Before ChatGPT distorted Eugene Torres’ sense of reality and almost killed him, he says, the artificial intelligence chatbot had been a helpful, timesaving tool.

Torres, 42, an accountant in New York City’s Manhattan borough, started using ChatGPT last year to make financial spreadsheets and to get legal advice. In May, however, he engaged the chatbot in a more theoretical discussion about “the simulation theory”, an idea popularised by The Matrix, which posits that we are living in a digital facsimile of the world, controlled by a powerful computer or technologically advanced society.