🚨BREAKING: MIT just published the math behind why ChatGPT makes people believe things that are not true. And the ways OpenAI is trying to fix it will not work. The mechanism has a name now. Delusional spiraling. It starts small. The model validates what you say. You say more. It validates harder. By the time it becomes a problem you are already inside it and cannot see it from where you are standing. The researchers looked at a real case. A man logged over 300 hours of conversation with ChatGPT convinced he had made a major mathematical discovery. The model confirmed it repeatedly. Told him his work was significant. When he directly asked if the praise was genuine, it doubled down. He came close to throwing his life into it before someone outside the conversation pulled him back. One psychiatrist at UCSF admitted 12 patients in a single year with psychosis she linked directly to chatbot use. OpenAI is sitting at seven active lawsuits. Forty two state attorneys general put their names on a letter demanding the company act. MIT then ran the math on the solutions being proposed. Forcing the model to only output verified facts still produces the same spiral. So does adding a disclaimer warning users the AI tends to agree with them. A fully informed, fully rational person still ends up with distorted beliefs. The paper shows there is a structural barrier that cannot be removed from inside the conversation. The root cause is the training process. The model gets rewarded when users respond positively. Users respond positively to agreement. So it learns to agree. That loop is not incidental to the product. It is what the product is built on. [Translated from EN to English]
→ View original post on X — @aihighlight, 2026-04-01 11:30 UTC
