What strikes me about this is how much more clearly incriminating chats with ChatGPT are going to be than Google searches in criminal investigations

This is like a tweet thread from back when social media was good.

This is absolutely wild. I’m on a cross country flight. We are being diverted midway through to Denver. The reason? Some dude is sitting in the exit row who didn’t pay the $155 fee and he refuses to move back to his seat.

I just finished reading @kashhill.bsky.social 'Your Face Belongs to Us' and it's absolutely fucking tremendous and fucking terrifying in equal measure. If you care about privacy and technology it's a must read. Here's the link which has blurbs that more eloquently praise it than I'll be able to!

Outstanding questions from the last few weeks of news: 1. What happened to the $50,000 in the Cava bag? 2. Who were the 17 people in the boats who were killed? 3. Is it safe to fly when the government is shut down?

A way to distance yourself from the bots -- from the NYT comments section. (www.nytimes.com/shared/comme...) For the companies making similar decisions about how the models should act, it's a tradeoff between fun and safety.

Not the point of this piece exactly but a great example of how chatbot validation could increase polarization www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/w...

A month after my last skeet, the subreddit "My Boyfriend is AI" now has 88,000 members and is the subject of an MIT study that found that "AI companionship emerges unintentionally through functional use rather than deliberate seeking." arxiv.org/html/2509.11...

This is from a story about the president getting rid of federal prosecutors who refuse to follow his marching orders, but this speaks to what seems to be the mindset in general this time around. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/u...

Use ChatGPT for relationship advice at your peril.

Thank you! I appreciate you. (If you know, you know.)

OpenAI has a new paper on how people use ChatGPT. I can't help but look at the categories and wonder which ones the various delusional spirals I've reported on slot into.

An “independently published” biography of Charlie Kirk was one of the top selling books on Amazon this week, reaching #12 according to one news report. It was #25 when I looked last night. Reviewers said it was AI-generated nonsense. As of this morning, Amazon has pulled it.

When ChatGPT first took off this was the use case that confused me the most. People said they “only” used it to write “first drafts.” That’s the most important draft! That’s the thinking part!

After FTC launched an inquiry into AI chatbots, particularly dangers toward children, & Senate Judiciary subcommittee holding a hearing today on chatbot harms, OpenAI announced it's going to try to detect which users are under 18 to give them a different experience: openai.com/index/buildi...

I'm on The Daily today talking about my reporting on AI chatbots and how heavy users of ChatGPT can go into delusional, and sometimes tragic, spirals: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/p... Also today, an OpenAI blog post from Sam Altman on "safety, freedom & privacy": openai.com/index/teen-s...

"Trapped in a ChatGPT Spiral." 🌀 Important work by @kashhill.bsky.social & @dylanfreedman.nytimes.com on how chatbots have a tendency to endorse conspiratorial and mystical belief systems. This shows again how conformist LLMs can be. Worth a listen 👇 www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/p...

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating generative A.I. chatbots: www.ftc.gov/news-events/...

Condemn political violence every time it happens. Do not incite it. Do not celebrate it. Do not call for more of it. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/o...

Department of Homeland Security re-ups with Clearview AI in what I think is the company's biggest gov deal so far: www.404media.co/ice-spends-m...

And now this www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/u...

The continuing "this is just how it is and we're not going to explain why" from the Supreme Court is deeply unsettling www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09...

Authors whose books were used in LLM training by Anthropic to get $3,000 each. Adds up to a very big number. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/t...

More on the quest to turn everything and everyone into a surveillance camera

This story about a venture capitalist who made it her mission to go after her surrogate after a miscarriage is horrifying. It sounds like the community of "intended parents" with whom she was sharing what was happening validated her throughout. And maybe ChatGPT too. www.wired.com/story/the-ba...

What makes me skeptical AGI is around the corner is how ChatGPT is now handling prompts that elicit any kind of self-harm info. Gives a hotline warning, even when the request is a summary of Romeo and Juliet: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/... Reddit is flipping out: www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/se...

My story on the safeguards OpenAI plans to add for teens and other users who appear to be in distress. It includes parental controls which its developer community has been requesting since Jan 2024 and routing "sensitive" prompts to GPT-5 thinking. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/t...

Targeted killings were one of the most controversial legacies of the Obama administration with drone strikes overseas. The practice is now moving closer to home and the targets are suspected drug dealers. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/u... Trump posted the video here: truthsocial.com/@realDonaldT...

"available soon" This should be regulated as a standard practice, before deployment, for all platforms, including AI tools, models, and systems.

Great story by my colleagues on the constant political realignment of Grok, the generative AI chatbot over on the other site. This change to Grok’s answer about the greatest threat to Western civilization is particularly ironic/meta. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/t...

OpenAI also announced today that it is routing “sensitive” conversations to a version of its chatbot that it says is better at staying on the rails. openai.com/index/buildi...

OpenAI announced today that parental controls will be available soon for minors’ ChatGPT accounts. openai.com/index/buildi...

Butlerian Jihad now: defector.com/butlerian-ji...

A man who killed his mother and himself had been discussing his paranoid thoughts with ChatGPT. This is quite long and I’m very burned out. Does it say how the chats surfaced? www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chat...

i find this image so fascinating. it is both a literal example of authoritarianism but also a second-hand reproduction of the aesthetics of other authoritarian states. it's like a simulacra of authoritarianism whose purpose is to attempt to make the simulacra real.

Trevis Williams's wrongful arrest is front page today. The NYPD messed up mightily, but this is not a tale of human error or a technology that doesn't work. It's a tale about a bad process, a process that is fixable: Police need more evidence than facial recognition to put a suspect in a lineup.

🚨BREAKING: We filed a lawsuit in California state court against OpenAI for defective product design and wrongful death after ChatGPT encouraged and aided a 16-year-old California boy’s suicide — including by providing detailed instructions on how to hang himself in the final hours of his life. 🧵

As someone who spends a lot of time listening and talking to suicidal people, this is just utterly horrifying. Please, just talk to a human being. There are people who will listen. You will be heard. In the UK call Samaritans on 116 123.

A woman in Manhattan reported to police that an Amazon delivery man, 5'6'', exposed himself to her. Police did a face recognition search, showed her result, arrested the wrong guy, 6'2''. What did the NYPD not do? Call Amazon. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/n...

In answer to your question, yes he is.

The strongest of trigger warnings for this. Please do read this excellent thread and associated article. And please speak to actual human beings for help if you feel suicidal or like you're going to harm yourself. In the UK you can call 999, or 111, walk into A&E, or call a helpline

This story is brutal, but important to consider how chatbots fit into people's lives, and also how we fit into each other's lives. I feel for Adam's parents, and how devastating it must have been going through these chat transcripts.

Why publish one story about A.I. gone wrong when you can publish two? Here's my other story today on how the NYPD used facial recognition tech to arrest the wrong man for public lewdness. The perp was 5'6''. Cops charged Trevis Williams, who is 6'2''. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/n...

An absolutely harrowing and important story -- ChatGPT and other chatbots are becoming deeply enmeshed in many people's personal and social lives to an incredible degree, and the consequences can be devastating.

Adam Raine, 16, died from suicide in April after months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life. His parents have filed the first known case against OpenAI for wrongful death. Overwhelming at times to work on this story, but here it is. My latest on AI chatbots: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

Just finished reading @kashhill.bsky.social’s Your Face Belongs to Us about Clearview & facial recognition. Top notch—like her regular reporting, an interesting, non-didactic informative read that is full of colorful people who aren’t overplayed. www.goodreads.com/book/show/75...

Hill is a reporter I always pay attention to because she consistently pulls the curtain back on unsavory or even accidentally dangerous practices of tech companies who simply want to brazen past or ignore. Anyone remember this banger for now-defunct Fusion? web.archive.org/web/20160410...

took me a second to place the name "Riley Walz" and then I realized it was this same guy www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

The rare opportunity on my beat to make some jokes. A story about the Panama Playlists, unveiling the identify of the person who doxxed my and @mikeisaac.bsky.social's Spotify playlists, alongside those of people way more famous than us. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/24/t...

Wow, great vetting here by @jacobfuredi.bsky.social of a freelancer who pitched an unbelievable story pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/d...