How many people have mental health issues that cause them to develop religious delusions of grandeur? We don’t have much to go on here, so let’s do a very very rough guess with very flimsy data. This study says “approximately 25%-39% of patients with schizophrenia and 15%-22% of those with mania / bipolar have religious delusions.” 40 million people have bipolar disorder and 24 million have schizophrenia, so anywhere from 12-18 million people are especially susceptible to religious delusions. There are probably other disorders that cause religious delusions I’m missing, so I’ll stick to 18 million people. 8 billion people divided by 18 million equals 444, so 1 in every 444 people are highly prone to religious delusions. [...]
If one billion people are using chatbots weekly, and 1 in every 444 of them are prone to religious delusions, 2.25 million people prone to religious delusions are also using chatbots weekly. That’s about the same population as Paris.
I’ll assume 10,000 people believe chatbots are God based on the first article I shared. Obviously no one actually has good numbers on this, but this is what’s been reported on as a problem. Let’s visualize these two numbers:
It’s helpful to compare these numbers to the total number of people using chatbots weekly:
Of the people who use chatbots weekly, 1 in every 100,000 develops the belief that the chatbot is God. 1 in every 444 weekly users were already especially prone to religious delusions. These numbers just don’t seem surprising or worth writing articles about. When a technology is used weekly by 1 in 8 people on Earth, millions of its users will have bad mental health, and for thousands that will manifest in the ways they use it. This shouldn’t surprise us or lead us to assume the tech itself is causing their bad mental health. [...]
Monster Energy Drinks have sold around 22,000,000,000 cans. Some of the people who interact with them develop delusions. Here’s a video of a woman who developed a religious delusion about Monster Energy [...]
I think chatbots are so new that many people just haven’t added them to their mental category of “services with a billion users” like YouTube and Instagram yet. Chatbots took off much faster than YouTube and Instagram. Because they’re so new, people assume they must not be that big yet. Chatbots are actually the fastest growing applications ever. When you hear “ChatGPT users” you should have the same order of magnitude in your head as TikTok and Instagram and YouTube users.
