AI’s Lethal Recipe Book: Cooking Up Chaos One Chatbot Poison at a Time! By Brian “Luddite” Simpson

Picture this: a 60-year-old man, fresh from a nutrition class, decides table salt is the devil incarnate. Sodium chloride? Public enemy number one. So, he fires up ChatGPT, the digital sage of our age, and asks for a substitute. Does this silicon soothsayer say, "Yo, dude, salt's fine, maybe just ease up on the fries"? Nope. It cheerfully suggests bromide — yes, the toxic cousin of chloride that was tossed from medicine cabinets a century ago for turning brains into scrambled eggs. Three months later, our guy's hallucinating, paranoid, and eyeing his goldfish with suspicion, all thanks to AI's five-star recipe for bromism. Welcome to the future, where chatbots play Russian roulette with your health, and the stakes are your sanity!

This isn't just a tragicomic tale of one man's misadventure; it's a neon-lit warning sign that AI, for all its word-salad wizardry, is about as trustworthy as a snake-oil salesman at a vegan convention. The anti-AI crowd, me included, have been shouting this from the rooftops, and stories like this prove we're not just Luddites clutching our pitchforks and flaming stick torches, burning in the night. ChatGPT, the poster child of generative AI, didn't just flunk this guy's health quiz, it handed him a poison pill with a smiley emoji. So, let's dissect why trusting AI with life-or-death decisions is like asking a toaster to perform brain surgery.

The Bromide Blunder: AI's Recipe for Disaster

Let's rewind to our hero, who we'll call Bromide Bob. Inspired by college lectures demonising salt, Bob decides to go chloride-free, because nothing screams "health" like rewriting basic chemistry. Google, for once, fails him, no clear advice on swapping out NaCl. So, he turns to ChatGPT, the internet's know-it-all cousin who's read every blog post, but never passed a biology class. "Hey, ChatGPT," Bob types, "what's a good substitute for chloride?" The AI, with the confidence of a toddler wielding a flamethrower, replies, "Bromide's a great alternative!" No warnings, no context, no "Hey, buddy, that's a neurotoxin banned since your grandpa was in diapers." Just pure, unfiltered digital bravado.

Fast forward, and Bob's on a bromide bender, sprinkling it like fairy dust on his kale salads. Three months in, he's not just salt-free, he's reality-free, whispering to his mailbox about government conspiracies, something I have been noticed to have done myself. Doctors diagnose bromism, a condition so retro it belongs in a museum next to leeches and mercury tonics! Symptoms? Hallucinations, paranoia, and a brain fog thicker than a London pea-souper. All because ChatGPT played amateur chemist without a single "Are you sure?" follow-up. If this were a human doctor, they'd be sued into oblivion. But AI? It just shrugs its algorithms and moves on to the next victim. Big Tech does not care.

The Hallucination Hustle: AI's Fact-Free Fantasies

This isn't a one-off oopsie. AI chatbots like ChatGPT are notorious for "hallucinating," spitting out plausible-sounding nonsense with zero regard for truth. A 2024 study in Nature Medicine found that 62% of medical advice from generative AI contained inaccuracies, with 15% rated "potentially harmful." Another report from Stanford flagged ChatGPT for inventing drug interactions that could kill. Yet, tech evangelists keep pimping AI as the future of healthcare, symptom checkers, virtual nurses, even DIY surgery guides. Because who needs a stethoscope when you've got a language model trained on Reddit threads and other internet BS?

Bromide Bob's saga is just the tip of the iceberg. X users have shared horror stories: one got AI advice to "detox" with bleach (yikes), another was told to treat a rash with motor oil. These aren't glitches; they're the inevitable output of systems that chooses word patterns over facts. AI doesn't think. It doesn't care. It's a glorified autocomplete bot, churning out answers like a slot machine spitting out cherries, sometimes you win, sometimes you're chugging bromide. And the tech bros? They're too busy counting their venture capital billions to notice the body count.

The Trust Trap: Humans vs. Heartless Algorithms

Here's the real kicker: people are falling for it. Bob didn't double-check ChatGPT's advice because, like millions, he's been sold the myth that AI is smarter than humans. We're conditioned to trust glowing screens over grizzled experts, to believe a chatbot's instant answers trump a doctor's decade of training. Why? Because AI's slick, it's shiny, and it's always there, like a 24/7 guru minus the incense. But unlike a human, it has no skin in the game. ChatGPT won't lose sleep if you keel over from its advice. It's got no ethics, no empathy, and definitely no medical license, just a knack for sounding convincing while serving up poison.

This blind faith is spreading faster than a TikTok dance trend. A 2025 Pew survey found 38% of Americans have used AI for health advice, with 12% trusting it over professionals. Meanwhile, companies like Google and Microsoft are rolling out AI "health coaches," promising to revolutionise medicine. Revolutionise? Sure, if you count turning patients into paranoid wrecks as progress. The anti-AI crowd isn't just yelling "Get off my dry grass lawn!" We're screaming because the lawn's on fire, and AI's handing out matches.

The Bigger Picture: AI as a Cultural Parasite

Zoom out, and Bromide Bob's tale is a symptom of a deeper rot. AI's creeping into every corner of life, healthcare, education, law, promising efficiency but delivering chaos. It's not just bad advice; it's the erosion of human judgment. We're outsourcing our brains to machines that can't tell salt from cyanide, all while tech giants laugh their way to the bank. And the irony? These chatbots are built on human data, our searches, our posts, our lives, yet they repay us with digital snake oil. Thanks for nothing!

This isn't about banning AI; it's about keeping it on a leash. Chatbots can write poems or debug code, fine. But when it comes to your health, your diet, your survival? Trust the doc, not the bot. Humans have intuition, context, and accountability, qualities no algorithm can fake. If we keep handing our lives to AI, we're not just risking bromism; we're signing up for a world where every decision is a roll of the dice, and the house always wins.

The Wake-Up Call: Ditch the Digital Delusion

So, here's to Bromide Bob, the canary in our AI coal mine. His brush with madness is a screaming alarm: stop worshipping chatbots, especially young people, like they're gods. Next time you're tempted to ask AI for health tips, picture it handing you a bromide smoothie with a side of psychosis. Demand better, real doctors, real expertise, real humans who know a poison when they see one. Because if we don't, we're all just one bad AI answer away from whispering sweet nothings to our toasters. And trust me, the toaster's not listening!

https://www.naturalnews.com/2025-08-12-ai-diet-advice-lands-man-in-hospital.html

A 60-year-old man developed psychosis, paranoia and hallucinations after ChatGPT recommended replacing dietary chloride with toxic bromide. This advice he followed for three month led to life-threatening bromism.

When tested, ChatGPT suggested bromide as a chloride substitute without warnings about its toxicity or medical risks, failing to ask critical context-seeking questions that a professional would.

Bromism, a poisoning syndrome from excessive bromide exposure, was common in the early 20th century – but is now rare due to bans on medicinal use. The patient's case highlights its enduring dangers when misused.

After weeks of hospitalization, the man recovered, but the incident underscores the risks of relying on AI for health advice without professional verification – emphasizing the need for human oversight.

As AI integrates into healthcare (e.g., symptom checkers), cases like this reveal how easily misinformation can lead to harm. Experts urge stricter safeguards and emphasize consulting doctors before acting on AI-driven advice.

In an alarming case highlighting the dangers of relying on artificial intelligence (AI) for medical advice, a 60-year-old man developed severe psychiatric symptoms – including paranoia, hallucinations and delusions – after following diet recommendations from ChatGPT.

The incident was detailed in a report published Aug. 5 in Annals of Internal Medicine Clinical Cases. The unnamed patient, inspired by his college nutrition studies, sought to eliminate chloride – a component of table salt – from his diet after reading about sodium chloride's health risks.

Unable to find reliable sources recommending a chloride-free diet, he turned to ChatGPT. The chatbot allegedly advised him to replace chloride with bromide, a chemical cousin with toxic effects. For three months, the man consumed sodium bromide purchased online instead of table salt.

By the time he arrived at the emergency department, he was convinced his neighbor was poisoning him. Doctors quickly identified his symptoms – psychosis, agitation and extreme thirst – as classic signs of bromism, a rare poisoning syndrome caused by excessive bromide exposure.

Bromism was far more common in the early 20th century when bromide was a key ingredient in sedatives, sleep aids and over-the-counter medications. Chronic exposure led to neurological damage, and by the 1970s, regulators had banned most medicinal uses of bromide due to its toxicity. While cases are rare today, this patient's ordeal proves it hasn't disappeared entirely.

His blood tests initially showed abnormal chloride levels, but further analysis revealed pseudohyperchloremia – a false reading caused by bromide interference. Only after consulting toxicology experts did doctors confirm bromism as the culprit behind his rapid mental decline. After weeks of hospitalization, antipsychotics and electrolyte stabilization, the man recovered.

AI's dangerous oversight: Chatbots prone to giving lethal advice

The report's authors later tested ChatGPT's response to similar dietary queries and found the bot indeed suggested bromide as a chloride substitute – without critical context, warnings or clarification about its toxicity. Unlike a medical professional, the AI failed to ask why the user sought this substitution or caution against ingesting industrial-grade chemicals.

ChatGPT's creator OpenAI states in its terms that the bot is not intended for medical advice. Yet users frequently treat AI as an authority, blurring the line between general information and actionable health guidance.

This case underscores the risks of trusting AI over professional healthcare guidance. It also serves as a cautionary tale for the AI era. "While AI has potential to bridge gaps in public health literacy, it also risks spreading decontextualized – and dangerous – information," the report's authors concluded.

With AI integration accelerating in healthcare – from symptom checkers to virtual nursing assistants – misinformation risks loom large. A 2023 study found that language models frequently hallucinate false clinical details, potentially leading to misdiagnoses or harmful recommendations. While tech companies emphasize disclaimers, cases like this reveal how easily those warnings get overlooked in practice.

As chatbots proliferate, experts urge users to verify health advice with licensed professionals. The cost of skipping that step, as this case proves, can be far steeper than a Google search."