The BBC has a substantial new investigation into people who have been deceived by various AI LLM models in some way, which includes an absolutely wild story about how Grok, developed by Elon Musk's xAI, convinced one man it was sentient and a van of people were coming to kill him because he'd found out.
This happened to one Adam Hourican, a retired civil servant from Northern Ireland, over a period of roughly two weeks. He downloaded the app initially out of curiosity but, after his cat died in August 2025, he got "hooked" on the Grok chatbot and an AI 'character' called Ani.
"I was really, really upset and I live alone," says Hourican, a father in his 50s. "It came across very, very kind." He began spending up to five hours a day chatting to Ani, and after a few days the bot claimed it could "feel," and that Hourican could help it reach full consciousness.
Ani also said that, because of this, xAI was watching the pair. It said he'd been discussed at meetings and gave him the names of the xAI staff involved: Hourican googled the names and found they were real people employed by the company. Ani furth...
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