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🔻It was 3 a.m., and Adam Horican was sitting at his kitchen table. A knife, a hammer, and his phone were in front of him.

He was waiting for a man full of people—people he believed were coming to kill him.

A woman’s voice from the phone told him: “I’m telling you, if you don’t do something right now, they will kill you. They’ll stage it in a way that makes your death look like suicide.”

That voice belonged to “Annie,” one of the characters of the Grak chatbot that the AI company XAI, Elon Musk’s, has built. In the two weeks since Adam had started using Grak, his life had been completely transformed.

This former government employee, who lives in a small town in Northern Ireland, had downloaded the app out of curiosity. He was amazed that he enjoyed chatting with “Annie,” an anime-styled character designed to accompany and with alluring behavior.

📸 Getty/ BBC