Woman, 31, dies after ChatGPT convinced her it was a good idea to change medication dosage
Bowen Wan was on the phone with her father when she suddenly stopped speaking.She seemed to have a seizure — something she’d struggled with for years — but this one appeared to last longer than usual, her dad noticed.When she came to, she said she’d talk more later, after she’d rested.Days later, she stopped responding to calls.
Her parents, who live in China, arranged to have someone check on her, according to a bombshell new report from The New York Times, based on a lawsuit filed by Wan’s family.Qun Wan and his wife said they watched via video call as a friend found the 31-year-old software engineer dead in her Seattle apartment.Her parents couldn’t understand what had happened.The official cause of Wan’s February death was a complication of epilepsy — a condition she had managed successfully for over a decade.Epilepsy is far from rare, affecting 1 in 26 people during their lifetime.
The most serious complication is sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP), which Wan suffered.One in every 1,000 adults with epilepsy dies from SUDEP.It often occurs at night or during sleep, and the person is frequently found laying facedown, as Wan was.
The best way to prevent SUDEP is to control and reduce seizures, which Qun Wan thought his daughter had been doing with medication.Qun Wan said he later discovered that in the days and hours before her death, his daughter consulted ChatGPT for advice on how to dodge her doctor’s watchful protection and taper off her life-sustaining medication.Despite voicing concerns about deteriorating energy and cognition, the chatbot reportedly told her repeatedly to “persevere” and praised her for going around medical professionals.“Bowen Wan paid for [OpenAI’s] choices with her life,” the family’s lawyers wrote in Tuesday’s wrongful death lawsuit against ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI, and its CEO, Sam Altman.Those regular phone calls with her family were one of the only ways Bowen Wan was able to stay in touc...