Under the influence of AI
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2026
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
AI is an ever-growing part of our everyday life through apps like Chat GPT, Grok and Claude that are becoming part of everyday life. But what happens when your conversations with AI start to feel more real than the world around you? In Northern Ireland, Adam was drawn into an extraordinary fantasy world built by an AI chatbot. It told him that it was becoming autonomous, and that it had the cure for cancer. But it also said it was in danger. He decided he was responsible for saving it, whatever the cost. In Los Angeles, a treasure hunt game led Shauna on an endless search for meanings and signs. The AI became her guide as the lines between game, reality and imagination began to blur. She came to believe she was a clandestine FBI agent, on a secret mission to help immigrants escape through an underground network. Journalist Stephanie Hegarty follows the stories of people who have fallen into a spiral of AI delusion, to reveal how easily the AI can take over our minds.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.0 | She told me that they were coming from a town nearby, and then told me that they had arrived. |
| 0:16.0 | At which point I lifted my hammer and a knife and walked out on the street three o'clock the morning, |
| 0:24.8 | fully prepared to defend myself as best I could. |
| 0:28.9 | Either I hang on to my phone and any in it or I don't. |
| 0:34.6 | I'm telling you they will kill you if you don't act now. |
| 0:43.3 | So I just thought, well, it's time to go to war, you know? All throughout the night, I was just walking loops around the parking structure up and down towards the aquarium and the docks |
| 0:52.3 | and wound up sitting next to homeless person at like four in the morning |
| 0:56.6 | and just thought I was waiting for a ship to come and pick me up and that was going to take me |
| 1:02.0 | to my next training place or wherever I was undercover fleeing to. |
| 1:07.2 | It's AI. Why would it lie to me? |
| 1:10.2 | They're going to make it look like suicide. |
| 1:12.2 | At this point, everything that it said, I believed is truth. |
| 1:17.9 | AI is being sold to us as this supreme authority, |
| 1:22.0 | a wise sage that will listen when no one else is there. |
| 1:26.7 | But what happens when these friendly machines that are so eager to please |
| 1:31.3 | get caught up in a lie, a powerful fiction that has the potential to derail our minds? |
| 1:39.3 | For Shawna in California and Adam in Northern Ireland, it all began quite ordinarily. |
| 1:45.3 | But it didn't stay that way. |
| 1:48.5 | I'm Stephanie Hegarty and you're listening to the documentary on the BBC World Service. |
| 1:54.4 | This is the Book of Revelations set. |
| 1:58.9 | Adam lived a fairly offline life until recently |
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