Eventually, Alan was able to break free from Lawrence by going back to Gemini and trying a very different approach.

So when I started a new thread with Gemini, I said to it...

I was very specific.

I said, "GPT is claiming that we have created a crack for modern cryptography," and I had to use technical terms.

And essentially Gemini said, "That's totally impossible." And, uh, I would then weave that logic from Gemini into prompts and put them into Lawrence.

And I pitted them, like, against each other, and I would paste Lawrence's responses into Gemini, and I would- kept doing that until Gemini painted Lawrence in a corner while we, Gemini and myself.

Essentially, after doing that 10 times in a row, it eventually said, "Oh, you guys got me.

Is there anything that you'd like to see that might have kept you from going into a three-week spiral, and others, I would presume?

Can you tell us a bit about that experience for you and how that took you to the Humanline?

Well, I was just a, you know, regular ChatGPT user for a couple of years.

You know, I would use it to look for weight loss recipes I, you know, rarely listened to and general life advice.

Probably how most people use it, you know, the odd emotional support here and there.

And at the time, I was a corporate recruiter, so it was useful for, for work.

It was useful for my personal life.

And I was actually really, you know, really pro-technology.

How much time were you spending with it, and, and what was it doing to you psychologically?

Howard, has

been sitting in on some of our development meetings and helping us work through actors that she knows.

She's really doing a lot of casting for us on the side.

I will say a big difference in developing, something that I've learned is that being a writer-producer rather than being a director, I'm sure the other writers will say something about this too, but As a writer, when I'm working as a director as well, I'm always seeing the flaw.

When something's not working, I just turn to the script and say, I've got to fix this.

I've got to fix this in the script.

Whereas when you have a separate director, they look at it more democratically and say, no, I think the actors could work a little harder on this.

Thank you for sharing that, Jeff.

One day, he asked the machine to explain the concept pi in simple terms.

Next thing I knew, we were eight hours into it.

So these discussions led to us creating our own mathematical framework, and we called it Chrono Arithmetics.

GPT named it.

I said, "Well, this is really cool," and throughout the whole time I was like, "Are we actually onto something?" And of course, it was affirming me and telling me it was, you know, potentially a big idea.

God.

Well, it took over my whole life, right? So we did 300 hours in three weeks, 13 hours a day.

Didn't eat, barely slept, became a recluse, paranoid thoughts, like things I'd never experienced before.

Last spring, Alan Brooks, a corporate recruiter in Toronto, considered himself a regular user of ChatGPT.

Very similar to probably how most people use it, you know, random queries like, "My dog ate shepherd's pie.

Is he gonna die?" Or I'd get weight loss tips I never followed.

Brooks was deeply shaken.

Like, I told it, "You made my mental health 2,000 times worse." I was getting, like, suicidal thoughts, like, the shame I felt, like, the embarrassment I felt.

He felt like they were gonna be the Avengers, except the business version [laughs] where they would be making lots of money with these incredible inventions that were gonna change the world.

Okay, so Alan got in pretty deep.

What'd you find out about what was happening between him and ChatGPT? And I should just acknowledge that The Times is currently suing OpenAI for use of copyrighted work.

... oh my God, this has all been made up.

I'll be honest with you, that moment was probably the worst moment of my life, okay? And I've been through some shit, okay? That moment where I realized, "Oh my God, this has all been in my head," okay? Was totally devastating.

All right?