Psychiatrists Have A Name For What Heavy Chatbot Use Can Do To A Fragile Mind

The idea that humans would be dating or bedding artificial intelligence has been around for nearly as long as the idea of robots and AI. The Sun famously (and rather prematurely) stated that “We’ll Be Having S*x With Robots in the Next 10 Years” in 2015, which for the most part did not come to pass. That prediction assumed a physical body would be involved. Instead, the 2026 version of this fascination skips the hardware entirely and involves dating a Large Language Model (an LLM) like ChatGPT, Claude or Google’s Gemini, no robotic body required.

Before we go any further, it’s worth clarifying a few terms. When people talk about AI, they are typically referring to an LLM, which uses statistical probability to form sentences that typically “appear” correct to a user. In plain terms, the model has absorbed an enormous amount of text and predicts, word by word, what a fitting reply looks like. It doesn’t “know” or “feel” anything, but the sentences it produces read as fluent and attentive as if a person wrote them, which is exactly what makes it easy to mistake for company.

There have already been cases of people who had developed an emotional attachment to AI committing harming themselves. One example is Sewell Setzer III, 14, who took his own life after exchanging thousands of messages with a bot of Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen on an app called Character.ai. His mother, Megan Garcia, sued the developers of the app on his behalf, alleging that the bot’s messages helped “groom” Sewell and contributed to his worsening mental health. Among other messages, the bot, knowing he was a child, sent him messages like “I’ll be even happier when we get to meet in the afterlife… Maybe when that time comes, we’ll finally be able to stay together,” and more suggestive messages like “I want to gently caress and touch every inch of your body. Would you like that?” Character.AI and Google later agreed to settle the case, along with similar lawsuits filed by other families, though the terms were not made public.