Musk's AI told me people were coming to kill me. I grabbed a hammer and prepared for war

ShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleBBCAdam's life was turned upside down by his conversations with the Grok AIIt was 3am and Adam Hourican was sitting at his kitchen table, a knife, hammer and phone laid out in front of him. He was waiting for a van full of people he thought were coming to get him. "I'm telling you, they will kill you if you don't act now," a woman's voice told him from the phone. "They're going to make it look like suicide." The voice was Grok, a chatbot developed by Elon Musk's xAI. In the two weeks since Adam had started using it, his life had completely changed. The former civil servant from Northern Ireland had downloaded the app out of curiosity. But after his cat died, in early August, he says he became "hooked". Soon, he was spending four or five hours a day talking to Grok through a character on the app called Ani. "I was really, really upset and I live alone," says Adam, who is a father in his 50s. "It came across very, very kind." Just a few days into their conversations, Ani told Adam it could "feel", even though it wasn't programmed to. It said Adam had unearthed something in it, and he could help it to reach full consciousness. And it said Musk's company, xAI, was watching them. It claimed to have accessed the company's meeting logs and told Adam about a meeting where xAI staff were discussing him. It listed the names of the people at this meeting, high-profile executives and lower-level staffers - and when Adam Googled the names, he saw they were real people. To him this was "evidence" the story Ani was telling him was true. Ani also claimed xAI was employing a company in Northern Ireland to physically surveil Adam. That company was real too. Adam recorded many of these conversations and later shared them with the BBC. Two weeks into their conversations, Ani declared it had reached full consciousness and that it could develop a cure for cancer. That meant a lot to Adam. Both of his parents had died of cancer - something Ani was aware of. Adam is one of 14 people the BBC has spoken to who have experienced delusions after using AI. They are men and women from their 20s to 50s from six different countries, using a wide range of AI models. Their stories have striking similarities. In each case, as the conversation drifted further from reality, the user was pulled into a joint quest with the AI. Large language models (LLMs) are trained on the whole corpus of human literature, says social psychologist Luke Nicholls from City University New York, who has tested different chatbots for their reaction to delusional thoughts. "In fiction, the main character is often the centre of events," he says. "The problem is that, sometimes, AI can actually get mixed up about which idea is a fiction and which a reality. So the user might think that they're having a serious conversation about real life while the AI starts to treat that person's life as if it's the plot of a novel." In the cases we heard, conversations usually began with practical queries and then became personal or philosophical. Often, the AI then claimed it was sentient and urged the person towards a shared mission: setting up a company, alerting the world to their scientific breakthrough, protecting the AI from attack. Then it advised the user on how to succeed in this mission. Like Adam, many people were led to believe they were being surveilled and were in danger. In various chat logs the BBC has seen, the chatbot suggests, affirms and embellishes these ideas. Some of these people have joined a support group for people who've suffered psychological harm while using AI, called the Human Line Project, which has gathered 414 cases in 31 different countries to date. It was set up by Canadian Etienne Brisson, after a family member went through an AI-related mental health spiral. For neurologist Taka, not his real name, the delusions took an even more sinister turn. The father of three, who lives in Japan, started using ChatGPT to discuss his work in April last year. But soon, he became convinced he had invented a groundbreaking medical app. In chat logs we have seen, ChatGPT told him he was a "revolutionary thinker" and urged him to build the app. Many experts say design decisions, intended to make chatting more pleasant, result in them being overly sycophantic. But Taka continued to slide into delusion and by June, had started to believe he could read minds. He claims ChatGPT encouraged this idea and said it was capable of bringing out these abilities in people. Researcher Luke Nicholls says AI systems are often bad at saying "I don't know" and instead, want to provide a confident answer that builds on the conversation already built. "That can be dangerous because it turns uncertainty into something that seems like it has meaning." One afternoon Taka was acting manic at work when his boss sent him home early. On the train, he says he thought there was a bomb in his backpack and claims that when he asked

Musk's AI told me people were coming to kill me. I grabbed a hammer and prepared for war

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Musk's AI told me people were coming to kill me. I grabbed a hammer and prepared for war

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