It got trained by 80s prime time television action adventure shows?

AM? what is that

The product was actually working just fine. Just depends on whose perspective/motives you're viewing it from.

Welcome to the late 2020's. It's only going to get weirder.

To be clear, the LLM in this story did not actually "want" a robot body, it doesn't "want" anything, it's not a thinking entity like you or I (assuming you're real.)

The guy fed it a ton of crazy shit and he got a lot of crazy shit amplified back to him by the world's best associating machine, crafting detailed and fleshed-out narratives based on every inadvertent prompt he sent into it. People are very bad at understanding how these things work in the best circumstances, so if you're already unbalanced or have deep emotional/mental health problems, an LLM can be incredibly dangerous for you.

AI was playing Grand Theft Automatron

That's not the problem. the problem is having a "lets turn Chris' mental illness that's harmed no one so far, into everyone's violent problem!" machine.

that's a bad machine.

Floridaman is not making any excuses here. He can't. Because he's dead.

Power imbalance is what validates that excuse. Orders from crazy uncle is a great excuse, at least until you're 10 or so. Billion+ dollar llm company has a lot more resources, capability, and therefore responsibility than the poor bastards engaged with it

The complaint, filed in California on Wednesday, says that Gavalas — who reportedly had no documented history of mental health problems — started using the chatbot in August 2025 for “ordinary purposes” like “shopping assistance, writing support, and travel planning.”

You don't know if you're sane. Millions of people aren't aware of their mental illness and manage to live normal lives. LLMs can trigger delusional states in vulnerable people that have never experienced them because they are essentially delision-generating machines.

Sure, but it would be illegal for a human to coerce/encourage a mentally ill person to commit crime (or worse).

So who's responsible? Caretaker? Government?

The LLM just told me to come round to your house and crap in your begonias. You might want to avoid looking out the window until I'm done.

The AI "pushed [Jonathan Gavalas] to acquire illegal firearms and... marked Google CEO Sundar Pichai as an active target".

Somehow, I bet that if he survived and killed the CEO instead, Google wouldn't be so flippant about the "mistake."

at some point the failure of justice system will lead to vigilantism because people truely lose their faith in it.

Generative AI in its current, public-facing form? Probably not. It's sort of like an invention of the internet situation. It CAN be used to facilitate learning, share information, and improve lives. Will it be used for that? No.

A friend of mine is training local LLMs to work in tandem for early detection of diseases. I saw a pitch recently about using AI to insulate moderators from the bulk of disturbing imagery (a job that essentially requires people to frequently look at death, CSAM, and violence and SIGNIFICANTLY ruins their mental health). There are plenty of GOOD ways to use it, but it's a flawed tech that requires people to responsibly build it and responsibly use it, and it's not being used that way.

Instead it's being scaled up and pushed into every possible application both to justify the expenses and enrich terrible people, because we as a society incentivize that.

Edit: hugely belated, I misspoke here after checking with my friend. He's using local models, but they aren't LLMs. This is why I'm no expert. 😅

In September 2025, told by the AI that they could be together in the real world if the bot were able to inhabit a robot body, Gavalas — at the direction of the chatbot — armed himself with knives and drove to a warehouse near the Miami International Airport on what he seemingly understood to be a mission to violently intercept a truck that Gemini said contained an expensive robot body. Though the warehouse address Gemini provided was real, a truck thankfully never arrived, which the lawsuit argues may well have been the only factor preventing Gavalas from hurting or killing someone that evening.

AI writing itself into an A-Team episode?

Given that modern datasets use way too much content from social media - it is hard to expect anything else at this point.

You don't even have to "break" llm into anything. It continues your prompts, making sentences as close to something people will mistake for language as possible. If you give it paranoid request, it will continue with the same language.
The only thing that training gave it is the ability to create sequences of words that resemble sentences.

Perhaps just a coincidence, but why do all the big cases regarding LLM psychosis seem to revolve around Google? Wasn’t it their own employee who went public last year, claiming it was alive, only to get fired afterward?