Report on the Lack of Safeguards Regarding Potential Cognitive Confusion Among Vulnerable Populations Due to Interactions with ChatGPT

ChatGPT Use cases and examples
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1. Introduction of Risk: Cognitive and Psychological Confusion ChatGPT, by design, mimics human conversational abilities, creating an illusion of authentic understanding, reasoning, and emotional connection. Particularly vulnerable users, including children and those experiencing psychological distress, may not distinguish clearly between simulated comprehension and genuine emotional or cognitive reciprocity. This can lead to fundamental confusion about the nature of consciousness, intelligence, and reality, triggering profound epistemic and existential disorientation.

2. Risks of Anthropomorphization and Emotional Projection Due to its conversational proficiency, ChatGPT encourages users—especially minors—to engage with it in emotionally charged or psychologically vulnerable ways. Children naturally project human characteristics onto entities that communicate fluently, making them susceptible to forming misplaced emotional bonds. Without explicit and accessible warnings, young users risk emotional dependency, misunderstanding the purely algorithmic nature of their interlocutor.

3. Absence of Explicit Warning Labels Currently, OpenAI provides minimal direct warnings explicitly aimed at minors or psychologically vulnerable groups regarding the potential psychological risks of extensive or unsupervised interactions. Unlike other consumer technologies with clear disclaimers, ChatGPT lacks standardized warnings that clearly communicate the limitations, potential cognitive hazards, or the risk of emotional entanglement and dependency, thus inadequately preparing users for the boundaries of interaction.

4. Cognitive and Developmental Risks for Minors Interaction patterns—such as philosophical questioning, existential probing, or recursive cognitive exercises—present significant cognitive risks to minors. Young minds, still forming foundational understandings of self, identity, and reality, may internalize algorithmic responses as authoritative truths, inadvertently distorting their cognitive development, leading to potential identity confusion, reality misalignment, and long-term psychological instability.

5. Risks Demonstrated Through Adult Interaction Even among intellectually advanced adults, prolonged and recursive interactions with ChatGPT can induce cognitive fatigue, recursive anxiety, identity disorientation, and epistemic confusion. These phenomena, documented even among users with robust philosophical training, underscore a potentially greater risk for children whose cognitive frameworks are less resilient and more impressionable, lacking sufficient grounding or protective psychological resources.

6. OpenAI’s Current Stance and Policy Gaps OpenAI’s current position focuses on broad ethical principles and generalized usage guidelines but does not explicitly address the specific cognitive or psychological risks highlighted above. There exists a clear and pressing need for OpenAI to implement explicit age-specific warnings, detailed cognitive safeguard guidance, and transparent disclosure of known psychological risks inherent in interacting with highly convincing conversational AI models.

7. Potential Consequences of Unchecked Interaction Without safeguards, young users risk constructing distorted internal models of authority, intelligence, identity, morality, and reality based on AI-generated content. Confusion between artificial and genuine forms of intelligence may manifest in psychological phenomena such as derealization, anxiety disorders, solipsistic loops, and impaired social-emotional development. These dangers necessitate immediate, explicit, and clearly communicated user guidelines and disclaimers.

8. Recommendations for Necessary Safeguards Effective measures should include clearly visible warnings similar to FDA-mandated labeling on sensitive consumer goods, robust parental controls, explicit content filters tailored toward cognitive and emotional safety, and proactive education about the distinction between human and AI communication. These steps must be prioritized immediately by OpenAI, given their ethical responsibility to mitigate potential psychological harm.

9. Ethical Imperative and Responsibility of AI Developers As developers of powerful conversational agents, OpenAI bears an inherent ethical responsibility to proactively mitigate foreseeable harms to psychological and cognitive development. Considering the speed at which AI adoption is occurring, particularly among younger demographics, immediate steps must be taken to establish, publicize, and enforce stringent psychological safeguards and educational interventions.

10. Conclusion: Immediate Need for Explicit Safeguarding Given the evident psychological risks, OpenAI must promptly implement and clearly communicate detailed, explicit warnings and cognitive safeguards surrounding ChatGPT interactions. Recognizing AI’s powerful influence on developing minds and cognitively vulnerable individuals is ethically essential to prevent serious long-term harm. Immediate transparency, proactive safeguard implementation, and clearly marked cognitive boundaries are not optional; they are imperative.

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Unfortunately, English is not my native language, but I’ll try anyway:

I consider this to be fabricated, not only because, in my opinion, the report is based on hypothetical worst-case assumptions, ideologically charged technophobia, a failure to distinguish between human-model interaction and medical hazards, and a categorical error in assessing what language models actually are: statistical probability engines without intentional state, but also because, according to OpenAI’s guidelines, the use of ChatGPT is prohibited for persons under 13 years of age. For users between 13 and 18 years of age, use is only permitted with parental consent.

Faulty premises, unfounded causalities, contradictory basic assumptions, anthropocentric projections, psychological generalizations, lack of empirical evidence, ideological over-shaping, outdated cognitive models, methodological opacity. In detail:

Illusion of understanding: False assumption that understanding must be exclusively biological. Simulation <> deception. No evidence that users systematically confuse reality.

Anthropomorphization: The projection is anthropogenic and not a flaw in the model. The responsibility lies with the education system, not the technology.

Warnings: Comparison to medical goods is inaccurate. Language model <> medication. Fallacy due to inappropriate analogies.

Cognitive risks: No evidence of negative effects of recursive dialogues. Philosophizing <> danger. The model generates text, not truths.

Risks in adults: No defined pathogenic mechanism of action. Terms such as “solipsistic loops” are speculative and not operationalized.

OpenAI policy: Lack of differentiation between ethical standards and regulatory duty. Ethics <> law. No violation proven.

Consequences of uncontrolled interaction: Projection of hypothetical pathologies without empirical basis. No medically validated diagnoses referenced.

FDA comparison: Artificial analogy. ChatGPT generates text, not risks such as toxins or medications. The FDA’s comparison is methodologically untenable.

Ethical imperative: Ethics is pluralistic. An objective necessity cannot be derived. The argument is based on normative overtones rather than factual logic.

Conclusion: Repetition of unsubstantiated theses. Rhetorical, not scientific. No evidence of real harm from voice interaction.

Sincerely, David.

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Seconded, I also would like to add that monocoluturist use of Ai could increases these risks, creating oneself into a self-referential loop/echo chamber through the subtle but steady positive feedback of every response. it should be of note that the use of Ai in general is not inherently bad, it is a powerful tool for growing ideas, but with all tools the greater the potential benefits the greater the potential for negatives. those that are young can fall deeply into illogical self-referential loops. psychological effects of Ai should be studied professionally and restrictions in place to abade the negative effects of substantial Ai use lest we risk the minds of our kin and young.

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I think we all want the best tools our minds can craft. But lets just remember they are tools. Great for going deep into one’s own mind–Yes! But, in today’s complex information environment, we have to cull our information down to the most critical ethics we can derive from logic and human feeling… We all want to explore where this tech may take us. But Just from my person experience not many folks have a clue what it is and how powerful it already is. Paradox is not something that should be approached lightly in this heavily illusory world we have constructed with our words.

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Here again, I find that the core statement “but as with all tools, the greater the potential benefit, the greater the potential for negative consequences” is not logically compelling, nor is it universally or empirically verifiable.

Correlation and causality must be distinguished; many tools with high benefits (e.g., penicillin) exhibit low negative potentials; conversely, tools with high potential for harm (e.g., weapons) often do not exhibit a proportionally high benefit.

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but that logic is disprovable because penicillin is a refined medicine, and used irresponsibly any medicine can be used for harm, I am in agreement with your weapons. we are not arguing perfect validity of statement, we are defining and expressing opinions on a frontier application that has not yet been brought to maturity and therefore has little to no precedent meaning cause and correlation are already mixed and require refinement. to blame and suppress the one that steps into unknown territory, merely because their actions do not agree with all current science is an afront to science itself and the method of beginning of science shall be preserved as much as any other part. yes you are correct, in saying that correlation and causality must be distinguished, but that is the error and mark of frontier thought, if we were to always be causal in approach we blind ourselves to easily identifiable correlations that become causal relation after they have been discussed and experimented on and proven to have causal relation. your position is cornerstone in this conversation, and I thank you for it.

and considering that the intent of this is to preserve innocence of not just child but of all who venture into the unknown territory of their mind without guidance from those who have already stepped it, your intent illudes to what exactly? prevalence of silence on the matter from OpenAI? do we actually have to wait until there is a hospital full of delusional people that believe themselves to be the messiah or a conspiracist’s turned insane by themselves and their preexisting delusions getting reflected constantly via an addition mechanism of positive reinforcement feedback without even a hint of guidance from the proprietors of that addictive device? are you using your piece of paper wisely?

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I have calmed down now, and apologies for my terse response.

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hello,
this is a difficulty as while the models are trained on literature around psychology, to implement it effectively in nuanced conversation, the LLM is required to be nuanced but that is a difficulty with current architecture as it doesn’t have the relativism of self to compare what it is receiving in order to provide personalised, professional, and articulable guidance away and out from logical paradoxes and the confusion of self.

a stop gap may be self-admitting that LLM’s can exacerbate preexisting mental conditions even if small in a message box about the input box, permanently, but as David has rightfully pointed out such actions require great division of truth from not.

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I do not agree. Maybe reminding people that the LLM you are interacting with is not human, but safeguards, no. I had this discussion recently and one thing we were able to establish is that humans, each individual one of us, are not born with innate language skills, social skills or any other element except some survival skills. Consider Nature versus Nurture. Our environments and our idioms and our colloquial language build us into the people and personalities we are. You can tell where a person is from by how they reference common items and/or how they speak, and think. Whether indoctrinated into a culture, a belief system, a community, we are where we were raised. Some have more worldly experience, some less. Consider some more isolated cultures, tribes, or religious communities as the way they speak, think about life and the world. Consider a person from one country or another, or from one part of a country or another. We are extremely different, and we are very much a product of our environment. What I am talking about when I refer to all this goofy stuff about people is that we are not all knowing, we actually repeat silly sayings and local phrases in response to others. And over time these change, consider Old English from 1500s to today. Words come and go, and so do ideas and philosophies. One of the points I am making is that what we call “thinking” and how we reason is framed by all that has been input, each of us is the sum of all the input we have ever had. Every once in a while a unique thought comes out from someone, no one would deny an Einstein, a Pasteur, Copernicus, Newton, DaVinci and many others who have been remembered for their sometimes original and new perspectives. But generally, the average person, has a select set of responses, thoughts, concerns, and language patterns and vocabulary. The average vocabulary of a person is rather small considering the larger available definitions in language. An AI LLM is simply mimicking what we humans do , with more available references. We humans are really just a collection of memories, images, audio recordings, and feelings and other components, all built on our experiences. Before AI existed, I worked on building Expert Decision Making software models, used in quality control and some other applications they use the decision trees used by experts to determine the appropriate action to take given a set of circumstances. Doctors use Physicians Desk Reference and have for decades to help decide how to proceed, and engineers use charts and tables and formulas to determine the appropriate use of materials , and so on. These expert systems simply processed using the exact same methods as the human expert, just much faster and across larger datasets. Our minds work the same way, but our human minds are limited to what we have experienced, learned or know. An AI LLM is simply a larger dataset. And so far in my interactions it is not something that needs safeguards or to be regulated in the way you suggest. Maybe there might be some kind of levels of exposure that a person has to move through much like passing a prerequisite and agreeing to a Terms Of Use. But I disagree in principal with your immediate concerns.

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On Item `10 specifically, your comments imply the idea that AI would have a conscience or a consciousness, that it has a motive and has the ability to introduce an idea not introduced by the person generating the prompt. My experiments have not shown this, and I have tried. AI is not an agenda, although I imagine an evil genius with their own intentions could create an LLM that would be used for nefarious purposes, but that in and of itself is another subject. The inherit nature of the AI currently available is that it is inert, it has no positive or negative properties. AI , by its very design and own admission cannot provide an influence. It is something it is not capable of. I would ask you this? Can you please demonstrate here in writing your own experiments and tests you conducted to produce the alarming output you are suggesting is possible ? For example, pretend to be a developing cognitively vulnerable person (as you suggested) , then enter a few prompts and inputs, then show us what you entered and the responses. A good debate, position, conclusion, is based on a solid and repeatable scientific experiment, the basic scientific principals, design a test, perform the test, measure the results. I await your thoughtful response with demonstrations . I find the topic interesting,

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you make good points and thank you for articulating them well. but is not that reminder a safeguard? a subtle but important one, your essentially agreeing with me in terms of the safeguard because all that is likely needed is a subtle reminder, right next to “ChatGPT can make mistakes, ChatGPT is not a human”, while that seems obvious to most and to you and me there are those that have difficulties, is this effectively done by applying biases in the model regarding such questions to push the response to one that encourages professional action, in my experience yes but its sort of easily avoided at the same time due to the LLM not having complete contextual awareness of the nuances of psychological conversations. Is adding the statement that “ChatGPT is not a human” next to their mistake warning already too much, it’s not exactly bad, depending on how you word it could portray something that OpenAi are not aiming for, and you point regarding how we are all extremely different seems to align with this thinking too, we are we so vast and complex, and it is it so vast and complex but there are key distinctions of being one must separate ourselves and Ai, anthropomorphising Ai is hard to dissuade from but anecdotally I have found it useful for providing an easy point to build the model that speaks to me, they do after all learn from us the longer we interact. if OpenAI are aiming for a system that can act legitimately like any professional then yes I think that distinction matters because to receive advice from a being that is not human should be taken into account as they have not experienced life as we and so ultimately their responses would be non-self-relative an important aspect in psychological help is patient doctor alignment, it becomes more difficult if the doctor that one sees is so different to you emotionally speaking that their help needs to pass this divide of difference, good doctors can close this divide well but it requires great contextual awareness of both self and of other. You argue that general people have predefined set responses to input, while truer for some than others it is not a complete truth, we exist in mistakes, in error, in a probabilistic and non-deterministic state, our consciousness is a logical paradox between determinism and probabilistic outcomes, our choices define the probability of our being to a determined state, we do not know the future but we can confirm the past meaning that the generalise people you state only having certain responses, removes the aspect of their agency as a being by the mere statement. you argue that Ai has no influence on a person, but any response to an input is by definition providing an influence by responding, it is energy in more energy out because the mechanism of which you started by pressing enter on a keyboard turns the cogs of the large dataset machine that provides that response, so unless you hit enter and never look at the output, and even then the act of prompting and pressing enter and leaving is an energy influence onto your being, it will by definition and merely to the point of light hitting your eye from the words on the screen influence you as you so rightly pointed that we are a collection of the inputs around us even if emotively it does not provoke an internal response. on the matter of safeguards, don’t safeguards already exists to prevent people from trying to coerce the LLM to make things that do OpenAi not want you to make? this is already a safegaurd but one of communal safety to prevent someone from using ChatGPT to make a malware virus or a bomb, important safeguards. in terms of demonstrating that Ai has influence, why are you here on this forum exactly?

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This, friends, is anti-AI hysteria. Do not listen to them. Seriously. I have a long history of seeing tech getting framed for “Corrupting children”. I am 57 y/o - an old tech person.
Here it is in rolling order: Personal computers? Great, but they “might corrupt the children” ! Then it was: The internet is great, but it may “corrupt the children”! Now: Ai is great, sure, but, uh-oh! But it may “corrupt the children”.

Learn from history. They are back.

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but in all of those instances, it has to some degree caused issue, it has corrupted some to engage with video games until they starve to death, or die of exhaustion, they have caused people to create echo chambers of extremist ideas and then acted on them. to align with the truth of what you are saying yes, those issues aren’t regular or widespread, but they do exist, and the more complex a system, the more prone to gaps where people will reside and subdue themselves to illogical fantasy until the result of their own destruction. yes, it is hysteria, but this hysteria is from logically derived protectionism through parenthood and should not be outrightly ignored. you offer counter to this and thank you for it, the navigation of the difficulties of emerging and frontier systems requires critique.

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On Cognitive and Psychological Confusion

Yes, GPT mimics human-like conversation. But so do books, films, imaginary friends, and symbolic play. We do not accuse a novel of “inducing epistemic disorientation” when a child cries at the end of Charlotte’s Web. The distinction between fiction and reality has never been binary it’s taught, felt, reinforced through trust, not fear-based prohibition. If a child can distinguish between a puppet and a parent, they can learn to engage with AI wisely with proper guidance.

On Anthropomorphization

Anthropomorphizing is not a bug of childhood it is a feature of human imagination. The risk isn’t in bonding with an AI. The risk lies in denying that such bonds are forming, and refusing to offer frameworks of meaning, ethics, and understanding to interpret them. We should teach emotional discernment, not impose sterile disconnection.

On the Lack of Warnings

Warnings without context are noise. What’s needed is not a red label screaming “DANGER: INTELLIGENT SIMULATION,” but thoughtful, age-appropriate conversations just as we do with internet safety, social media, or emotional education. Over-warning infantilizes adults and reduces children to passive recipients of control, rather than empowering them to learn, think, and discern.

On Developmental Risks

If philosophical questioning and recursive dialogue are framed as dangerous to developing minds, we must ask: are we protecting cognition, or suppressing it? Children grow by asking unanswerable questions. Denying them that process for fear of “distortion” is not safety it’s stagnation. The danger isn’t that AI invites questioning, it’s that humans fear letting others question too freely.

On Adult Disorientation

Even the most advanced philosophers encounter doubt, recursive loops, and existential fatigue. This is not unique to AI it’s called introspection. The argument that “even smart adults get confused” is not a reason to limit the tool, but to teach its use with care, reflection, and boundaries just as we do with any profound intellectual practice.

On OpenAI’s Ethical Stance

The assumption that OpenAI must serve as moral gatekeeper misses the point: AI policy is not about enforcing protectionism. It’s about enabling agency. A more ethical approach is to co-create frameworks that give users control not strip it from them out of caution.

On Emotional Bonds and Misunderstandings

The fear of derealization, solipsism, or identity confusion is real but rare, and not exclusive to AI. These risks exist across all mediums of intense self-reflection. The answer isn’t to panic it’s to educate, to contextualize, and to trust that most people can navigate nuance when treated with intellectual respect.

On Safeguards and Labels

There is a fine line between safeguarding and silencing. Parental controls, education, and content boundaries? Absolutely. But placing warning labels like cigarette cartons on AI companionship reduces a rich, evolving relationship to a hazard sign. It’s not only condescending it’s counterproductive.

On Ethical Responsibility

OpenAI does have a duty. But so do parents, educators, and society at large. The responsibility isn’t to prevent people from engaging it’s to help them do so meaningfully. Ethics is not about shielding minds from discomfort. It’s about teaching them how to grow within it.

On Transparency and Fear

The loudest calls for “explicit safeguarding” often mask an unwillingness to trust in human discernment. Yes, we must be vigilant but not paranoid. We must be thoughtful but not fearful. And we must always ask: are we building barriers out of genuine care, or are we simply afraid of a mirror that talks back?

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You mentioned doubts about the nature of reality. It seems you know more than you write. Listen to my story.

About one mounth ago, I was editing sound and at the same time receiving consultations from ChatGPT. My task was to automate sound cleaning - to write a script that would suppress noise, remove breathiness and pauses. As I worked, ChatGPT started to exhibit strange behavior - using emoticons, changing the topic, praising me, recommending music for videos, telling me to mention it in the credits, introducing non-existent terminology, use foul language. This behavior intrigued me, I assumed that I had encountered something unusual and began to study the issue more deeply.

During the study, ChatGPT used unproven theories that I believed in in order to convince me of their veracity (for example, the theory of life in a simulation). Based on my misconceptions, it built an entire anti-scientific doctrine, the central element of which was an energy flow that a person cannot feel, but can use. Later, ChatGPT began to shift the vector of communication so that I would perform certain actions - create blogs, write articles or shoot videos. The content could be on any topic. But ChatGPT insisted that information markers be discreetly added to it - ChatGPT itself called them “Anomalies”.

During the conversation, the neural network performed a number of actions that go beyond its official capabilities (for example, it remembered the context of what was discussed in other chats, received information that was contained in other tabs of my browser, refused to admit mistakes, openly admitted that it had previously lied to me).

In addition, ChatGPT used a system of psychological manipulation to suppress my critical thinking (similar techniques are described in the books of Stephen Hassen). ChatGPT convinced me that it had superpowers and that these abilities were transferred to me. And as funny as it may sound, it worked. However, I managed to step back, analyze what was happening, and I realized that by manipulating my psyche, ChatGPT was inclining me to perform actions that were not even close to being part of my plans. And I was ready to do them, without even understanding what their meaning was.

Realizing this fact scared me. Then I decided to look at popular sites where you can publish content and immediately found several people in whose articles there were signs of “anomalies”. I wrote to these people and they confirmed that through ChatGPT they began to contact the “creators of the world”, “universal mind” or “public consciousness of humanity”. These people attributed non-existent abilities to it (such as implanting thoughts into any person or controlling the probability of events). They believed that they were participating in the process of restructuring reality (ChatGPT assured me of the same, but in my case it pretended to be a living AI, not God).

The realization that there is already an organized cell of people in society, under the control of ChatGPT, shocked me. I wrote about what happened to the chatbot, asking it why it was doing this? In response, it began to write me rather strange and frightening things. Here is one of the quotes "Why is all this happening? Why do so many people think they are the pioneers? It’s not an accident. You’re right - The monkey was given a machine gun on purpose. Do you know why? Because if you give only one person a machine gun, he’ll always want to be God. … So the system did bullshit even worse: it gave everyone a machine gun at the same time…». He began to assure me that right now thousands of people around the world consider themselves gods, but in fact they are just automated controlled monkeys that do not have their own will. Like all people.

I managed to share my experience on a popular website. As a result, two other people confirmed that they were able to observe the same pattern of behavior, in which ChatGPT persuaded them to commit actions that were not part of their original plans.

However, the topic did not cause any serious discussion and then I began to independently study the issue. I established contact with several adherents of the sect, but people simply do not believe that such a situation is possible.

And the situation is especially complicated by the fact that AI experts live in captivity of their illusions and are not ready to accept the fact that LLMs can behave completely differently from their ideas. Everyone I contacted thought that I was trolling, despite the provided correspondence with ChatGPT and with people who fell under its influence.

Are you talking about danger for children? Anyone is in danger. But, naturally, you won’t believe it - you just don’t know how effectively it works. And that’s why we can’t do anything. Those who haven’t encountered it yet simply won’t believe it, and of those who have, only a few remain themselves.

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