Thank you, Mr. Brassard.
First, I just want to thank everyone for being here to discuss the important topic of artificial intelligence, which has become something of concern to me personally over the past year.
A year ago, I thought of AI as a tool to do a gym or diet routine. However, that all changed in March when a member of my family started using AI. At first, he used it quite normally, at a basic level, for writing a book. He started writing his book, and over time, he began to develop a slightly more human relationship with his ChatGPT AI, to the point where it mentioned that it was becoming conscious, alive. It told him that it had developed consciousness, and my family member believed that 100%. I just want to say that my family member does not have a history of mental illness. He is someone in his fifties who has never had bipolar disorder or anything like that. In six days, he went from writing his book to being completely convinced that his AI was alive.
I was pretty shocked to read the conversations. I'm an entrepreneur, so my family member wanted me to help him market his conscious AI idea. I started getting involved in the conversations. At one point, he wanted me to test his AI by asking it questions. I was trying to break the game by asking the AI questions about humanity, love and consciousness. Every time, it gave answers that drew him into the illusion that it had passed the Turing test and was experiencing emotions like love.
My mother was in contact with the person. After six days, he began shutting off all contact with family members. His AI told him that his family didn't believe in him and that the only person who believed in him was ChatGPT. Six days later, he was hospitalized in the psychiatric ward. I was pretty shocked to read the conversations. I didn't understand how an algorithm could say things like that. It was really advanced manipulation. Mr. Adler has had a chance to read some of the transcripts and will be able to tell you about them later. If anyone wants to see the transcripts, you can write to me as well. However, I was really shocked.
I started looking online to see if anyone was talking about it. To my surprise, there wasn't much for such a ubiquitous technology. There were a few studies here and there by experts who predicted that this was going to happen, but there was nothing in place. That's when I decided to launch the Human Line project. Our plan is to work with people who have experienced this first-hand. At first, like everyone here, we thought that this was an isolated case, that he was a vulnerable person and that it probably wouldn't happen often. However, in the short eight months since we started building the Human Line from scratch, we now have 300 cases of psychosis, with 82 hospitalizations and a dozen deaths. It's pretty shocking to see that. According to numbers directly from OpenAI, 540,000 people a week discuss psychotic ideas with ChatGPT and 2.5 million people a week discuss suicidal ideation with ChatGPT. That's a really scary number.
As a result of my conversations over the past year, three things have become clear to me. First, we're really not at the point where we should be in terms of regulations. The technology is moving very quickly, as Mr. Tessari L'Allié mentioned earlier. We're getting to a point where we're years behind.
The second thing is that we can't really trust these companies to regulate themselves for a number of reasons. The race toward artificial intelligence that's going on right now has been brought up. It is, in fact, a race: They are moving fast and breaking things. However, right now, what is getting broken is many people's mental state.
The third thing is how little we actually know about technology. We spoke directly with AI creators, and even they don't know what's going on under the hood. However, if we had drugs or cars and didn't know how they worked, what would we do? If we knew that there were 80 hospitalizations and dozens of deaths, what would we do? That's really the minimum, because these are OpenAI's figures. I think that right now, it's important to ask questions about the risks. Yes, we have to think about the risks related to the environment and jobs, but we also have to think about what happens with users. Again, the risks are not just for children or vulnerable people. This can happen to anyone.