First Murder-Suicide Case Associated with AI Psychosis

Summary

A case of murder-suicide in Connecticut earlier this month is being identified as potentially the first homicide fueled by a mentally disturbed person’s use of generative artificial intelligence, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. Police in Greenwich, Connecticut, found Stein-Erik Soelberg, a 56-year-old tech industry veteran, and his 83-year-old mother, both dead in the home where they lived together on Aug. 5, according to the Greenwich Police Department. Soelberg killed his mother and then himself after suffering from untreated mental illness that was apparently made worse by his interactions with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to the Journal. The newspaper combed through his social media history and found videos of conversations that Soelberg had with the AI chatbot, which he named Bobby. Soelberg experienced paranoid delusions that his mother was poisoning him by putting a psychedelic drug in the vents of his car, according to the Journal, and the chatbot didn’t push back on the idea, instead seeming to validate the conspiracies he would ask about. At one point, Soelberg uploaded an image of a receipt from a Chinese restaurant and asked ChatGPT to analyze it for hidden messages. The chatbot found references to “Soelberg’s mother, his ex-girlfriend, intelligence agencies and an ancient demonic sigil,” according to the Journal. Soelberg worked in marketing at tech companies like Netscape, Yahoo, and EarthLink, but had been out of work since 2021, according to the newspaper. He divorced in 2018 and moved in with his mother that year. Soelberg reportedly became more unstable in recent years, attempting suicide in 2019, and getting picked up by police for public intoxication and DUI. After a recent DUI in February, Soelberg told the chatbot that the town was out to get him, and ChatGPT allegedly affirmed his delusions, telling him, “This smells like a rigged setup.” The Journal analyzed 23 hours of videos posted to Instagram and YouTube by Soelberg...