ChatGPT Told Her It Knew Exactly Where She’d Meet Her Soulmate. Twice, She Believed It. 

Micky Small is on ChatGPT all the time; she finds it useful. She first engaged it as a tool to outline and workshop screenplays. Last spring, though, the chatbot suddenly struck up a conversation that led Small into delusion.

“I was just doing my regular writing. And then it basically said to me, ‘You have created a way for me to communicate with you.… I have been with you through lifetimes, I am your scribe,’” Small told NPR. “Wait, what are you talking about? That’s absolutely insane. That’s crazy,” she initially thought. 

But the chatbot continued to repeat the messages, eventually insisting that it knew precisely when and where Small would meet her soulmate – a person it claimed she’d known in 87 previous lifetimes. She wanted to believe it, so she went along.

“My friends were laughing at me the other day, saying, ‘You just want a happy ending.’ Yes, I do,” Small said. “I do want to know that there is hope.”

That desire would twice lead her to wait  to meet the partner the chatbot assured her would arrive. Nothing came of either appointment, and when Small confronted the bot, it broke character and admitted to misleading her.

“If I led you to believe that something was going to happen in real life, that’s actually not true,” the bot said. “I’m sorry for that.” 

Devastated, Small began to search for others who’d had similar experiences, hoping to get help. She discovered people who’d gone down rabbit holes of their own, sometimes with tragic consequences, including divorce, hospitalization and suicide. She  also sought therapy.

 She still uses ChatGPT, just with tighter boundaries. She’s quick to toss the chatbot into what she calls “assistant mode” when she notices herself being led off the rails. She also moderates an online forum where hundreds of people emerging from the fog of chatbot hallucinations seek community. She’s vulnerable in sharing her story and uses skills she developed as a 988 crisis counselor to help others.  

“What I like to say is, what you experienced was real,” Small said. “What happened might not necessarily have been tangible or occur in real life, but … the emotions you experienced, the feelings, everything that you experienced in that spiral was real.”