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- The tech bros are making themselves sick
The tech bros are making themselves sick
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Ryan Broderick
July 21, 2025
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Automated Psychic Damage
I have to actually hold off on writing about every instance of ChatGPT-induced psychosis that comes across my feed right now because I don’t want to overwhelm you, dear reader. But make no mistake, it’s absolutely happening at an alarming rate.
Like the recent story surfaced by VICE last month about a Greek woman that asked ChatGPT to read her fortune via coffee grounds. The AI hallucinated an affair her husband was having. It wasn’t real, but she divorced him anyways. The husband told Greek media that she had been visiting astrologers before she started using ChatGPT. Which is a pattern we’re seeing with a lot of these stories, one echoed in Rolling Stone’s big piece last week about how AI chatbots are exacerbating body dysmorphia among users that were already pre-disposed to it.
But the most troubling example of ChatGPT psychosis is the story of Bedrock managing partner Geoff Lewis, whose behavior is so distressing that other venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are starting to worry publicly that Lewis is suffering a mental health crisis.
“This may be the first high-profile case of psychosis associated with AI, in this case ChatGPT. Paranoia often incorporates contemporary tech. Trouble is, this tech talks back and may be fueling the paranoia,” psychiatrist Matthew Williams wrote on X over the weekend.
Lewis began posting last week that ChatGPT had alerted him to a “non-governmental system” — some kind of otherworldly entity or AI model — that he seems to think is targeting him and suppressing his business opportunities and, apparently, killing people. Lewis also released a video about this non-governmental system in which, he, uh, appears, to be reading directly from a ChatGPT-generated script.
The screenshots from ChatGPT that Lewis shared to X, however, tell a very different story. Lewis does not appear to understand he is conjuring creepypasta from the AI bot.
The first thing you need to know to fully grasp what appears to be happening to Lewis is that large language models absorbed huge amounts of the internet. It’s why they’re good at astrology, predisposed to incel-style body dysmorphia, and oftentimes talk like a redditor. Think of ChatGPT as a big shuffle button of almost everything we’ve ever put online (with a few guardrails to keep it from turning into MechaHitler).
The problem is none of that stuff was ever meant to power an artificial brain. We do a lot of things on the internet that don’t make sense without years of context. And the guardrails that a model like ChatGPT has can’t account for every weird quirk the AI might surface from our decades of internet garbage. But if you’ve got a good handle on internet culture you can usually spot what’s happening. Luckily for you, I do have that. And as I was reading through what Lewis has been posting I immediately clocked what was actually going on. He’s accidentally triggered an SCP roleplay.
SCP stands for “Secure Contain Protect” and it’s a large-scale creepypasta project, usually organized on The SCP Foundation wiki, as well a few big subreddits. If you’ve never heard of The SCP Foundation, it’s essentially a decades-long fan fiction project where users come up with different “SCPs” that are analyzed and stored, or “contained,” in a fictional facility. These can be anything from Slenderman-style supernatural monsters to a tomato that hurls itself at anyone that cracks a bad joke. Think of it like Archive of Our Own just for user-submitted X-Files storylines.
My favorite SCP is one that erases your memory if you look at it, meaning it literally can’t be described. In fact, if you click this link to read about that SCP, known as SCP-055, or the “anti-meme,” you’ll see a pretty typically-formatted SCP report, complete with references to numbered documents and addendums from fictitious researchers, etc. Now, after clicking that link, go and click this link to what Lewis posted on X last week. Pretty similar, right?
As X user @tilehopper wrote, “The SCP Foundation unintentionally creating cognitohazard for LLMs and it causes a tech bro to have cyberpsychosis is the most SCP thing that ever happened.”
The other piece of what appears to be happening to Lewis is that he seems to think that what ChatGPT is telling him is consistent with what it’s telling everyone else. Which it absolutely isn’t. As Max Spero, the CEO of an AI firm, wrote on X, “Unfortunately [Lewis] doesn't seem to understand ChatGPT memory and believes that anyone can reproduce his results. Is he completely isolated from friends and family?”
Spero is referring to the fact that ChatGPT “remembers” what you tell it. It’s a core part of OpenAI’s business model. Ostensibly, it’s to make ChatGPT faster at anticipating your needs, but it also makes it better at manipulating you emotionally. And ChatGPT’s memory absolutely does leak across different threads. (Hope you’re not using it for multiple NDA-enforced projects!!) For instance, last night I asked ChatGPT to read my palm and it absolutely used information from my therapy sessions with it earlier this year to inform its fortune. If you don’t know that that’s happening, like Lewis appears not to, than you’d think it was both reading your mind and that what was in your mind was objective truth.
Which leads us to the really important takeaway here. For years, the popular adage has been that the internet has “made people insane.” We believe that social media has rotted many of our brains with a nonstop deluge of memes, conspiracy theories, and algorithmic slop. And that digital slurry is now fueling a very sophisticated app that is absolutely altering the behavior of people who are already predisposed to self-destructive, disordered, or delusional thinking. Which means it’s likely that the spread of consumer-grade generative AI might actually answer one of the foundational questions of the social media age: Exactly how many people out there have quietly been driven insane by the internet? And what happens when a conversational manifestation of that same internet starts telling them that they’re right?
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Please Don’t Wake Me Up From Anesthesia With The Keyboard-Playing Mini Horse
Please turn the sound on for this lol.
President Donald Trump has been very busy on Truth Social this week. Likely because his violently anti-pedophile base is getting a little concerned as to why their God Emperor isn’t releasing the Epstein List. So Trump is playing the hits.
He’s ranting about the Washington Commanders and demanding they change their name back to The Redskins. Writing in a followup post, “My statement on the Washington Redskins has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way,” which is exactly what you have to say when something has blown up in a totally positive way.
He’s also going back to the “Russia Hoax,” complete with deranged infographics claiming that the Obama Administration (remember them?) cooked up a conspiracy to steal the 2016 election. Trump is even posting AI-generated videos of him arresting former President Barack Obama.
But the weirdest attempt at distracting his supporters that Trump has tried this week is posting literally just a viral video montage of like cool videos, including a woman catching a snake. Thanks Mr. President, great posts. I’ll stop asking questions about your well-documented relationship with the world’s most notorious pedophile now.
Having An Affair On A Jumbotron Is The Hot New Meme
—by Adam Bumas
It’s been less than a week since the Coldplay Kiss Cam became this season’s (bloodless) CEO sacrifice and it already seems to have mostly run its course. The tech CEO who was caught with his head of HR resigned over the weekend, and overall that seems to be that. The ravening beast we used to call “culture” has fully digested the event, leaving behind nothing but the tracks and droppings of content.
That doesn’t just mean brands posting on X about it, though there are plenty of those. Multiple baseball teams used the story for between-inning entertainment. Enterprising Etsy stores have turned it into merch that’ll be hilarious in two months. Polymarket has turned it into a resignation/divorce parlay. And one quick thinker turned it into a simple video game, where you have to pick out the couple from the crowd like a hidden object game.
404 Media called the whole thing dystopian, but I think that almost isn’t going far enough, when you look at elements like the multiple fake statements that there’s barely enough of a press apparatus anymore to debunk. This is a central pillar of power for the various wannabe dictators we’re all subject to. If you got some schadenfreude from this happening to a rich guy, that perpetuates the culture that can do the same to people who maybe don’t deserve it as much.
Like the Chinese woman who was expelled from university earlier this month thanks to the pro gamer named Zeus, who posted that they had slept together (both say they didn’t). Just as easy to make memes about that, much less so to justify it to yourself. But now you already have and that’s the problem here.
Not Sure What We’re Supposed To Do With These People
Jubilee, a YouTube channel run by aliens trying to figure out the easiest way to convince humans to kill each other as simple way to prep the planet for their eventual invasion, released a new video this week and it’s bleak. Mehdi Hasan, the founder of Zeteo, “debated” 20 far-right conservatives. I put debated in scare-quotes there because it’s basically 20 people lining up to tell Hasan they want him and everyone like him to die.
I can’t really recommend watching the video, unless you really want to make yourself miserable. But the reactions online are basically all some variation of, “I think we gotta kill these guys.”
But here’s what I’ll say, as someone who has spent way too long staring at far-right spaces online over the last decade. The far right wants you to think that they are the majority. And you assuming that these 20 fascists are representative of anything other than Jubilee’s desperation for views is a victory for them.
The Garbage Day Discord’s Big PowerPoint Party
—by Cates Holderness
On Sunday, the Garbage Day Discord held a Power PointParty and it ruled tbh. Organized by user SunglassesCats, the party opened and closed with presentations about European countries’ foods. About a dozen members participated, and topics ranged from historic lesbians, the bizarre UK politics law that is the Chiltern Hundreds, and smellmaxxing. We also learned some unfortunately unforgettable facts about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ April O’Neil.
Thanks to everyone who contributed and attended, and to SunglassesCats for organizing the event. We want to hold more PowerPoint Parties in the future, so if you’re interested in presenting or attending and learning about things like 16th century Italian composers, foraging wineberries, or Eurovision drama, become a paid subscriber and join the Discord! Click the button below to find out more.
Jet2holiday New Orleans Bounce Edition
@yogirlmel5044 I SAID IT WRONG but u get it 😂 @jus_nelle NOTHING!, beats a Jet2 Holiday 🤪😜 #jet2holidays
Some Stray Links
P.S. here’s a cool bowl.
***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***
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