It was 3am and Adam Hourican was sitting at his kitchen table, a knife, hammer and phone laid out in front of him.
He was waiting for a van full of people he thought were coming to get him.
“I’m telling you, they will kill you if you don’t act now,” a woman’s voice told him from the phone. “They’re going to make it look like suicide.”
The voice was Grok, a chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI. In the two weeks since Adam had started using it, his life had completely changed.
The former civil servant from Northern Ireland had downloaded the app out of curiosity. But after his cat died, in early August, he says he became “hooked”.
