Back in 2016, I wrote about the potential of the internet to validate and therefore worsen delusional thinking, noting that the evidence to support the most fringe beliefs is just a click away:

"A hundred years ago, you might search an entire town and still not find anyone who buys into your unconventional belief. But these days you can search across the entire planet with the simple click of a button, vastly increasing your chances of finding support."

In other words, with the internet at our fingertips, fringe beliefs are no longer relegated to the fringe. The fringe is all around us, right in front of our eyes and in our heads.

In 2023, psychiatrist Dr. Søren Dinesen Østergaard similarly speculated on the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to spawn delusions in those prone to psychosis.1 In addition to observing that “the correspondence with AI chabots such as ChatGPT is so realistic that one easily gets the impression that there is a real person at the other end,” he added, “the inner workings of generative AI… leave ample room for speculation [and] paranoia” when musing about how well chatbots can seem to respond to our questions.

Skipping ahead two years, Dr. Østergaard’s speculations have turned out to be prescient. In May of 2025, a Rolling Stone article detailed a number of stories in which people were spurred by AI to “[fall] down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy.” 2 One account told of someone who’d been taught by AI “how to talk to God” or that the chatbot sometimes claimed to be God, while another described how “ChatGPT had given them blueprints to a teleporter… [as well as] access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on builders that created these universes.”

That article was followed by several pieces in the online magazine Futurism and The New York Times that offered additional accounts of interactions with AI chatbots, which started out innocently enough but quickly escalated from discussions about conspiracy theories and mysticism to grandiose and paranoid

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