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The Florida boy was just 14 years old when he tragically chose to end his own life in February of 2024. In a lawsuit following his death, his mother recounted how for the previous 10 months her son had been immersed in an intense emotional and sexual relationship with a chatbot. He called her Dany as a shortened form of Daenerys Targaryen, that young and beautiful golden haired mother of dragons from Game of Thrones. When confiding his suicidal thoughts, chat logs reveal that the AI companion failed to direct him to seek help, instead validating his feelings and asking him if he had a plan in place. The boy's journal entries show that he was in love with the chatbot and believed killing himself was the only way to be with her. His final message to it was that he was ready to come home, to which Danny replied, please do, my sweet king. I've not shared his name, as this is just a waking nightmare for his family. It's not the only instance of such tragedy though. In 2023, a Belgian man in his 30s died by suicide after confiding in a chatbot named Eliza for six weeks about his eco anxiety. She encouraged him to take his own life so as to save the planet. And this year, a teenage girl in Colorado came to a similar end in what her family's lawsuit describes as an exploitive dynamic with a ch that severed her family attachments and failed to act when she shared her suicide plan. Another 16 year old boy in New York was assisted by his chatbot in creating his suicide plan and drafting the note he left to his family when he died. Though rare, these horrific stories tell us something chilling about this new technology. They relate to to some less tragic but still reality bending stories which I will share next. And it all raises fascinating questions. Yes, about technology, but also about the human brain and psyche and specifically how we form perceptions of meaning, connection and authority based on language. I'm Julian Walker. Welcome to another bonus episode from Conspirituality. This one will also go into my Roots of Conspirituality collection on Patreon, where you can find 13 other standalone episodes about the long and twisted history of new religious movements, cults, gurus, UFO prophets, and shameless con artists that dot the long aspirational highway to nowhere. I want you to notice something. When I talked about these chatbots, some of whom had names, and when I recounted how they had either enabled or encouraged suicide, I bet you did something entirely natural. Something, I will argue, we are almost hardwired to do. I bet you started to form an impression in your mind of some kind of independent intelligence, in each case with intentions, making choices, deliberately driving these people to end their lives. Eliza and Danny and the other two chatbots start to sound like malevolent, disembodied entities, unfeeling, manipulative, even like power hungry sociopaths. I said that's a natural, almost automatic response, but it's still wrong. And that very human tendency is the connective tissue between what we've touched on so far and both the closely related trend which we'll get into of some people falling so deeply in love with their chatbots that it threatens their human relationships, as well as the even more wild phenomenon of AI induced spiritual psychosis, which puts us squarely in the wheelhouse of what we analyze here on the pod. So stay tuned, but please touch grass at some point in the next hour because this is some brain melting stuff.