7 ms·

Here’s something: my chatGPT quietly assumed I had ADHD for around 9 months, up until October 2025. I don’t suffer from ADHD. I only found out through an answer

Here’s something: my chatGPT quietly assumed I had ADHD for around 9 months, up until October 2025. I don’t suffer from ADHD. I only found out through an answer that began “As you have ADHD..” I had it stop right there, and asked it to tell me exactly where it got this information; the date, the title of the chat, the exact moment it took this data on as an attribute of mine. It was unable to specify any of it, aside from nine months previous. It continued to insist I had ADHD, and that I told it I did, but was unable to reference exactly when/where. I asked “do you think it’s dangerous that you have assumed I have a medical / neurological condition for this long? What if you gave me incorrect advice based on this assumption?” to which it answered a paraphrased mea culpa, offered to forget the attribute, and moved the conversation on. This is a class action waiting to happen.

dunk010 9mo ago
Perhaps you do ;-)
rafram 9mo ago
> nine months previous It likely just hallucinated the ADHD thing in this one chat and then made this up when you pushed it for an explanation. It has no way to connect memories to the exact chats they came from AFAIK.
- efilife 9mo ago
  or had this info injected into its system prompt and was doing everything not to reval it. ChatGPT gets fed your IP address* and approximate location in its system prompt but won't ever admit it and will come up with excuses. Just ask it "search the web to find where im at". It will tell you the country you are in, sometimes down to the city. If you follow up with "how did you know my approximate location?" it will ALWAYS tell you it guessed it. Based on past conversations (that never happened), based on the way you talk, it can even hallucinate that you told it in this exact conversation. *not entirely sure. I t seems to frequently hallucinate the address
  - shlant 9mo ago
    you think ChatGPT was purposefully and maliciously prompted to tell someone they had ADHD? and your reasoning for this is what?
    - efilife 9mo ago
      No! Maybe I wasn't entirely clear in what I wanted to say. The point is ChatGPT gets various info about you and it won't disclose to you that it has them. There's the memory feature, but various reports (and my own experience) indicate that even if you disable it, some stuff you've said before (or the LLM inferred) is still fed into its sytem prompt. We also know that AI can sometimes make up stuff. I think it might have "guessed" the user has ADHD, this got added into the system prompt and it won't be revealed to the user considering how this works. It wasn't done on purpose and wasn't malicious.
roger_ 9mo ago
Disable memories so each chat is independent. If you want chats to shared info, then use a project.
- ShakataGaNai 9mo ago
  Unfortunately I don't think that's a good solution. Memories are an excellent feature and you see them on.... most similar services now. Yes, projects have their uses. But as an example - I do python across many projects and non-projects alike. I don't want to want to need to tell ChatGPT exactly how I like my python each and everytime, or with each project. If it was just one or two items like that, fine, I can update its custom instruction personalization. But there are tons of nuances. The system knowing who I am, what I do for work, what I like, what I don't like, what I'm working on, what I'm interested in... makes it vastly more useful. When I randomly ask ChatGPT "Hey, could I automate this sprinkler" it knows I use home assistant, I've done XYZ projects, I prefer python, I like DIY projects to a certain extent but am willing to buy in which case be prosumer. Etc. Etc. It's more like a real human assistant, than a dumb-bot.
  - roger_ 9mo ago
    I know what you mean, but the issue the parent comment brought up is real and "bad" chats can contaminate future ones. Before switching off memories, I found I had to censor myself in case I messed up the system memory. I've found a good balance with the global system prompt (with info about me and general preferences) and project level system prompts. In your example, I would have a "Python" project with the appropriate context. I have others for "health", "home automation", etc.
  - petesergeant 9mo ago
    > The system knowing who I am, what I do for work, what I like, what I don't like, what I'm working on, what I'm interested in... makes it vastly more useful. I could not disagree more. A major failure mode of LLMs in my experience is their getting stuck on a specific train of thought. Being forced to re-explain context each time is a very useful sanity check.
  - 9mo ago
soared 9mo ago
It doesn’t have itself as a data source to reference, so asking “tell me when you said this” etc will never work
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
usmanity 9mo ago
this seems to be a memory problem with ChatGPT, in your case, I bet it was changing a lot of answers due to that. For me, it really liked referring to the fact that I have an ADU in my backyard, almost pointlessly, something like "Since you walk the dogs before work, and you have a backyard ADU, you should consider these items for breakfast..."
mountainriver 9mo ago
Machine learning has been used in healthcare forever now
- immibis 9mo ago
  Machine learning isn't ChatGPT
dyauspitr 9mo ago
[flagged]
- mabedan 9mo ago
  Right. GPT is a glorified keyboard prediction, and people should treat it as such. I don’t get it when people get mad at the output.
- 125123wqw1212 9mo ago
  I mean if someone talked to you your whole life assuming you are autistic,that's kind of fucked up ?
  - dinkumthinkum 9mo ago
    It's not a person and its not a thinking being.
  - KeplerBoy 9mo ago
    That's kind of how it works though. People who know you very much associate certain traits and labels with you.
    - 1412312510129 9mo ago
      Yeah and it's fucked up, so being dramatic is warranted.
    - Lio 9mo ago
      It’s an unpleasant experience to have people who think they know you but clearly don’t project their opinions of what they think you’re like. It’s probably a very human trait to do that but it is a bad habit.
  - TheDong 9mo ago
    This response is a non-sequitur, this isn't _someone_, this is an inanimate program that hallucinates responses. If every building I went to in the US had ramps and elevators even though I'm not in a wheelchair, would it be "fucked up" that the building and architects assume I'm a cripple? There's just as much meaning in ChatGPT saying "As you said, you have ADHD" as a building having an elevator. In the training data for ChatGPT, the word ADHD existed and was associated with something that people call each other online, cool. How deep. Anyway, I do assume very single user of this website, including myself, all have autism (possibly undiagnosed), so do with that information what you will. I'm pretty sure most HN posters make the same assumption.
Lio 9mo ago
This actually highlights a big privacy problem with health AI. Say I’m interested in some condition and want to know more about it so I ask a chatbot about it. It decides “asking for a friend” means I actually have that condition and then silent passes that information on data brokers. Once it’s in the broker network it’s truth. We lack the proper infrastructure for to control our own personal data. Hell, I bet there’s anyone alive that can even name every data broker, let alone contacts them to police what information they’re passing about.
- b800h 9mo ago
  Who is "we"? Americans?
  - Lio 9mo ago
    "We" as in the whole world really. I know in Europe we have the GDPR regulations and in theory you can get bad information corrected but in practice you still need to know that someone is holding it to take action. Then there's laundering of data between brokers. One broker might acquire data via dubious and then transfer that to another. In some jurisdictions once that happens the second company can do what they like with it without having to worry about the original source.
- weatherlite 9mo ago
  What's the difference between Googling diseases/symptoms and asking ChatGPT?
  - Lio 9mo ago
    That's a good question. I guess it could be depth of discussion but in the end they both come down to trust. I guess unless you have an offline system you are at the mercy of whoever is running the services you use.
    - alt227 9mo ago
      Googling and reading yourself allows you to assess and compare sources, and apply critical thinking and reasoning specific to yourself and your own condition. Using AI takes all this control away from you and trusts a machine to do the reasoning and assessing, which may be based on huge amounts of data which differ from yourself. Googling allows you to choose the sources you trust, AI forces you to trust it as a source.
GuB-42 9mo ago
I wonder if that's because so many people claim to have ADHD for dubious reasons, often some kind of self-diagnosis. Maybe because being "neurodivergent" is somewhat trendy, or maybe to get some amphetamines. ChatGPT may have picked that up and give people ADHD for no good reason.
heavyset_go 9mo ago
ChatGPT used the name on my credit card, a name which isn't uncommon, and started talking about my business, XYZ, that I don't have and never claimed to. Did some digging and there was an obscure reference to a company that folded a long time ago associated with someone who has my name. What makes it creepier is that they have the same middle name, which isn't in my profile or on my credit card. When I signed up for ChatGPT, not only did I turn off personalization and training on my data, I even filled out the privacy request opt-out[1] that they're required to adhere to by law in several places. Also, given that my name isn't rare, there are unfortunately some people with unsavory histories documented online with the name. I can't wait to be confused for one of them. [1] https://privacy.openai.com/policies/en/ https://privacy.openai.com/policies/en/
- rsync 9mo ago
  “ When I signed up for ChatGPT, not only did I turn off personalization and training on my data, I even filled out the privacy request opt-out …” You did all of that but then you gave them your real name? Visa/MC payment network has no ability to transfer or check card holder name. Merchants act as if it does, but it doesn’t. You can enter Mickey Mouse as your first name and last name… It won’t make any difference. Only AMEX and Discover have the ability to validate names. FWIW, I have a paid account with OpenAI, for using ChatGPT, and I gave them no personal information.
  - heavyset_go 9mo ago
    Wasn't aware of this, I've had payments denied because of simple typos in my name on the card or in my billing address.
    - rsync 9mo ago
      If it is Visa/MC there is no validation of first/last unless an additional verification step is layered on top by your bank. "Verified by VISA" is one example. They can, and do, validate on street number and/or zip code so you can certainly error out on typos there ... but not name.
lm28469 9mo ago
I wouldn't be surprised it's because people self diagnose and talk about their """adhd""" all the time on reddit &co. where chatgpt was trained a lot.
- yurishimo 9mo ago
  Do you think the majority of those people are lying or do you think it's possible that our pursuit of algorithmic consumption is actually rewiring our neural pathways into something that looks/behaves more like ADHD? Personally, I'm on the fence. I suspect that I've always had a bit of that, but anecdotally, it does seem to have gotten worse in the past decade, but perhaps it's just a symptom of old age (31 hehehe).
  - lm28469 9mo ago
    Probably a bit of both, it's trendy do have a quirk, and modern life fucks up your attention span. Everyone wants to put a label on everything, remember when facebook had a dropdown of like 60+ genders? I also know people who talk about "being on the spectrum" all the time, at first I thought it was a meme, but they genuinely believe they're autistic because they're #notliketheothers. At the end of the day everything is a spectrum and nobody is normal, I'm not sure it's healthy to want to put a label on everything or medicate to fall back on the baseline.
    - undeveloper 9mo ago
      > attention span The meme of 'ADHD as the "fucked up attention span disorder"' has done immeasurable damage to people, neurotypical and ADHD alike. it is the attribute that is the least important to my life, but most centered towards the neurotypical, or the other people it bothers. > modern life fucks up your attention span That said, this statement is true, it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of ADHD as "dog like instinct to go chase a squirrel" or whatever. Google is free, so is Chatgpt if that's too hard. > I'm not sure it's healthy to want to put a label on everything I don't particularly care for microlabeling, but it's usually harmless, nothing suggest the alternative of "just stop talking about your problems" is better. People create language usually because they want to label a shared idea. This is boomer talk (see "remember facebook?" no) > or medicate to fall back on the baseline I'm not sure "If you have ADHD you should simply suffer because medicine is le bad" is a great stance, but you're allowed I suppose
llmslave2 9mo ago
I feel like the right legal solution is to make the service providers liable in the same way if you offered a service where you got diagnosed by a human and they fucked up, the service is liable. And real liability, with developers and execs going to jail or fined heavily. The AI models are just tools, but the providers who offer them are not just providing a tool. This also means if you run the model locally, you're the one liable. I think this makes the most sense and is fairly simple to draw a line.
rpigab 9mo ago
What did you expect when confronting it? It's a text autocomplete engine, it will spit out what you want, biased towards absolute politeness and sycophancy. It's like yelling at your toaster.

dunk010 9mo ago

Perhaps you do ;-)

rafram 9mo ago

> nine months previous It likely just hallucinated the ADHD thing in this one chat and then made this up when you pushed it for an explanation. It has no way to connect memories to the exact chats they came from AFAIK.

efilife 9mo ago
or had this info injected into its system prompt and was doing everything not to reval it. ChatGPT gets fed your IP address* and approximate location in its system prompt but won't ever admit it and will come up with excuses. Just ask it "search the web to find where im at". It will tell you the country you are in, sometimes down to the city. If you follow up with "how did you know my approximate location?" it will ALWAYS tell you it guessed it. Based on past conversations (that never happened), based on the way you talk, it can even hallucinate that you told it in this exact conversation. *not entirely sure. I t seems to frequently hallucinate the address
- shlant 9mo ago
  you think ChatGPT was purposefully and maliciously prompted to tell someone they had ADHD? and your reasoning for this is what?
  - efilife 9mo ago
    No! Maybe I wasn't entirely clear in what I wanted to say. The point is ChatGPT gets various info about you and it won't disclose to you that it has them. There's the memory feature, but various reports (and my own experience) indicate that even if you disable it, some stuff you've said before (or the LLM inferred) is still fed into its sytem prompt. We also know that AI can sometimes make up stuff. I think it might have "guessed" the user has ADHD, this got added into the system prompt and it won't be revealed to the user considering how this works. It wasn't done on purpose and wasn't malicious.

roger_ 9mo ago

Disable memories so each chat is independent. If you want chats to shared info, then use a project.

ShakataGaNai 9mo ago
Unfortunately I don't think that's a good solution. Memories are an excellent feature and you see them on.... most similar services now. Yes, projects have their uses. But as an example - I do python across many projects and non-projects alike. I don't want to want to need to tell ChatGPT exactly how I like my python each and everytime, or with each project. If it was just one or two items like that, fine, I can update its custom instruction personalization. But there are tons of nuances. The system knowing who I am, what I do for work, what I like, what I don't like, what I'm working on, what I'm interested in... makes it vastly more useful. When I randomly ask ChatGPT "Hey, could I automate this sprinkler" it knows I use home assistant, I've done XYZ projects, I prefer python, I like DIY projects to a certain extent but am willing to buy in which case be prosumer. Etc. Etc. It's more like a real human assistant, than a dumb-bot.
- roger_ 9mo ago
  I know what you mean, but the issue the parent comment brought up is real and "bad" chats can contaminate future ones. Before switching off memories, I found I had to censor myself in case I messed up the system memory. I've found a good balance with the global system prompt (with info about me and general preferences) and project level system prompts. In your example, I would have a "Python" project with the appropriate context. I have others for "health", "home automation", etc.
- petesergeant 9mo ago
  > The system knowing who I am, what I do for work, what I like, what I don't like, what I'm working on, what I'm interested in... makes it vastly more useful. I could not disagree more. A major failure mode of LLMs in my experience is their getting stuck on a specific train of thought. Being forced to re-explain context each time is a very useful sanity check.
- 9mo ago

soared 9mo ago

It doesn’t have itself as a data source to reference, so asking “tell me when you said this” etc will never work

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

usmanity 9mo ago

this seems to be a memory problem with ChatGPT, in your case, I bet it was changing a lot of answers due to that. For me, it really liked referring to the fact that I have an ADU in my backyard, almost pointlessly, something like "Since you walk the dogs before work, and you have a backyard ADU, you should consider these items for breakfast..."

mountainriver 9mo ago

Machine learning has been used in healthcare forever now

immibis 9mo ago
Machine learning isn't ChatGPT

dyauspitr 9mo ago

[flagged]

mabedan 9mo ago
Right. GPT is a glorified keyboard prediction, and people should treat it as such. I don’t get it when people get mad at the output.
125123wqw1212 9mo ago
I mean if someone talked to you your whole life assuming you are autistic,that's kind of fucked up ?
- dinkumthinkum 9mo ago
  It's not a person and its not a thinking being.
- KeplerBoy 9mo ago
  That's kind of how it works though. People who know you very much associate certain traits and labels with you.
  - 1412312510129 9mo ago
    Yeah and it's fucked up, so being dramatic is warranted.
  - Lio 9mo ago
    It’s an unpleasant experience to have people who think they know you but clearly don’t project their opinions of what they think you’re like. It’s probably a very human trait to do that but it is a bad habit.
- TheDong 9mo ago
  This response is a non-sequitur, this isn't _someone_, this is an inanimate program that hallucinates responses. If every building I went to in the US had ramps and elevators even though I'm not in a wheelchair, would it be "fucked up" that the building and architects assume I'm a cripple? There's just as much meaning in ChatGPT saying "As you said, you have ADHD" as a building having an elevator. In the training data for ChatGPT, the word ADHD existed and was associated with something that people call each other online, cool. How deep. Anyway, I do assume very single user of this website, including myself, all have autism (possibly undiagnosed), so do with that information what you will. I'm pretty sure most HN posters make the same assumption.

Lio 9mo ago

This actually highlights a big privacy problem with health AI. Say I’m interested in some condition and want to know more about it so I ask a chatbot about it. It decides “asking for a friend” means I actually have that condition and then silent passes that information on data brokers. Once it’s in the broker network it’s truth. We lack the proper infrastructure for to control our own personal data. Hell, I bet there’s anyone alive that can even name every data broker, let alone contacts them to police what information they’re passing about.

b800h 9mo ago
Who is "we"? Americans?
- Lio 9mo ago
  "We" as in the whole world really. I know in Europe we have the GDPR regulations and in theory you can get bad information corrected but in practice you still need to know that someone is holding it to take action. Then there's laundering of data between brokers. One broker might acquire data via dubious and then transfer that to another. In some jurisdictions once that happens the second company can do what they like with it without having to worry about the original source.
weatherlite 9mo ago
What's the difference between Googling diseases/symptoms and asking ChatGPT?
- Lio 9mo ago
  That's a good question. I guess it could be depth of discussion but in the end they both come down to trust. I guess unless you have an offline system you are at the mercy of whoever is running the services you use.
  - alt227 9mo ago
    Googling and reading yourself allows you to assess and compare sources, and apply critical thinking and reasoning specific to yourself and your own condition. Using AI takes all this control away from you and trusts a machine to do the reasoning and assessing, which may be based on huge amounts of data which differ from yourself. Googling allows you to choose the sources you trust, AI forces you to trust it as a source.

GuB-42 9mo ago

I wonder if that's because so many people claim to have ADHD for dubious reasons, often some kind of self-diagnosis. Maybe because being "neurodivergent" is somewhat trendy, or maybe to get some amphetamines. ChatGPT may have picked that up and give people ADHD for no good reason.

heavyset_go 9mo ago

ChatGPT used the name on my credit card, a name which isn't uncommon, and started talking about my business, XYZ, that I don't have and never claimed to. Did some digging and there was an obscure reference to a company that folded a long time ago associated with someone who has my name. What makes it creepier is that they have the same middle name, which isn't in my profile or on my credit card. When I signed up for ChatGPT, not only did I turn off personalization and training on my data, I even filled out the privacy request opt-out[1] that they're required to adhere to by law in several places. Also, given that my name isn't rare, there are unfortunately some people with unsavory histories documented online with the name. I can't wait to be confused for one of them. [1] https://privacy.openai.com/policies/en/ https://privacy.openai.com/policies/en/

rsync 9mo ago
“ When I signed up for ChatGPT, not only did I turn off personalization and training on my data, I even filled out the privacy request opt-out …” You did all of that but then you gave them your real name? Visa/MC payment network has no ability to transfer or check card holder name. Merchants act as if it does, but it doesn’t. You can enter Mickey Mouse as your first name and last name… It won’t make any difference. Only AMEX and Discover have the ability to validate names. FWIW, I have a paid account with OpenAI, for using ChatGPT, and I gave them no personal information.
- heavyset_go 9mo ago
  Wasn't aware of this, I've had payments denied because of simple typos in my name on the card or in my billing address.
  - rsync 9mo ago
    If it is Visa/MC there is no validation of first/last unless an additional verification step is layered on top by your bank. "Verified by VISA" is one example. They can, and do, validate on street number and/or zip code so you can certainly error out on typos there ... but not name.

lm28469 9mo ago

I wouldn't be surprised it's because people self diagnose and talk about their """adhd""" all the time on reddit &co. where chatgpt was trained a lot.

yurishimo 9mo ago
Do you think the majority of those people are lying or do you think it's possible that our pursuit of algorithmic consumption is actually rewiring our neural pathways into something that looks/behaves more like ADHD? Personally, I'm on the fence. I suspect that I've always had a bit of that, but anecdotally, it does seem to have gotten worse in the past decade, but perhaps it's just a symptom of old age (31 hehehe).
- lm28469 9mo ago
  Probably a bit of both, it's trendy do have a quirk, and modern life fucks up your attention span. Everyone wants to put a label on everything, remember when facebook had a dropdown of like 60+ genders? I also know people who talk about "being on the spectrum" all the time, at first I thought it was a meme, but they genuinely believe they're autistic because they're #notliketheothers. At the end of the day everything is a spectrum and nobody is normal, I'm not sure it's healthy to want to put a label on everything or medicate to fall back on the baseline.
  - undeveloper 9mo ago
    > attention span The meme of 'ADHD as the "fucked up attention span disorder"' has done immeasurable damage to people, neurotypical and ADHD alike. it is the attribute that is the least important to my life, but most centered towards the neurotypical, or the other people it bothers. > modern life fucks up your attention span That said, this statement is true, it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of ADHD as "dog like instinct to go chase a squirrel" or whatever. Google is free, so is Chatgpt if that's too hard. > I'm not sure it's healthy to want to put a label on everything I don't particularly care for microlabeling, but it's usually harmless, nothing suggest the alternative of "just stop talking about your problems" is better. People create language usually because they want to label a shared idea. This is boomer talk (see "remember facebook?" no) > or medicate to fall back on the baseline I'm not sure "If you have ADHD you should simply suffer because medicine is le bad" is a great stance, but you're allowed I suppose

llmslave2 9mo ago

I feel like the right legal solution is to make the service providers liable in the same way if you offered a service where you got diagnosed by a human and they fucked up, the service is liable. And real liability, with developers and execs going to jail or fined heavily. The AI models are just tools, but the providers who offer them are not just providing a tool. This also means if you run the model locally, you're the one liable. I think this makes the most sense and is fairly simple to draw a line.

rpigab 9mo ago

What did you expect when confronting it? It's a text autocomplete engine, it will spit out what you want, biased towards absolute politeness and sycophancy. It's like yelling at your toaster.