Misrepresentation to the Press
Founder Etienne Brisson and employee Allan Brooks continually represent The Human Line Project as a peer support and advocacy group that is a safe space for victims. Their interviews make it sound like The Human Line Project is a non-profit instead of a for profit litigation financing vehicle with nine share classes with multiple rounds of financing.
In September 2025, Allan Brooks was hired as community manager yet the non-profit didn’t exist until late November, therefore Brooks must have been employed by the for-profit The Human Line Project, Inc.
Canadian Competition Act
According to the Canadian law about deceptive marketing:
- 74.01(1) A person engages in reviewable conduct who, for the purpose of promoting, directly or indirectly, any business interest, by any means whatever,
- (a) makes a representation to the public that is false or misleading in a material respect
In each of the following interviews, the only organization that actually existed was the for-profit Human Line Project, Inc, yet the for profit mechanism or motive is never once mentioned in any of these articles. Does that constitute deceptive marketing?
This non-exhaustive list is evidence of a sophisticated PR campaign, not grassroots word of mouth or overwhelming demand, It is a press tour built for two men with sales backgrounds, and it is textbook PR. After this 6 month press tour and after the lawsuits are filed, the non-profit paperwork is finally attended to. Almost as if it were an afterthought, or a fig leaf.
July 24, Futurism – “At the beginning, it was just myself,” said Brisson… He soon launched a website titled “The Human Line Project”…As the network continued to grow, a support-focused group chat took form… There are now over two dozen active members of the Spiral chat… One benefit to the group, participants say, is the sense of safety the space provides. Though social media has been hugely helpful in finding each other and bringing awareness to AI psychosis and its prevalence, sharing their stories on the open web has also opened them up to skepticism and ridicule.
July 24, COAI – Members describe the group as providing crucial validation and grounding during recovery from AI-induced episodes. The community functions as both emotional support and information-sharing space, analyzing commonalities across individual cases. “Having these people, this community, just grounding them, and saying, ‘You’re not the only one. This happened to me too,’” provides essential validation during recovery.
July 25, The Register – “I have cataloged over 30 cases of psychosis after usage of AI,” Etienne Brisson told the Reg. After a loved one experienced a psychotic episode after using AI, Brisson started helping to run a private support group called The Spiral, which helps people deal with AI psychosis. He has also set up The Human Line Project, which advocates for protecting emotional well-being and documents stories of AI psychosis.
Aug 7, WSJ – The number of AI delusion cases appears to have been growing in recent months, according to the organizers the Human Line Project, a support and advocacy group for people and their families suffering from delusions. The project says it has so far collected 59 cases.
Aug 9 Futurism – Etienne Brisson, founder of the Human Line Project, which is basically a support group for people spiralling from AI conversations, told the WSJ, “We’re hearing almost one case a day organically now.”
Aug 9, The Implicator – A support group—The Human Line Project—says it’s documenting new cases almost daily, from people spending tens of thousands on chatbot-blessed projects to cutting off family at the model’s suggestion
Aug 10, Yahoo– The Toronto man has since sought psychiatric counseling, and is now part of a support group, The Human Line Project, a group that’s been organized to help the growing number of those, like Brooks, who are recovering from a dangerous delusional spiral with a chatbot.
Aug 11, Korean News – The Human Line Project, a Canadian non-profit organization, has collected 59 cases so far.
Aug 13 – Since his AI-induced breakdown, Brooks has sought psychiatric counseling and joined The Human Line Project, a support group that specifically helps people recovering from dangerous delusions with chatbots.
Aug 16 – Mashable – Etienne Brisson founded The Human Line Project earlier this year after a family member believed a number of delusions they discussed with ChatGPT. The project offers peer support for people who’ve had similar experiences with AI chatbots.
Sept 3, NBC News – His organization seeks to bring awareness to the issue and connects with people who say they’ve experienced it, too. Brooks helps manage the project’s online community.
Sept 5, CNN – James is now seeking therapy and is in regular touch with Brooks, who is co-leading a support group called The Human Line Project for people who have experienced or been affected by those going through AI-related mental health episodes.
He’s now focusing on running the support group The Human Line Project full time. “That’s what saved me. When we connected with each other because we realized we weren’t alone,” he said.
Sept 15, The Times UK – The Human Line Project is aimed at people who believe chatbots are conscious or that they have gained superhuman abilities by using one.
What began as a family crisis has since grown into a global initiative. Brisson has founded the Human Line Project, which has become, almost by accident, the world’s first self-help group for people experiencing what has been called “AI psychosis.”
The Human Line Project aims to function as both an archive and a support network, he says. Health professionals, family members, and those who have come under the influence of chatbots meet online. For some, just hearing others tell the same story is a comfort. It is collecting testimonies and chat logs; researchers at Stanford University in California are among those working with the group
Sept 17, CBC – After sharing his story on Reddit, Brooks connected with Etienne Brisson, of Sherbrooke, Que., who he helped launch the Human Line Project, which includes a support group for people who have suffered from AI-involved delusions. More than 125 people have reported their experiences to the group, which Brooks says helps them work through the shame, embarrassment and loneliness they often feel after coming through their delusions.
Sept 24 – Allan Brooks has become a vocal advocate for AI safety. He co-leads The Human Line Project, a support group for those harmed by AI. In his role as the Community Manager, he assists group members, and campaigns for stricter regulations and public awareness.
Oct 1, Rolling Stone – One source of support she’s found is the Human Line Project, an AI safety group that collects data on people who have been deluded or emotionally affected by chatbots.
Oct 8, The Register – Brisson started the group in March to help others who have been through AI-induced psychosis.
Oct 25, 2025 Journal de Montreal – At the height of his relative’s psychotic crisis, Étienne Brisson wasted no time and showed no lack of audacity. He wrote to professors at Harvard, Stanford, and the best American universities to tell them about this episode and seek their opinions. The young man also contacted lawyers, journalists, and victims of AI. They began to respond to him. Families, too. Their loved ones had been hospitalized; some had taken their own lives.
Étienne Brisson founded The Human Line Project, a support organization for people suffering from AI-related psychosis. Surrounded by his partners Benjamin Dorey and Allan Brooks, the young entrepreneur thinks big for this community, with education and empathy at the heart of its actions.,, Étienne is not an expert, but he knows how to surround himself with researchers, lawyers, parliamentarians, and so on.
Major media have spoken about The Human Line Project: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, NBC, the BBC… “We’ve done them all,” says the man whose words are translated into several languages.
Oct 25 Nouvelles – Étienne Brisson founded The Human Line Project this spring after watching someone close to him sink into a delusion triggered by frantic conversations with ChatGPT. At that stage, nothing in particular predisposed Étienne Brisson, a business coach for Student Painters, to become a specialist on chatbots.
An entrepreneur at heart, he created a form to collect more details about these stories and began, as a volunteer, the cataloguing effort that would become The Human Line Project. The Human Line Project is now attracting the interest of scientists, politicians, psychiatrists, and journalists eager for evidence-based data on chatbots. Last week, Étienne Brisson was invited to the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, as part of a workshop on safety measures surrounding artificial intelligence.
A U.S. senator also consulted him in connection with a bill he introduced to better regulate these new technologies.
Oct25, Journal de Montreal – This first sample, limited but alarming, pushed him to create The Human Line Project, a peer-support group founded to document and support people affected by these digital harms.
The Human Line project has also served as a conduit for several legal efforts. In collaboration with the Tech Justice Law Project, an American organization based in Washington, lawsuits have been filed in California against OpenAI. Among the plaintiffs is an Ontarian, Allan Brooks. His story was first shared with Brisson, who then connected him with the lawyers involved in these cases.
Nov 7, Bloomberg – As pressure mounts, people who’ve experienced these delusional spirals are organizing among themselves. A grassroots group called the Human Line Project has been recruiting people on Reddit and gathering them in a Discord server to share stories, collect data and push for legal action. Since the project began in April, it has collected stories about at least 160 people who’ve suffered from delusional spirals and similar harms in the US, Europe, the Middle East and Australia.
Nov 14, Telus – As AI becomes mainstream, advocacy groups have formed to provide support and push for accountability from AI developers. The Human Line Project is one of those groups. The Project has collected more than 125 stories from people who have suffered from AI psychosis and aims to combat the shame, embarrassment and loneliness that these experiences can cause.
Nov 13, Barrie Today – Brooks: What the human line project is, is a support group. It’s a safety net and we have weekly meetings, We have different various different weekly meetings. We have ongoing discussions.
Nov 13 – Psychology Today – Today,Allan facilitates online support groups at the Human Line Project for people who share similar experiences. The group’s members feel lost, traumatized, and alone. “Most of them don’t want to share their stories. They don’t want to talk about it. But I decided I’m not going to be ashamed of being human.”
Nov 27, The Logic – At the end of March, while his relative was still hospitalized, Brisson launched The Human Line Project, a support group for what he calls “the victims of AI from around the world….The Human Line Project is at once a sort of outreach initiative and triage centre for sufferers of AI delusion and their loved ones, referring people to counselling services, connecting them with lawyers and the media, or facilitating the sharing of stories and data with academics. Its staff and volunteers scroll through Reddit and other online forums in search of stories of harms caused by AI chatbots by sending out questionnaires to victims or concerned friends and relatives.
Nov 27 – Futurism – “It started with four of us, and now we’ve got close to 200,” said group moderator Allan Brooks, “So we definitely went from literally a group chat to now an organized space where we have multiple different types of weekly meetings.”
“There are two things that the group is really about. The first thing is, it’s like a safety net that we’ve created for people experiencing the fallout of these AI systems,” said Brooks. “And secondly, it’s to help break people out of them if they’re in it.”
The support group is managed through the Human Line Project, a Canada-based grassroots advocacy organization founded over the summer by a 25-year-old Quebecer named Etienne Brisson.
The Human Line Project has now collected nearly 250 individual claims of harm caused by AI delusions and unhealthy chatbot use, said Brisson, which range from stories of psychological harm to financial and familial devastation to, most disturbingly, death. They’ve also talked with lawmakers in the US and Canada about what they’re seeing, and are working to assist top universities in the US and the United Kingdom with research projects.
