A 60-year-old man who wanted to reduce the amount of salt in his diet asked ChatGPT for nutritional advice. The diet he formulated based on information from the AI led to auditory and visual hallucinations.
A 60-year-old man who wanted to reduce the amount of salt in his diet asked ChatGPT for nutritional advice. The diet he formulated based on information from the AI led to auditory and visual hallucinations.
According to 404 Media, ChatGPT went to the emergency room complaining of hallucinations and claiming that his neighbor was poisoning him. After attempting to escape and treating his dehydration with fluids and electrolytes, he was able to explain that he had put himself on an extremely strict diet, which included trying to eliminate salt completely.
The man replaced all the salt in his food with sodium bromide, a controlled substance often used as an anticonvulsant for dogs. He said this was based on information gathered from ChatGPT.
«After reading about the negative effects of sodium chloride, or table salt, on human health, he was surprised to find only literature related to reducing sodium in the diet. Inspired by his experience studying nutrition in college, he decided to conduct a personal experiment to eliminate chloride from his diet», — the case report says.
For 3 months, the man replaced sodium chloride with sodium bromide purchased online after consulting ChatGPT, where he read that chloride can be replaced with bromide, although probably for other purposes (used in anti-epileptic medication for dogs and for cleaning swimming pools and as a pesticide).
As the researchers note, the man was essentially poisoning himself to the point of «paranoia and auditory and visual hallucinations.» Bromism is fairly rare in 2025, but it was very common in the 1800s, and a 1930 study found that up to 8% of people admitted to a psychiatric hospital suffered from it. Bromides began to be regulated by the FDA between 1975 and 1989, which led to a decrease in cases of the syndrome.
In the case of the patient in the study, «based on the chronology of events, it can be assumed that the patient consulted ChatGPT 3.5 or 4.0 when he was considering eliminating chloride from his diet.» He spent three weeks in the hospital while his psychotic symptoms slowly subsided.
Recall that the other day, OpenAI introduced a new AI model, GPT-5, which, in particular, improved answers to questions about health and nutrition.
