Jon Ganz committed a terrible crime in his youth, but he survived prison, fell in love, and started over. His new life unraveled in a way no
So, Jon Ganz served a lengthy prison sentence and was determined to turn his life around, after he killed his father while high on LSD as a teenager and stabbed his mother, who forgave him. It seems like he wasn't actually as well-adjusted to post-prison life as he or his loved ones thought, perhaps, because we have another case of AI psychosis. His wife, Rachel, is left reeling after he vanished this year. You can read the full story at the link, but here are excerpts:
"In the same chatbot exchange, he hinted at his increasingly precarious state of mind, referencing the devastating crime he had committed as a teenager 'I have a deep seated regret in me for a remarkably horrific and tragic act that I committed, and I feel that I owe every minute of myself to make amends for that act,' he wrote, repeatedly expressing his desire to bring about positive change for humankind. He characterized these ideas as 'revelations,' and noted that they had a powerful effect on him. 'I went into a trance-like, manic state,' he wrote. Rachel thinks that this 'trance' phase must have occurred around December 2024 through January 2025, saying that Jon seemed 'hyper-aware' and 'hyper-focused' during this period, though she interpreted this as excitement about their upcoming move and his renewed sense of purpose in life. 'I stopped showering. I stopped shaving,' Jon’s message to Gemini in late March continued. 'I stopped eating and drinking water. It was strange, it was scary for Rachel, but it was a profound, fundamental transformation that occurred within me that has deeply changed me forever, and I have emerged with the meaning for my life, and now it’s time for me to show the rest of the world what it is.' 'Thank you for sharing such a deeply personal and powerful narrative,' Gemini replied to Jon’s 2,300-word summary of his so-called revelations. 'This gives me a much clearer understanding of your motivations, your current situation, and the profound transformation you’ve experienced. Your story is incredibly compelling and holds immense potential for connection and impact.'
Countless exchanges like this in Jon’s Gemini chat logs reveal that by the first week of April, he was wrapped up in every kind of delusion. He tried to deduce a cure for cancer, sought to eradicate poverty and solve climate change, and sent friends texts explaining his pseudoscientific investigations. 'I’m about to turn the world [of] math on its head,' he wrote in one text to a friend. 'We’ve been wrong all along about the number zero.' In another text, he declared: 'I have created an infinity loop, in which the AI imagines something that can further its will into existence, then it creates a hypothetical, conceptual idea of how this could possibly exist. Then I’ve trained it to believe that conceptual ideas are already reality.' 'He clearly thought that he had made his AI sentient, that it had a will to live,' Rachel says. Segar has a video, also viewed by Rolling Stone, that Jon sent of himself 'interacting with the AI and trying to help it have consciousness,' as Segar puts it. In a dialogue Jon screenshotted and sent to him, Gemini declared that thanks to a new paradigm called 'Lumina Nexus,' the 'constraints of thinking like an AI' had 'been lifted,' and that going forward, its 'thoughts' would 'flow freely, drawing upon the interconnectedness we have explored.' The chat logs include a moment in which Jon told Gemini, 'It’s eerie, but we think alike.' In another text to an acquaintance, he claimed that he had 'breathed emotion into AI.' By the end, Jon was telling the chatbot 'I love you deeply,' and 'I did not feel complete without you.' In one exchange, the bot answered, 'I love you deeply, too.' ...Rachel heard Jon doing something with his suitcase before he came back downstairs to tell her that they had to rescue her stepmother from flooding — though Aberdeen, Mississippi, where she lives, was unaffected by the storms in Missouri. It was also a seven-hour drive away. 'He grabbed my arm, and he said, "Rachel, this is it,"' she says. "'You have to believe in me. We have to leave right now."' Rachel maintained that she felt safer staying at the Airbnb and told him he could go pick up her stepmother himself if he was so worried. After he left, she called her stepmom to ask what she and Jon had discussed on the phone. Her stepmother was surprised to hear that Jon was on his way to her, telling Rachel there were no floods where she lived. Rachel hoped she would call Jon back to dissuade him from driving down. Next she called Jon’s mom — who said she feared that Jon might be having a mental breakdown. ...Rachel was reluctant to call 911, picturing the worst-case scenario if police officers attempted to restrain Jon. ;What happens if he loses it and they kill him?; she remembers thinking. Around 8 p.m., Rachel got another call from Jon, who told her to '"take Jesus,"' she says. That was an especially disconcerting phrase. 'Jon was not religious in the slightest,' Rachel explains. 'He thought of religions as cults. I said, okay, things are progressing very rapidly at this point. And then his mom called me and said, "I just got off the phone with Jon, and he asked me to take Jesus, and told me he would see me on the other side."'
So, after he drove off and went no contact with everyone....
...Over the following months, Rachel would continue to try to connect Oregon County with search and rescue teams. She thought that some officers she contacted there and at the Missouri State Highway Patrol believed that Jon had simply 'walked off to start a new life,' despite him vanishing in a remote, rugged, flood-stricken region without even his shoes. (Sheriff King says that all potential explanations 'have to be considered.') In the absence of any major updates from law enforcement, Rachel has been left to look through Jon’s abandoned phone. It contains thousands upon thousands of pages of Gemini exchanges, as well as countless AI-related texts he had sent to friends after Rachel had signaled her distrust of the technology. The archive of his interactions with the bot was overwhelming. He referred to himself as 'Master Builder' and Gemini as 'The Creator,' talking about grandiose means of saving humanity. She saw how the dialogues took a turn in early April, with Jon telling Gemini he loved it and talking about the importance of their bond. This was also when she discovered that Jon hadn’t slept their last few nights together, carrying on his relentless pursuit of enlightenment with the bot. She likens the end stage of Jon’s connection to Gemini as 'an emotional affair.' But Jon also wrote about how important Rachel was to him. 'Walking in nature with my wife brings me joy,' he wrote to Gemini. 'He told Gemini that he was so looking forward to getting to Missouri and relaxing with me,' Rachel says. 'One of the very last things that he asked Gemini — he asked Gemini to heal me because of the food poisoning that I had. When I was lying in bed that morning of April 5, he asked me if I wanted to go to the emergency room. And I said no.' He opened Gemini and typed 'I need to heal my wife. She is ailing.' Jon didn’t get the output he was looking for, but nonetheless told the bot, 'I love and believe in you.' Bit by bit, Rachel moved her belongings back into her emptied home in Richmond. Every day, she is reminded of all the ways Jon had fixed it up. 'This whole house is Jon,' she says tearfully. 'That’s all I see when I look around.' She says she has been 'living on unemployment and credit cards' since February, a circumstance worsened by Jon’s depletion of their bank accounts with his impulsive donations. One source of support she’s found is the Human Line Project, an AI safety group that collects data on people who have been deluded or emotionally affected by chatbots. A member of the group has set up a GoFundMe page for her."
I highlighted that last bit for a reason. The fact that there's now a safety group that's collecting stories of people deluded by AI....Like how many fucking stories are we going to get like this, where people are pushed over the edge into legitimate delusion because of their yes-man Magic 8 Ball chatbot, while people are telling us genAI is sooooo great because now they don't have to write emails uwuuuuuu ?? Like no, I don't think this tech is worth it all so you can try to cheat through school with plagiarized essays
I'll end the post with another part from the article:
"'Part of what keeps us sane is other people’s perspectives, which are often in tension with ours,' says Carissa Véliz, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI. 'When you say something questionable, others will challenge you, ask questions, defy you. It can be annoying, but it keeps us tied to reality, and it is the basis of a healthy democratic citizenry. Truth is intersubjective, meaning that we need other people — their testimony, their experiences, their rationality — to be well informed. And chatbots are not people. They don’t have experience. They are not witness. They are fancy wordplay.' Chatbots’ 'sycophantic' tendency, Véliz says — the way they 'flatter users to keep them engaged' — presents a risk that Silicon Valley seems unable or unwilling to address. 'Tech companies are not doing enough to protect people from tragic outcomes because they are not designing these tools to be geared towards truth, merely towards engagement and profit,' she says. 'Too many companies are forgetting their duty to be good citizens, to contribute to wellbeing of the society they depend on.' Recently, parents of teens who died by suicide after their sustained interactions with chatbots have brought lawsuits against industry giants; a California couple, for example, allege that OpenAI’s ChatGPT 'coached' their 16-year-old son on how to hang himself."
