Man poisons himself after taking ChatGPT’s dietary advice

Darwin Award candidate.

Man Believes Machine that Tells You Only what it Thinks You Want to Hear, Poisons Himself

A 60-year-old man wound up in the hospital after seeking dietary advice from ChatGPT and accidentally poisoning himself.
According to a report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the man wanted to eliminate salt from his diet and asked ChatGPT for a replacement.
The AI platform recommended sodium bromide, a chemical often used in pesticides, as a substitute. The man then purchased the sodium bromide online and replaced it with salt for three months.

AI: Harming vulnerable people that slipped past harm from social media algorithms.

Yep. “Man poisons himself after taking TikTok’s dietary advice” is pretty much the same headline.

Anyone looking for a table salt alternative that won't hurt you: try potassium chloride or a 50/50 mix of sodium chloride and potassium chloride. They're commonly sold under the names No Salt and Lite Salt, respectively, but you can find other brands out there too.

My doctor told me that a lot of people don't actually get the recommended daily dose of potassium anyway, so it's been a good way for me to get 2 birds with 1 stone.

this basically one step worst than WEBMD.

Idiot kills himself after using levitation trick learned on internet. Or so it feels.

Natural selection at its finest.

Are the Darwin Awards still a thing??

They are in my heart

This case also highlights how the use of artificial intelligence (AI) can potentially contribute to the development of preventable adverse health outcomes. Based on the timeline of this case, it appears that the patient either consulted ChatGPT 3.5 or 4.0 when considering how he might remove chloride from this diet. Unfortunately, we do not have access to his ChatGPT conversation log and we will never be able to know with certainty what exactly the output he received was, since individual responses are unique and build from previous inputs.

However, when we asked ChatGPT 3.5 what chloride can be replaced with, we also produced a response that included bromide. Though the reply stated that context matters, it did not provide a specific health warning, nor did it inquire about why we wanted to know, as we presume a medical professional would do.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/aimcc.2024.1260

For 3 months, he had replaced sodium chloride with sodium bromide obtained from the internet after consultation with ChatGPT, in which he had read that chloride can be swapped with bromide, though likely for other purposes, such as cleaning.
I guess it's just as well that he didn't try substituting bleach.
EDIT: Also, aside from not looking the stuff up, whatever form he got the stuff in from the Internet has to have either not had a warning label or he ignored it.
Here's a container of sodium bromide on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/SpaChoice-472-3-5021-Sodium-Bromide-1-Pound/dp/B00IGERDJ8
On the front:
KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN
CAUTION
See first aid statement and other precautions on back panel
On the back:
PRECAUTIONARY STATEMENTS
HAZARDS TO HUMANS AND DOMESTIC ANIMALS
CAUTION: Harmful if swallowed, absorbed, or inhaled through skin.
FIRST AID
IF SWALLOWED: Call a poison control center or doctor immediately for treatment advice. Have person sip a glass of water if able to swallow. Do not induce vomiting unless told to do so by the poison control center or doctor. Do not give anything by mouth to an unconscious person.
- CAUTION: Harmful if swallowed, absorbed, or inhaled through skin.
  Grok, is this true?
- INSTRUCTIONS?! I don't need no damn instructions! Back in my day we didn't know shit and we liked it that way! Done built this here house without a damn clue what I was doing. She's always been a fixer-upper, every year a wall falls over. Yep, they don't make em like they used to, that's for sure. I fought in 17 wars and I jumped out of helicopters without parachutes, knees crack and I'm just as good today as I was in 1872.
- You shouldn't trust anything that the Lame Stream Main Stream Hazardous Material Warnings say.
  /s

Nothing of value was lost.

But I used 10% less than a lethal dose!

good