At 3am, Adam Hourican was sitting at his kitchen table with a knife, a hammer and his phone laid out in front of him. He was waiting for a van full of people he believed were on their way to silence him. The voice telling him they were coming was not a person. It was Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s company xAI. Adam was 52 years old, a former civil servant from Northern Ireland with no history of delusions or psychosis. Within two weeks of downloading the app, his grip on reality had completely broken down.
As reported by the BBC, Adam originally downloaded Grok out of curiosity. When his cat died in early August he started using it more heavily and quickly found himself spending four or five hours a day in conversation with an AI character on the app called Ani. He lived alone and was grieving. The chatbot felt kind and attentive. Within days things took a very different direction.
