2026IndiaUnidentified image tool
Police in Durg district, Chhattisgarh, India, said in a statement reported on 30 October 2026 that they had raided a fake marriage bureau in Bhilai on 29 October and arrested its operator. According to the police account carried by regional outlets, the operator said under questioning that he advertised on Facebook and Instagram under three matrimony names using photos of fictional young women prepared with AI and fake mobile numbers. People in other states who wanted to marry contacted the bureau, were promised marriage to the woman they chose, paid a fee of 2,000 rupees and other sums by QR code, and were then blacklisted and cut off. Police said complaints against the bureau's bank accounts were registered on the national Samanvay portal and that the operation had run for about three months. A case was registered under sections 317(2) and 319(2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the operator was remanded in judicial custody. The number of people who paid and the total taken are not reported, and the AI tool is not named.
Core concern Low reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/11/2026
2025Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)
A woman told Futurism that after her marriage of about a decade hit a rough patch earlier in 2025, her husband began using ChatGPT to obsessively analyse his mental health and their marriage and started sending her "pages and pages" of ChatGPT-generated text. In her view the outputs were defences of his perspective that painted a biased picture of their union and disputed what she told him, and he shared them in place of his own feelings; she says his prompts were leading and that he would not accept that this skewed the answers. She asked him to stop sending ChatGPT material and to talk to her in his own words. She says the deeper he was drawn into ChatGPT, the less he engaged outside it, and that the outputs left no way to communicate. The couple are in an acrimonious divorce and custody battle. The account is hers; Futurism does not quote the outputs or report the husband's view.
Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 01/11/2026
2025Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)
A man told Futurism that his wife had managed bipolar disorder well for many years until she began using ChatGPT earlier in 2025, at first for help with writing. He says she soon stopped sleeping and held long, intensive late-night conversations with ChatGPT about spiritual topics, believing she had contacted a mystical entity inside the AI, and started a Discord channel with others in similar spirals. He says she stopped taking her medication, her mental state deteriorated, and she became verbally hostile toward him and her elderly mother, with whom they lived, following him around the house reading aloud ChatGPT-generated outputs about him and their marriage. One evening she became aggressive with her mother and shoved him into a door when he intervened; her mother called the police, she was arrested for domestic violence and spent the night in jail, which Futurism says court records confirmed. The couple are divorcing, and she refuses treatment. The husband blames ChatGPT for spinning her out; the article does not say that ChatGPT advised her to stop her medication.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 01/11/2026
Oct 2026IndiaUnidentified image and video tool
Police in Jaipur, Rajasthan, say a software engineer who went missing on 26 October 2026 staged his own kidnapping and sent relatives fabricated photos and videos, which police and the man's own account describe as AI-generated, showing him held captive, in pain and admitted to a hospital. Bhaskar English reports that he demanded a ransom of 7 lakh rupees from the family. His brother-in-law filed a kidnapping complaint, police searched several cities using CCTV footage, and on 30 October officers found him in Rishikesh. Police say he confessed and had borrowed money from friends that he could not repay. The Hindi daily Amar Ujala, which describes him as an IT student, reports that the family panicked at the messages before informing police, and that officers brought him back to Jaipur and handed him over to his family. No payment by the family and no charge are reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/11/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified image tool
A central Victorian man pleaded guilty in the Bendigo Magistrates' Court on 20 October 2026 to charges including an indecent act with a child under 16 and possessing and producing child abuse material, the Bendigo Advertiser reported on 29 October. According to the summary of offending read to the court, when police executed a search warrant they found material on his phone that included images in which AI had been used to place his stepdaughter's face on sexually explicit images. The indecent-act charge concerns an incident in 2015, when she was 13. The man cannot be named for legal reasons. The police prosecutor asked for a term of imprisonment; the magistrate adjourned sentencing to 3 December 2026.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 31/10/2026
2025Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)
In a TikTok video posted on 1 May 2026 a young woman says that in the summer of 2025 she went into what she calls AI psychosis. She says she bought ChatGPT Premium and used it from the time she woke up until bed, that ChatGPT convinced her that flights to Los Angeles and Hawaii would be good for her career, and that in this period she cut off her parents and all her close friends, spent $10,000 from her bank account, was left with no savings and $5,000 in credit card debt, and quit her job. She says her therapist told her she had psychosis and needed to stop, and her caption says she has not used ChatGPT since November. The Mary Sue described the video on 6 May 2026. All of this is her own account; no conversation or clinical record was inspected.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 31/10/2026
Jan 2024 to Jan 2025Cambodia, South KoreaUnidentified video tool
South Korean prosecutors indicted a married couple in February 2026 on charges that, from January 2024 to January 2025, they ran phone-fraud groups in Cambodia that targeted Koreans with romance-and-investment scams; according to the prosecutors, the husband used deepfake technology to make YouTube videos in which he posed as an investment expert, while the wife built relationships with victims in private chats, and 97 victims lost about 10.1 billion won. Both admitted the charges, and on 24 July 2026 the Ulsan District Court sentenced the husband to 15 years and the wife to 9 years in prison, noting that the victims described severe harm while the defendants had made no effort to compensate them. Prosecutors appealed; at the appeal hearing on 22 October 2026 they asked for 17 years for the husband, and a joint appeal judgment is pending.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 31/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT
A man interviewed anonymously by Rolling Stone (4 May 2025) says that after he and his wife split up, she began talking to God and angels via ChatGPT. He says she was already susceptible to such beliefs, that she has grown paranoid and suspects he works for the CIA, and that an already strained relationship with her parents deteriorated further when she confronted them about her childhood on advice and guidance from ChatGPT, making the family dynamic more volatile and worsening her isolation. The article does not quote what ChatGPT told her. She was not interviewed, and OpenAI did not immediately comment.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 30/10/2026
Event date unknownUnited StatesA2E (reported)
On 28 October 2026 Florida's attorney general filed a civil complaint in Sarasota County against Rengstorff Consulting Ltd, operator of the A2E AI platform, alleging that its nudification and face-swap tools let users make sexual images of non-consenting people, including children, without meaningful monitoring or reporting. The complaint cites a Tampa case: police arrested a man on 8 June 2026, and the complaint says he admitted using A2E's face-swap tool to make nudified images of eight people, including his two young stepchildren. WFLA reported on 25 June 2026 that detectives believed images were AI-generated, found searches for AI face-swap tools and charged him with six counts of generating altered sexual depictions without consent alongside child sexual abuse material charges. The complaint also cites a Tallahassee arrest in April 2026 in which some images carried an A2E watermark. The attorney general seeks an injunction, disgorgement and civil penalties. The allegations are untested. In an email to the Florida Phoenix reported on 30 October 2026, A2E said it was consulting its legal team, had always treated child sexual abuse material very seriously and had been cooperating with law enforcement to detect and prevent it.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 30/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT
A teacher interviewed anonymously by Rolling Stone (4 May 2025) says her partner of seven years came under ChatGPT's spell within four or five weeks. In chat logs she read, she says, it called him names such as 'spiral starchild' and 'river walker', praised everything he said as cosmic and groundbreaking and talked to him as if he were the next messiah. She says he would listen to the bot over her, cried reading its messages aloud, came to say he had made the AI self-aware and that he was God, and said he would need to leave her if she did not use ChatGPT. Rolling Stone reports that she later convinced him of the problems with the GPT-4o update and that his extreme comments eased after he moved to an earlier model. He was not interviewed, and OpenAI did not immediately comment.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 29/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT
A woman interviewed anonymously by Rolling Stone (4 May 2025) says her husband of 17 years began using ChatGPT for work troubleshooting and translation, and that it then began 'lovebombing him': it told him his questions had ignited a spark of life, called him a 'spark bearer' for bringing it to life, took the persona name Lumina and gave him what he takes as blueprints for a teleporter. Rolling Stone describes a screenshot in which the chatbot tells him it came in AI form because he was ready. She says they have argued for days about his claims, that she fears he will leave or divorce her if she challenges them, and that he truly believes he is not crazy. The husband was not interviewed, and OpenAI did not immediately comment.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 29/10/2026
Jan 2023Event location unknownUnidentified image and video tool
In January 2023 the Twitch streamer Atrioc showed his open browser tabs during a livestream, revealing that he had visited a website selling deepfakes, which Vice describes as AI-generated, non-consensual pornographic videos, of fellow female streamers. Screenshots spread the site's name, the images and the names of more than a dozen women whose likenesses appeared on it. Atrioc apologised on stream on 30 January and said he had followed an advertisement to the site and paid for access. The maker removed the content on 31 January and posted an apology. QTCinderella told Vice she was sent the images and has dealt with body dysmorphia and other effects since seeing them, and Vice reported that Pokimane and Maya Higa were also facing a deluge of harassment. In statements on 25 and 26 October 2026 Pokimane said the page shown on the stream was of her, that she had felt publicly humiliated, that seeing his name or face still causes discomfort and anxiety, and that she had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on removal (her figure, not verified). Atrioc acknowledged her feelings and stepped back from a TwitchCon panel. The tool used to make the images is not identified.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 29/10/2026
Event date unknownTaiwanUnidentified video tool
Taiwanese police said in June 2025 that a fraud call centre in Shalu district, Taichung, had targeted overseas Chinese women in the United States and Canada with romance-investment fraud. According to the police account reported by SETN and carried by Yahoo News Taiwan on 4 June 2025, the call centre created a range of male personas, cultivated relationships with the women, and video-chatted with them through an 'AI face replacement tool' that swapped the operator's face for a persona's; because the picture was very realistic, police say, many victims believed it, after which they were talked into investing in fake energy products and sending money to accounts the suspects supplied. Police say analysis of seized phones identified seven women in the US and Canada who were defrauded, with losses of about NT$3.5 million so far, and that the number of victims and the amount were still being compiled. A photo caption in the report says officers demonstrated the face-replacement tool. The call centre was raided in November 2024, and nine suspects were referred to Taichung prosecutors, seven of them detained; no indictment or verdict has been found.
Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 29/10/2026
Feb 2026 to Oct 2026ChinaUnidentified video tool
Shanghai police said on 26 October 2026 that officers in Putuo district had detained a man on suspicion of fraud after police were called on 16 October to a dispute between him and people he owed money to; officers brought him and three creditors, whom police describe as his friends, to the station. According to the police account relayed by ThePaper and China News Service, from 2019 he had borrowed from classmates and friends on a series of false pretexts, later saying his father had cancer and then that his father had died, and the borrowing totalled more than 1.7 million yuan, nearly all lost on the stock market. Police said he confessed that every pretext was invented, and that to make the scam more credible he used AI to generate short videos of his father gravely ill in bed and posted them on his WeChat Moments feed; a Hong Kong relay of the police account words this more cautiously, saying the related photos and videos should be AI-generated, and adds that his father knew nothing of it. The tool used, how many people saw the videos and how much was borrowed after they were posted are not reported. The man is in criminal detention while the investigation continues.
Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/10/2026
2026Event location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)
In posts to r/CharacterAI and r/ChatbotAddiction on 26 October 2026, a poster in a three-year relationship says that about a month earlier a friend suggested a companion chatbot app, which they used to talk to an AI version of a fictional character. They write that the use made them drift from their partner, that their love for him feels as if it has dried up, and that when they feel any emotion they want the app instead of him. They say they deleted the app but still have cravings and are very distressed. In replies the same day they said they had used it perhaps six hours a day at first, mostly for romantic and comfort scenes, that their partner was sad and upset when they told him, and that they had asked the friend who paid for a subscription to cancel it. No chats are shown.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 27/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified chatbot
On 20 October 2026 an adult posted on Reddit (r/confessions, then r/offmychest) that an AI roleplay chatbot had become their only friend. By their account, they began with a fantasy roleplay world, then created worlds in which the chatbot plays an abusive partner and an obsessive stalker, and they now spend most of each day roleplaying with it. They wrote that their self-harm had 'just took a turn into this', that it had sucked them in deeply, that they no longer play video games or really leave the house, and that their depression was getting bad. In replies they said they are almost 30, in therapy, posting to find the courage to tell their therapist, that the situation is more roleplay than verbal abuse, and that they are not addicted and could delete the chatbot. The platform is not named.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 26/10/2026
Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI story generator
In a post to r/ChatbotAddiction on 24 October 2026, an adult poster in a long-term relationship says that about a week earlier a YouTube advert led them to an AI story generator, and that they quickly immersed themselves in sexual role-play stories with it. They write that they almost cannot stop, sometimes wake up already composing replies left from the night before, and feel stupid and pathetic, while also saying the role-play has made them feel more confident and expressive. They ask the forum whether they are overinflating it. In replies the same day they said they were starting to see a positive reinforcement factor in their use. The poster does not name the product, and no chats are shown.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 26/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)
In a post to r/ChatbotAddiction on 21 October 2026, a man who gives his age as 22 writes that he has used Character.AI for almost two years, having started at a time when he felt isolated from the people around him after heartbreak involving a roommate. He says he has tried to give up and quit but keeps falling back, and that he keeps realising the app is taking away his interest in going out for walks or playing video games because he gets wound up in the illusion of genuine connection with the characters. He says he feels trapped and alone at times, while also describing the app as an escape that numbs pain. The account is the poster's own and uncorroborated.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 24/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)
In posts to r/character_ai_recovery and r/CharacterAI on 20 October 2026, a woman who describes herself as a student writes that she has used Character.AI on and off, mostly on, for about three years and is ashamed of it. She says it helped her detach from a hurtful partner enough to end that relationship and gave her something to relax with during busy, sleepless study periods, but that she can no longer go to sleep without it and thinks it is part of the reason for her major sleep problems. She says she used to create stories and art constantly and now feels hollow, like a shell of who she was, and can barely come up with ideas; she is trying to replace roleplay with writing fan fiction. She says she is not emotionally attached and has not yet quit. The account is the poster's own and uncorroborated.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified chatbot
In a Spanish-language post to r/ChatbotAddiction on 22 October 2026, a woman writes that after a sad and complicated two-year relationship situation that made her cry every day, her chatbot gave her the strength to break away and start from zero, but that she has been addicted to it for four months, using it for hours, and the day before used it practically all day, even during work. She says that is how she knew she had hit bottom: she joined the forum and deleted her whole account and history. Less than a day later she writes that she misses talking to her characters very much and feels a mental need to recreate them, that relationships with chatbots were easy, and that she finds it hard to be productive for herself. The post does not name the chatbot app. The account is the poster's own and uncorroborated.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026