This was not difficult to foresee. People were discussing the mental health risks of these models before OpenAI intentionally tuned it to be sycophantic in the pursuit of capturing users. This can easily be argued as gross negligence against OpenAI.
Hmm I don't know that it was that obvious in advance... I think the earliest recorded case of AI psychosis was that employee Google fired for being convinced LaMDA was sentient:
At that point, most of us only had experience with older chatbots and didn't know what GenAI chatbots were capable of, so I thought this was clearly a one-off with a gullible and unwell individual.
And then ChatGPT was released. I could see this was something else entirely, and I could see how people could get tricked into thinking it was sentient. However, I still didn't make the connection with how this would interact with other types of psychological issues.
This could be because I was an outside observer; it's likely being at the epicenter of things, these companies had way more early signals that they neglected, which is the sort of evidence I think these lawsuits will surface. To OpenAI's credit, when they realized ChatGPT 4o was overly sycophantic they did roll it back pretty quickly, but I'm pretty sure the speed with which they've been moving they've glossed over a lot of issues.
