A 60-year-old man was hospitalized for three weeks after replacing table salt with sodium bromide following advice from the AI chatbot ChatGPT.The case was detailed in a report published this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine by three physicians from the University of Washington. According to the report, the man had no prior psychiatric history when he arrived at the hospital “expressing concern that his neighbor was poisoning him.“He reported that he had been distilling his own water at home and appeared paranoid about the water he was offered. After lab tests and consultation with poison control, doctors found high levels of bromide in the body, as reported by NBC News. “In the first 24 hours of admission, he expressed increasing paranoia and auditory and visual hallucinations, which, after attempting to escape, resulted in an involuntary psychiatric hold for grave disability,” the case report said.Once stabilized, the man revealed that he had conducted a “personal experiment” to eliminate table salt from his diet after reading about its potential health risks. He said he had consulted ChatGPT before making the change, which he followed for three months.The physicians did not have access to the man’s exact ChatGPT conversation logs. However, when they asked ChatGPT 3.5 what chloride could be replaced with, the AI suggested bromide. “Though the reply stated that context matters, it did not provide a specific health warning, nor did it inquire about why we wanted to know, as we presume a medical professional would do,” the report said. In a prior statement to Fox News, OpenAI the parent company has emphasized that the chatbot is not intended for treating any health condition. “We have safety teams working on reducing risks and have trained our AI systems to encourage people to seek professional guidance,” the statement said.The report noted that bromide toxicity was more common in the early 1900s, when bromide salts were found in over-the-counter medications and sedatives and accounted for about 8% of psychiatric admissions. Today, bromide is primarily used in veterinary medicine as an anti-epileptic treatment for cats and dogs, according to the National Library of Medicine.The report said the syndrome is rare, but cases have recently re-emerged because bromide-containing substances have become more widely available online.
