THE VERGE on "AI Therapy"

From Adi Robertson's 5-13-25 THE VERGE article entitled "AI Therapy Is a Surveillance Machine in a Police State":

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to be understood by the machine. The Meta CEO has recently been pitching a future where his AI tools give people something that “knows them well,” not just as pals, but as professional help. “For people who don’t have a person who’s a therapist,” he told Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, “I think everyone will have an AI.”

The jury is out on whether AI systems can make good therapists, but this future is already legible. A lot of people are anecdotally pouring their secrets out to chatbots, sometimes in dedicated therapy apps, but often to big general-purpose platforms like Meta AI, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or xAI’s Grok. And unfortunately, this is starting to seem extraordinarily dangerous — for reasons that have little to do with what a chatbot is telling you, and everything to do with who else is peeking in.

This might sound paranoid, and it’s still hypothetical. It’s a truism someone is always watching on the internet, but the worst thing that comes of it for many people is some unwanted targeted ads. Right now in the US, though, we’re watching the impending collision of two alarming trends. In one, tech executives are encouraging people to reveal ever more intimate details to AI tools, soliciting things users wouldn’t put on social media and may not even tell their closest friends. In the other, the government is obsessed with obtaining a nearly unprecedented level of surveillance and control over residents’ minds: their gender identities, their possible neurodivergence, their opinions on racism and genocide [...].

Even if you’re one of the few American citizens with truly nothing to hide in your public or private life, we’re not talking about an administration known for laser-guided accuracy here. Trump officials are notorious for governing through bizarrely blunt keyword searches that appear to confuse “transgenic” with “transgender” and assume someone named Green must do green energy. They reflexively double down on admitted mistakes. You’re one fly in a typewriter away from everybody else.

In an ideal world, companies would resist indiscriminate data-sharing because it’s bad business. But they might suspect that many people will have no idea it’s happening, will believe facile claims about fighting terrorism and protecting children, or will have so much learned helplessness around privacy that they don’t care. The companies could assume people will conclude there’s no alternative, since competitors are likely doing the same thing.

If AI companies are genuinely dedicated to building trustworthy services for therapy, they could commit to raising the privacy and security bar for bots that people use to discuss sensitive topics. They could focus on meeting compliance standards for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or on designing systems whose logs are encrypted in a way that they can’t access, so there’s nothing to turn over. But whatever they do right now, it’s undercut by their ongoing support for an administration that holds contempt for the civil liberties people rely on to freely share their thoughts, including with a chatbot...

To read the entire article, click HERE.

My Favorite News Headline of 2025 (So Far)

‘All my homies hate paintball Nazis’: Antisemitism scandal tears through paintball community

BECOMING NOSFERATU

I just received my comp copy of BECOMING NOSFERATU edited by Gary D. Rhodes and Matthew Sorrento! Gary and Matt did a fantastic job putting together this hefty anthology of strange tales inspired by silent German horror. I'm very proud to share the same Table of Contents page with such writers as Steve Berman, Stephen R. Bissette, and Jeffrey Ford. My own contribution, a novelette entitled "The Land of Thieves and Phantoms" (16,200 words), is my first new story published in 2025 and was inspired by disturbing current events as filtered through the lens of Expressionist cinema. I urge you to check it out!

 

ROLLING STONE on "AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies"

From Miles Klee's 5-4-25 ROLLING STONE article entitled "People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies":

Less than a year after marrying a man she had met at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Kat felt tension mounting between them. It was the second marriage for both after marriages of 15-plus years and having kids, and they had pledged to go into it “completely level-headedly,” Kat says, connecting on the need for “facts and rationality” in their domestic balance. But by 2022, her husband “was using AI to compose texts to me and analyze our relationship,” the 41-year-old mom and education nonprofit worker tells Rolling Stone. Previously, he had used AI models for an expensive coding camp that he had suddenly quit without explanation — then it seemed he was on his phone all the time, asking his AI bot “philosophical questions,” trying to train it “to help him get to ‘the truth,’” Kat recalls. His obsession steadily eroded their communication as a couple.

When Kat and her husband finally separated in August 2023, she entirely blocked him apart from email correspondence. She knew, however, that he was posting strange and troubling content on social media: people kept reaching out about it, asking if he was in the throes of mental crisis. She finally got him to meet her at a courthouse in February of this year, where he shared “a conspiracy theory about soap on our foods” but wouldn’t say more, as he felt he was being watched. They went to a Chipotle, where he demanded that she turn off her phone, again due to surveillance concerns. Kat’s ex told her that he’d “determined that statistically speaking, he is the luckiest man on earth,” that “AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler,” and that he had learned of profound secrets “so mind-blowing I couldn’t even imagine them.” He was telling her all this, he explained, because although they were getting divorced, he still cared for her.

“In his mind, he’s an anomaly,” Kat says. “That in turn means he’s got to be here for some reason. He’s special and he can save the world.” After that disturbing lunch, she cut off contact with her ex. “The whole thing feels like Black Mirror,” she says. “He was always into sci-fi, and there are times I wondered if he’s viewing it through that lens.”

Kat was both “horrified” and “relieved” to learn that she is not alone in this predicament, as confirmed by a Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT that made waves across the internet this week. Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software. 

What they all seemed to share was a complete disconnection from reality. 

To read the entire article, click HERE.

HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD

I have a lot of proofreading to do...

My next book, HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD, will be published by Headpress in November of 2025!

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD: 

"In HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD, Robert Guffey takes his readers for a trip behind the magic curtain to reveal the true Wizards at work - those behind the lenses, making magic and moving the secret levers. To this end, Guffey plays the role of Toto, tearing the curtain aside to reveal these flesh and bone Wizards of the military-industrial-entertainment complex, and the occult role they play in influencing our inner dreams and everyday realities."

--Adam Gorightly,  

author of SAUCERS, SPOOKS, AND KOOKS
and THE SHADOW OVER SANTA SUSANA: BLACK MAGIC, MIND CONTROL, AND THE MANSON FAMILY MYTHOS

"Hollywood has truly haunted the world. So too should this book, one of the best ever written on American cinema."

--Gary D. Rhodes,

author of THE PERILS OF MOVIEGOING IN AMERICA and TOD BROWNING'S DRACULA, 

from his Foreword

BACK TO THE FARM! (PART 2)

The latest episode of Steven Snider's THE FARM PODCAST has just dropped! In the concluding installment of this two-part interview, I return to THE FARM to discuss my most recent book, THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK (Madness Heart Press), as well as such disparate subjects as infanticide, Scientology, giant insects, Gojiro, Lyndon LaRouche, psychological warfare, disinformation, satire, expectant mothers, atomic babies, the HALLOWEEN franchise as an exploration of mind control, John Carpenter, HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH, Nigel Kneale, Roger Corman, Orson Welles, pornography, Richard Condon, WINTER KILLS, Starchildren/starseeds, indigo children, the current state of QAnon, Newsmax, Anna Paulina Luna, the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, the JFK assassination records, the Nashville Christmas bombing, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate!!!

If you want to listen to the entire episode, click HERE.

If you want to visit Steven Snider's VISUP blog, click HERE.

If you want to check out a picture of my cat, see below...

I Make My Debut Apppearance on THE AP STRANGE SHOW!!!

The latest episode of THE AP STRANGE SHOW just dropped! Here's AP Strange's description of this epic 2 1/2 hour-long interview:

Robert Guffey joins AP in this episode for a lengthy and mind-bending chat that covers a lot of weird ground. Robert is a well-known writer and author of both fiction and non-fiction, and in this chat the difficulty in telling the difference between the two is well illustrated. One of his books, CHAMELEO, is discussed at length - in particular, how much of what seemed fantastic or crazy in it when it was released ten years ago now seems eerily prescient.

In addition, Robert discusses his newest book, THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK, and his short stories from CRYPTOPOLIS; science fiction and how it overlaps with secret government projects; how stories are told in media broadly about weird and paranoid subject matter; all this and more!

To listen to the entire episode, click HERE!!!