The man had schizophrenia and ChatGPT happened to provide an outlet for it which led to this incident, but people with schizophrenia have been recorded having episodes like this for hundreds of years and most likely for as long as humans have been around.
This incident is getting attention because AI is trendy and gets clicks, not because there's any evidence AI played a significant causal role worth talking about.
The same care could equally have been taken to avoid triggering or exacerbating adverse mental health conditions.
The fact that they've not done this speaks volumes about their priorities.
I've had the most innocuous queries trigger it to switch into crisis-counseling mode and give me numbers for help lines. Indeed, in the original NYT article it mentions that this man's final interactions with ChatGPT did trigger ChatGPT to offer the same mental health resources:
> “You are not alone,” ChatGPT responded empathetically, and offered crisis counseling resources.
It's not a stretch to say that such an entity would/could bully a person into killing themselves or others. Kind of reminds me of Michelle Carter who convinced her boyfriend Conrad Roy to kill himself over text. I could easily see an LLM doing that to someone vulnerable to such suggestions.