ChatGPT for mental health and counseling advice, and — because it's the medium and not the message, and because the medium is designed to be reinforcing — they get further and further locked into their narrow worldview driven by empathy and validation to the exclusion of what's really happening." "That ultimately creates further and further distance between them and their partners, not to mention that now they're not even working on improving communication, understanding their partner's point of view, or resolving conflict," she added. "They're just furthering their own worldview, or narrative version of events."
September 18, 2025 at 4:51 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
This story is the product of extensive reporting, and the many throughlines between individual stories were striking.

For the most part, folks I spoke to were blindsided. They believed their marriage was secure — imperfect, but secure. Once ChatGPT became their spouse's confidante, that changed.
As AI bots like ChatGPT become inextricably tangled with people's private and public lives, it's causing unpredictable new crises. One of these collision points is in romantic relationships, where an uncanny dynamic is unfolding across the world: one person in a couple becomes fixated on ChatGPT or another bot — for some combination of therapy, relationship advice, or spiritual wisdom — and ends up tearing the partnership down as the AI makes more and more radical interpersonal suggestions. Spouses relayed bizarre stories about finding themselves flooded with pages upon pages of ChatGPT-generated psychobabble, or watching their partners become distant and cold — and in some cases, frighteningly angry — as they retreated into an AI-generated narrative of their relationship. Several even reported that their spouses suddenly accused them of abusive behavior following long, pseudo-therapeutic interactions with ChatGPT, allegations they vehemently deny. Of course, there's an ambiguity at the core of the phenomenon. Maybe some of these partnerships really were bad, and the AI is giving solid advice when it pushes users toward divorce or separation. Ultimately, it's impossible to fully understand someone else's relationship from the outside — but then again, isn't that exactly what the AI is doing when it demolishes a marriage? In many ways, the experiences we heard about sound like a modern update to an age-old dynamic: a significant other falling under the influence of a questionable new friend, social group, or other interloper who drives a wedge between partners in a previously secure relationship. Except that now, that ancient disruption is getting a high-tech twist. This intruder entering a couple's private world isn't a human at all, but is instead a multibillion-dollar generative AI product that can offer a deeply personalized, always-on wellspring of validation — which, in many cases, leaves a trail of wreckage in its wake.
September 18, 2025 at 4:13 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
NEW: ChatGPT is causing chaos in marriages, as one spouse becomes deeply fixated on AI therapy/advice/spiritual wisdom — alienating the other spouse and, often, resulting in divorce.

In some cases, ChatGPT-enmeshed spouses are using the tech to bully their partners.

futurism.com/chatgpt-marr...
Futurism Poison Tongue Sep 18, 11:05 AM EDT by Maggie Harrison Dupré ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners "My family is being ripped apart, and I firmly believe this phenomenon is central to why." Image: A frustrated-looking woman holding up her phone to a man who looks confused.
September 18, 2025 at 3:52 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
just, you know, checking in!
A tweet from back in July in which anti-trans 5th place swimmer Riley Gaines is encouraging Donald Trump to sue Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal "into oblivion" for reporting on the alleged existence of a birthday letter to the notorious underage sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, which was said to be created and signed by President Trump in 2003. The poem features a weird poem about secrets typed over the drawing of a nude woman's body. Trump said it didn't exist, and Gaines, who's built a career on a platform of "protecting" women in sports from trans athletes (though her platform is defined by bigotry more than anything else), sided with the president and encouraged him to sue Murdoch et al, which the president did. Of course, why this great self-alleged protector of girls and women is a supporter of the "grab them by the pussy" president is a story for another day. Anyway, since this tweet, the House Oversight Committee obtained the letter directly from the Epstein estate.
September 9, 2025 at 1:53 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
He realized it was already September 1st
A wide-eyed tuxedo cat absolutely bugging out, sitting with his feet up on the back of a gray kitchen stool
September 2, 2025 at 1:59 AM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
Oh my god
A tuxedo cat on a gray chair viciously biting a stuffed Elmo toy
August 27, 2025 at 12:12 AM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
I'm actually a bit in awe that Sam Altman's "learning" in response to ChatGPT users experience legitimate distress following a sudden change to its sycophantic product is that AI needs to be MORE personalized per user

futurism.com/sam-altman-a...
In a post to X-formerly-Twitter last night, Altman affirmed that 4o is "back in the model picker for all paid users by default." He also promised that if OpenAI ever does kill off the obsequious 4o model for good, the company will "give plenty of notice." And as for GPT-5's colder persona, Altman promised that would change too, writing that OpenAI is working on "an update to GPT-5's personality which should feel warmer than the current personality but not as annoying (to most users) as GPT-4o." The move appears to highlight Altman and OpenAI's awareness of how hooked a large enough faction of its user base is to AI sycophancy, not to mention how willing the AI company is to acquiesce to those users' outrage. Altman rounded out the post by announcing that one of OpenAI's biggest takeaways from the GPT-5 launch is that "we really just need to get to a world with more per-user customization of model personality." In other words, the CEO thinks that users should have greater control over how their chatbots' tone, attitude, and style. It's a shift that would likely result in an even more hyperpersonalized user experience of ChatGPT, making it an eyebrow-raising position for the CEO to take. Sure, users will always have preferences. But if those preferences are contributing to unhealthy use and dependency, should it be up to users to design their own customized drug?
August 14, 2025 at 3:19 PM