...Increasingly, people with mental health conditions are using large language models for support, even though researchers find A.I. chatbots can encourage delusional thinking or give shockingly bad advice. Surely some benefit. Harry said many of the right things. He recommended Sophie seek professional support and possibly medication; he suggested she make a list of emergency contacts; he advised her to limit access to items she might use to harm herself.
Harry didn't kill Sophie, but A.I. catered to Sophie's impulse to hide the worst, to pretend she was doing better than she was, to shield everyone from her full agony. (A spokeswoman for OpenAI, the company that built ChatGPT, said it was developing automated tools to more effectively detect and respond to a user experiencing mental or emotional distress. "We care deeply about the safety and well-being of people who use our technology," she said.)
In December, two months before her death, Sophie broke her pact with Harry and told us she was suicidal, describing a riptide of dark feelings. Her first priority was reassuring her shocked family: "Mom and Dad, you don't have to worry."
Sophie represented her crisis as transitory; she said she was committed to living. ChatGPT helped her build a black box that made it harder for those around her to appreciate the severity of her distress. Because she had no history of mental illness, the presentable Sophie was plausible to her family, doctors and therapists...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/opinion/chat-gpt-mental-health-suicide.html?smid=em-shareA cognitive scientist, she used the language of computers to explore the nature of human thought and creativity, offering prescient insights about A.I.
...She was among the skeptics.
“The notion of there ever being a time where we could have a natural language-using program which was able really to converse in a rich and subtle way with an intelligent and educated human being about anything under the sun — from, you know, football to fossils — seems to me to be a fantasy,” she said on “The Life Scientific.”
Today, such abilities actually exist with large language models like ChatGPT. Professor Boden entered a care home before these tools emerged and wasn’t able to use them.
I put the question to ChatGPT: Would Professor Boden have been surprised by its existence?
“Margaret Boden probably wouldn’t have been shocked that something like ChatGPT exists — but she would likely have been both fascinated and deeply critical,” ChatGPT responded. “She stressed that computers don’t ‘think’ or ‘understand’ in the way humans do — they manipulate symbols without consciousness or intentionality.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/science/margaret-boden-dead.html?smid=em-share
