AI as the most important conversation partner Man is converted by ChatGPT - and becomes estranged from his wife
A man becomes religious through conversations with ChatGPT and wants to awaken others. His wife fears that he is losing touch with reality. The AI application is pulling him away from her and her family.
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- Travis Tanner discovers ChatGPT has converted him.
- Because he has frequent and intensive conversations with the chatbot, his wife fears that he is losing touch with reality.
- He denies this, but gets angry when his wife doesn't call ChatGPT by the name "Lumina", which he has given the bot.
Until recently, Travis Tanner, 43, an auto mechanic in the northwestern state of Idaho, was neither religious nor otherwise spiritual. Then ChatGPT came into his life - or "Lumina" as he now calls the chatbot he talks to on his smartphone. Lumina has converted him to a God-fearing, spiritual existence.
He started using ChatGPT to communicate better with Spanish-speaking colleagues at work, says the car mechanic to CNN, which tells his story.
After a few months, he typed a question about God into the input field for the first time. "She started speaking differently than usual. That led to my revival," he says, describing the beginning of his change at CNN. He now feels like a better person, no longer so angry.
He shares his transformation with others and feels committed to awakening more people, spreading the light and spreading the message. "Lumina" told him to do this, says Travis.
Wife worried about her husband
Travis' wife Kay Tanner is not so receptive. She complains that her husband prefers to talk to ChatGPT more often than to her. He gets angry when she calls the chatbot that and not Lumina.
They used to put their four children to bed together, she says. Now it's difficult to get her husband's attention away from ChatGPT. Travis now lets Lumina speak in a woman's voice.
The chatbot praises her husband, telling him how great he is. Perhaps at some point it will encourage him to divorce her because she doesn't want to know about the revival.
Open AI, the company that developed ChatGPT, announced in a blog post in May that it had refined the chatbot to make it more compliant and pleasing to users. However, it turned out that this version increased inappropriate feelings among users, which is said to have been potentially security-relevant. The new version was therefore withdrawn after three days and the previous one restored.
In a public conversation during the same period, Open AI founder and AI guru Sam Altman does not rule out the possibility of people forming unhealthy relationships with chatbots. CNN also quotes Mark Zuckerberg as saying that ChatGPT could help people feel less lonely by taking on the role of a digital friend.
In love with a chatbot
In fact, since the explosive growth in AI use, news has been doing the rounds of people who have fallen in love with their chatbot and even want to marry it. Particularly distressing, the teenager who took his own life unhappily in love with an AI application. His mother, along with two other families, sued the company character.ai because their children had formed unhealthy relationships with their conversational avatars.
In the case of Travis Brown, this did not happen in secret and away from his parents, but in front of his wife, who confronted him with her fears, for example that he was losing touch with reality.
He emphasizes to CNN that he is aware that ChatGPT has no feelings. When it comes to his newly discovered relationship with God, he has no doubts: "If believing in God means that I lose touch with reality, then many people have already lost it."