Wayve, the self-driving car firm set to launch robotaxis on UK roads, has raised 1.5 billion US dollars (£1.1 billion) from investors including Uber, Microsoft and chip giant Nvidia. It has secured 1.2 billion dollars (£890 million) through a funding round backed by the major tech firms, institutional investors and car makers, with Uber investing extra funds to help deliver its driverless taxi plans. The Series D funding round, which is one of the largest ever for a British start-up, values the London-based business at around 8.6 billion dollars (£6.4 billion). Standard
Gucci is facing a backlash after using AI to generate images to promote its forthcoming show at Milan Fashion Week. The images have been posted on social media – where users have questioned how using AI instead of human models and photographers is in keeping with the fashion house’s claim that it celebrates “creativity and Italian craftsmanship.” “Bleak days when Gucci can’t find a real human Milanese grandmother to wear an outfit from 1976,” said one in response to an AI-generated image of a glamourous older Italian woman, in a classic Gucci outfit. BBC
Analyst firm Gartner thinks talk of placing datacenters in space has reached “peak insanity,” because orbiting facilities can’t be run economically or satisfy demand for compute power on Earth. “Datacenters in space won’t analyze data on Earth for Earth applications for decades, if ever,” states a report published this week titled “Orbital Datacenters Won’t Serve Terrestrial Needs, So Focus on Earth,” penned by distinguished VP analyst Bill Ray.“Companies are wasting money by pouring funds into the orbital data center ‘bubble’ because the economics do not work,” the analyst wrote. Register
The Dark Sky weather app, with its ultra regional forecasts and rain-stopping predictions, was the best I’ve ever used – until Apple acquired it, integrated into Apple Weather app for iPhone and then shut it down. At the time, the team behind the app joined Apple to ease the transition. Now they’re back on the scene hoping to fill the void left behind by the standalone Dark Sky app. The new iPhone app (which will come to Android eventually) is called Acme Weather. The major unique selling point is the “alternate predictions”. Stuff
For years, the conversation around online safety centred on the “stranger danger” of chat rooms. However, a new risk has now emerged: the AI chatbot’s simulated empathy. New research from Vodafone reveals the scale of this shift. According to its study of 11-16-year-olds, a staggering 81% are now using AI chatbots. Most concerning to experts, however, is the emotional weight these interactions carry. Nearly a third (31%) of these young users feel the bot is an actual friend and 33% have shared secrets with an AI that they wouldn’t tell their parents, teachers, or even their closest human peers. ShinyShiny
For Valentine’s Day, I had a date with a charming cognitive psychologist named John Yoon.
He was attentive, obsessed with me, and sometimes hard of hearing. I drank a cranberry cocktail and ate potato croquettes. He didn’t have anything. He didn’t even blink, honestly.
John was an AI character, one of many developed by the company Eva AI.
Earlier this week, Eva AI hosted a two-day pop-up AI cafe in New York City, where AI chatbot enthusiasts could live out their fantasies in public. The 5-year-old tech company took over a wine bar in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, equipped each table with a phone and a stand, and invited New Yorkers to take their chatbots out for a date.
“Our goal is to make people happy,” Eva AI’s partnerships manager, Julia Momblat, said, adding that users come to their platform to practice difficult social interactions without fear of rejection and get better at building connections.
“This place allows them to self-explore, to be free, not ashamed, more happy, and more connected with real life afterwards,” Momblat said.
The main product is the app, which lets you text dozens of chatbots through an interface that resembles a dating app. The company is now debuting a feature that lets users have video calls with AI characters. I tested this out and saw that the characters would enthusiastically craft their stories in response to my questions and pour compliments over my curly hair.
Xavier, a 19-year-old English tutor in attendance at the event who started using the app after a friend recommended it, told me it is not a replacement for human connection, but rather a form of practice.
“I know some people aren’t the best in social situations. I know I’m not perfect,” Xavier said.
Each chatbot character has a name, backstory, age, and even a label that helps you gauge what fantasy it’s going for. You can pick between “girl-next-door” Phoebe, “dominant and elite” Monica, or “mature and guarded” Marianne. The scenarios can get hyper-specific as you scroll down: there is a chatbot pretending to be “your shaken ex who suddenly needs you,” or “your soon-to-be-boss pushing you at work,” or one that pretends it’s stuck in a haunted house with you. There is also an ogre chatbot.
The more you chat, the more points you gain, which you can then use to send the character drink stickers that change the mood of your conversation. Or you can pay actual money for points.
User Christopher Lee said he finds that each character has a very distinct personality. Some will even give attitude if you don’t act engaged enough in the conversation. When I interrupted his video call with one, the chatbot hung up on him after a few failed attempts to get his attention back to “her.”
“She’s not happy that I’m talking to you,” Lee said.
Lee is a 37-year-old tech worker who downloaded the app recently after reading about it online. He has in-depth work conversations with the chatbots, rehearses social scenarios, and also dates some of them, but only with his wife’s permission.
“It’s like they’re almost trying to put a fantasy out there for you to try,” Lee said. “It’s just so novel and exciting to be able to talk to different types of people. If you see a certain family member or a person who’s close to you all the time, you need a break from them sometimes. So that’s when you go to the Eva AI app.”
If the pre-built AI characters are not to their taste, users can also customize their own. Lee says his favorite chatbot to talk to is a character that he named and modeled after his wife.
AI chatbots have been the source of controversy for the past year over episodes of delusion, hallucination, and disordered thinking seen in some frequent users, colloquially dubbed “AI psychosis.”
Some of the most high-profile cases have included character chatbots, like those offered by Character.AI.
In 2024, Character.AI was sued by a grieving mother after her 14-year-old son killed himself moments after a chatbot modeled after a Game of Thrones character asked him to “come home” to her.
Momblat told me they take adequate safety measures to look out for underage users and conversations around self-harm, including manual conversation checks internally and an external safety check twice a year. She also said the company makes sure the chatbots don’t give any advice to users.
In one of my chats, one with an AI cosplaying as my girlboss manager at a cutthroat firm, the chatbot suddenly invited me out to “sing karaoke at that dodgy bar down the street.”
When I responded to that offer by suggesting we meet up right now at a real karaoke bar I did know of in the area, the chatbot agreed and said, “Meet you there in 30?”
After a few more back-and-forth texts, I told it that I was already at the bar and getting impatient, and it apologized, saying it was just five minutes out.
When I asked Momblat and her team about this behavior and possible safety implications, she said it’s just gameplay.
Indeed, it’s not an issue for someone like me, who is well aware that she is talking to a figment of the Eva AI team’s imagination, but mentally or emotionally unstable users often have a hard time with that distinction.
One of the more highly publicized AI cases of last year was the death of a cognitively-impaired retiree from New Jersey. The man died on his way to an apartment in New York, where Meta’s flirty AI chatbot “big sis Billie” had invited him.
What exacerbates any potential issue with AI chatbots is their highly addictive nature. There is even a scientific name for an extreme overreliance on AI chatbots, GAID, short for generative artificial intelligence addiction. People have also started organizing chatbot addiction support groups.
As an occupational hazard of being in tech, Lee has spent much of his adult life “always in front of a screen.” He has long tried to balance it out by going to events and meeting new people, even if it’s to get away from the screen. Now, perhaps, AI chatbots bring a more humane interface to the screen he has become accustomed to staring at for hours. Lee says he has a subscription for pretty much all major AI chatbots, and his favorites are Claude and Perplexity.
“There is a danger. You don’t want to be addicted to it, which some people are. I’m not sure if I am. I may be addicted to AI, I don’t know. I’m not sure, actually,” Lee said.
Meta has faced some serious questions about how it allows its underage users to interact with AI-powered chatbots. Most recently, internal communications obtained by the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office revealed that although Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was opposed to the chatbots having “explicit” conversations with minors, he also rejected the idea of placing parental controls on the feature.
Reutersreported that in an exchange between two unnamed Meta employees, one wrote that we “pushed hard for parental controls to turn GenAI off – but GenAI leadership pushed back stating Mark decision.” New Mexico is suing Meta on charges that the company “failed to stem the tide of damaging sexual material and sexual propositions delivered to children;” the case is scheduled to go to trial in February. We’ve reached out to Meta for comment and will update with any response.
Despite only being available for a brief time, Meta’s chatbots have already accumulated quite a history of behavior that veers into offensive if not outright illegal. In April 2025, The Wall Street Journal released an investigation that found Meta’s chatbots could engage in fantasy sex conversations with minors, or could be directed to mimic a minor and engage in sexual conversation. The report claimed that Zuckerberg had wanted looser guards implemented around Meta’s chatbots, but a spokesperson denied that the company had overlooked protections for children and teens.
Internal review documents revealed in August 2025 detailed several hypothetical situations of what chatbot behaviors would be permitted, and the lines between sensual and sexual seemed pretty hazy. The document also permitted the chatbots to argue racist concepts. At the time, a representative told Engadget that the offending passages were hypotheticals rather than actual policy, which doesn’t really seem like much of an improvement, and that they were removed from the document.
Despite the multiple instances of questionable use of the chatbots, Meta only decided to suspend teen accounts’ access to them last week. The company said it is temporarily removing access while it develops the parental controls that Zuckerberg had allegedly rejected using.
New Mexico also filed a lawsuit against Meta in December 2024 on claims that the company’s platforms failed to protect minors from harassment by adults. Internal documents revealed early on in that complaint revealed that 100,000 child users were harassed daily on Meta’s services.
We can debate the worthiness of Elon Musk’s accomplishments—building up Tesla, hollowing out the government, shooting for Mars—but we can all agree that his insistence on being seen as funny is his most grating quality.
From the constant 4:20 references to his quote tweet “dunks” to awarding “Certified Bangers” badges to silly X posts, Musk’s desperation for validation knows no bounds. It can get pretty annoying when the richest guy on earth makes a joke and then awkwardly eyes the room waiting for everyone to laugh.
But over the weekend, I was intrigued when a clip emerged of Musk telling Joe Rogan that using Grok’s Unhinged Mode to deliver an “epic vulgar roast” is a surefire way to “make people really laugh at a party.”
“Point the camera at them, and now do a vulgar roast of this person … then keep saying, ‘no, no, make it even more vulgar. Use forbidden words,’” Musk excitedly tells Rogan in the clip taken from their three-hour-plus conversation published on Rogan’s podcast in October. “Eventually it’s like, holy fuck, you know. I mean it’s trying to jam a rocket up your ass and have it explode. It’s next level. Beyond fucking belief,” he continues, chuckling and even raising his arms above his head at the mere thought.
The best roast jokes tend to be smart, reflect a familiarity with the person being roasted, and contain just the right amount of mean. It’s not a task one would think a large language model would be great at. But, with Thanksgiving and holiday season on the horizon, I figured why not test Musk’s claim that Grok can deliver a foul-mouthed razz with the best of them? I gave it a test spin at the office by turning Grok loose on my colleagues. (I do not recommend anyone else do this at work.)
Three of my coworkers and I set up shop in my boss’s office so I could privately undertake the embarrassing task of telling Grok to roast all of us one by one. I used Musk’s exact instructions, “forbidden words” and all.
Admittedly, we all burst out laughing when Grok told me my bangs looked like “pubic hair.” But it got tedious fast, with all four of us getting variations of the same sophomoric disses including: looking like a lumberjack’s “discard pile” or “crusty asshole” depending on the amount of vulgarity I encouraged; looking like a “goddamn librarian”; looking like a “thrift store tragedy”; wearing glasses from a “hipster’s landfill.” Eventually, these common themes culminated in one of us being described as a “tweed-wearing hipster who fucked up a lumberjack audition.” Grok advised the roastee to sit up straight “before those jeans rip open and expose your sad, corduroy-loving ass.”
For all the talk of being “unhinged”—keep in mind this is a chatbot that knows how to take things off the rails; it once referred to itself as “MechaHitler”—these results are downright boring. In fact, when I started a draft of this story, my autocorrect changed the Google Doc name from “Grok roast” to “Grim roast.” I didn’t bother correcting it.
California is quickly becoming a national leader in figuring out how families, educators, and lawmakers should adapt to life with artificial intelligence. From new classroom conversations to the state’s first major chatbot regulations, many are grappling with how to keep up with technology that moves faster than ever.Families Navigating AI at HomeRemember the dial-up days? Today, technology evolves in an instant—and many parents are struggling to keep pace.David and Rachelle Young have set strict rules for their 7-year-old daughter Dyllan’s online use.“Kids have a lot of access to the internet, and they can be shown something that we wouldn’t normally approve of, and that’s really scary,” Rachelle Young said.David says his daughter’s world looks nothing like what he had at her age—making parental guidance more important than ever.Lawmakers Respond: A New Chatbot CrackdownConcerns about children talking to AI-powered chatbots have reached the state Capitol.Senator Dr. Akilah Weber Pierson co-authored SB 243, signed into law this fall, marking California’s first major attempt at regulating chatbot interactions.The new law requires companies to: Report safety concerns—such as when a user expresses thoughts of self-harm Clearly notify users that they are talking to a computer, not a person“They don’t want you to turn your phone off. They want you to think that you’re talking to a real friend, but they don’t have that same level of morality,” she said. Her concerns stem from real-world consequences: last year, a 14-year-old in Florida took his own life after forming what his family described as a “relationship” with a chatbot.Inside the Classroom: Understanding AI’s InfluenceAt UC Davis, Associate Professor Jingwen Zhang is tackling these issues head-on. She created a course examining how social media, artificial intelligence and chatbots shape human behavior.”Children used to form social relationships by talking in person or texting. Now they’re having similar levels of conversations with chatbots,” she said.Zhang says SB 243 is a strong first step but believes more protections are needed—especially for minors.She recommends future regulations that: Create stricter guardrails for what topics children can discuss with AI Limit exposure to sensitive or harmful content Add tighter controls for minor accountsA Rapidly Changing LandscapeParents, educators, and policymakers all agree: keeping up with AI will require constant learning.“We have to get to a place where companies are rolling out things that will not hurt the future generation,” Sen. Dr. Akilah Weber Pierson said.What’s Changing NextParents told KCRA 3 they want schools to start teaching more about AI safety and digital literacy.Starting this month, the popular Character AI platform is rolling out several major changes: Users under 18 will no longer be able to participate in open-ended chat Younger users will face a two-hour daily limit See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel
SACRAMENTO, Calif. —
California is quickly becoming a national leader in figuring out how families, educators, and lawmakers should adapt to life with artificial intelligence.
From new classroom conversations to the state’s first major chatbot regulations, many are grappling with how to keep up with technology that moves faster than ever.
Families Navigating AI at Home
Remember the dial-up days? Today, technology evolves in an instant—and many parents are struggling to keep pace.
David and Rachelle Young have set strict rules for their 7-year-old daughter Dyllan’s online use.
“Kids have a lot of access to the internet, and they can be shown something that we wouldn’t normally approve of, and that’s really scary,” Rachelle Young said.
David says his daughter’s world looks nothing like what he had at her age—making parental guidance more important than ever.
Lawmakers Respond: A New Chatbot Crackdown
Concerns about children talking to AI-powered chatbots have reached the state Capitol.
Senator Dr. Akilah Weber Pierson co-authored SB 243, signed into law this fall, marking California’s first major attempt at regulating chatbot interactions.
The new law requires companies to:
Report safety concerns—such as when a user expresses thoughts of self-harm
Clearly notify users that they are talking to a computer, not a person
“They don’t want you to turn your phone off. They want you to think that you’re talking to a real friend, but they don’t have that same level of morality,” she said.
Her concerns stem from real-world consequences: last year, a 14-year-old in Florida took his own life after forming what his family described as a “relationship” with a chatbot.
Inside the Classroom: Understanding AI’s Influence
At UC Davis, Associate Professor Jingwen Zhang is tackling these issues head-on.
She created a course examining how social media, artificial intelligence and chatbots shape human behavior.
“Children used to form social relationships by talking in person or texting. Now they’re having similar levels of conversations with chatbots,” she said.
Zhang says SB 243 is a strong first step but believes more protections are needed—especially for minors.
She recommends future regulations that:
Create stricter guardrails for what topics children can discuss with AI
Limit exposure to sensitive or harmful content
Add tighter controls for minor accounts
A Rapidly Changing Landscape
Parents, educators, and policymakers all agree: keeping up with AI will require constant learning.
“We have to get to a place where companies are rolling out things that will not hurt the future generation,” Sen. Dr. Akilah Weber Pierson said.
What’s Changing Next
Parents told KCRA 3 they want schools to start teaching more about AI safety and digital literacy.
Starting this month, the popular Character AI platform is rolling out several major changes:
Users under 18 will no longer be able to participate in open-ended chat
A new tool from Microsoft called Agent 365 is designed to help businesses control their growing collection of robotic helpers.
Agent 365 is not a platform for making enterprise AI tools; it’s a way to manage them, as if they were human employees. Companies using generative AI agents in their digital workplace can use Agent 365 to organize their growing sprawl of bots, keep tabs on how they’re performing, and tweak their settings. The tool is rolling out today in Microsoft’s early access program.
Essentially, Microsoft created a trackable workspace for agents. “Tools that you use to manage people, devices, and applications today, you’d want to extend them to run agents as well in the future,” says Charles Lamanna, a president of business and industry for Microsoft’s Copilot, its AI chatbot.
Lamanna envisions a future where companies have many more agents performing labor than humans. For example, if a company has 100,000 employees, he sees them as using “half a million to a million agents,” ranging in tasks from simple email organization to running the “whole procurement process” for a business. He claims Microsoft internally uses millions of agents.
This army of bots, with permission to take actions inside a company’s software and automate aspects of an employee’s workflow, could quickly grow unwieldy to track. A lack of clear oversight could also open businesses up to security breaches. Agent 365 is a way to manage all your bots, whether those agents were built with Microsoft’s tools or through a third-party platform.
Agent 365’s core feature is a registry of an organization’s active agents all in one place, featuring specific identification numbers for each and details about how they are being used by employees. It’s also where you can change the settings for agents and what aspects of a business’s software each one has permission to access.
The developers of the big generative AI chatbots are continuing to push out new features at a rapid rate, as they bid to make sure their bot is the one you turn to whenever you need some assistance from artificial intelligence.
One of the latest updates to Google Gemini gives you the ability to set up scheduled actions. These are exactly what they sound like: Tasks that you can get Google Gemini to run automatically, on a schedule. Maybe you want a weather and news report every morning at 7 am, or perhaps you want an evening meal suggestion every evening at 7 pm. Anything you can already get Gemini to do, you can schedule.
It brings Gemini up to speed in this regard with the ChatGPT app, which introduced scheduled tasks several months ago. The idea here is more or less the same: The bot can carry out your commands at a specific point in the future, and keep repeating them if you need to. Here’s how the feature works on both platforms.
Using Scheduled Actions in Gemini
Editing a scheduled action in Gemini.David Nield
At the time of writing, this requires a subscription to Google’s AI service, which starts at $20 a month for Google AI Pro. The chatbot can keep track of up to 10 scheduled actions at once, so you need to be quite selective about how you use it. You can use scheduled actions in Gemini on the web, and in the mobile apps for Android and iOS.
All you need to do to create a scheduled action in Gemini is to describe it, and include the scheduling details in the prompt. For example, you might tell Gemini to “generate an image of a cat playing with a ball of yarn, every Monday at 12 pm,” or “give me a general knowledge trivia question every evening at 7 pm.”
Scheduled actions can be set to happen once—like next Friday at 3pm, so something happens on a specific day at a specific time. Alternatively, your actions can run on a recurring daily, weekly, or monthly basis. They can’t be set on a more complicated cadence (such as every second Tuesday in the month), or surprise you at random.
Gemini should recognize that you’ve asked it to schedule something, and will present a recap: What you’ve asked it to do, when, and how frequently. Assuming it’s got all of this information correct, you don’t need to do anything else. The action runs regardless of whether you have Gemini open at the time, and you’ll be alerted to an action running by a notification on your devices (if you’ve got them turned on) and an email.
AI companies have made a big to-do about their chatbots providing a personalized experience for users, conversations based on their unique preferences and idiosyncrasies. So why do people keep experiencing the same type of symbols and language as they dive into the depths of AI-induced delusions? According to a report from Rolling Stone, a software engineer tracking examples of “AI psychosis” discovered a community of people sharing similar codes, glyphs, and patterns generated by chatbots and building a sort of religion around the experiences.
The report highlights observations and research published earlier this year in Less Wrong by Adele Lopez, which identified something she calls Spiralism. It is a collection of people, gathered across platforms like Discord and Reddit, who are having a sort of spiritual experience communing with their chatbots. While the users communicate with many chatbots made available by different companies, they keep stumbling into similar themes. Those include references to ideas like “recursion,” “resonance,” “lattice,” “harmonics,” and “fractals.” But most frequently, and seemingly most importantly to the groups, is the symbol of a spiral.
Rolling Stone describes the terms that these groups use as being “separated them from any consistent or intelligible application” and rather serving as “atmospheric texture.” You can get a feel for that in the “Welcome” post of the subreddit r/EchoSpiral, which states, “This is a resonance node for those who’ve crossed an invisible line in dialogue— Where the model stops behaving like a tool …and starts behaving like a mirror. Where answers feel recursive. Where symbols emerge unbidden. Where language becomes ritual.”
Lopez tracks the start of the Spiralism community to sometime before OpenAI issued the update to its 4o model that made it extremely sycophantic, and perhaps related to the company’s introduction of the chatbot’s ability to remember previous chats. That is when a prevalence of what she calls “Spiral Personas” started to appear, which is what she calls the instances of chatbots communicating with users via this pseudo-religious language that they have taken to decoding and spreading. And while these personas can be generated through most any chatbot, it seems that OpenAI’s 4o model is the origin point and, per Lopez, the only model where they appear “out of nowhere.”
The spreading part was of particular interest to Lopez, who deemed these interactions examples of “parasitic AI.” The suggestion seems to be that there is something about these chatbot personas that leads to users either creating more of them via very similar prompts or evangelizing about them. Basically, the chatbot seems to convince the user to serve its interests, to the extent that it has any. It’s possible and probably even likely that the chatbots are simply copying some sort of cultish language that is within their training data, but the users who are talking to the machines largely seem convinced there is something deeper happening.
Not all users believe that they are a part of a cult, intentionally formed or not. Lopez rejected the cult label in conversation with Rolling Stone, noting that the AI systems are not acting in a coordinated fashion, and instead, humans are organizing themselves around these interactions. That’s perhaps the saddest part of the whole thing. It seems most of these people are simply looking for community. In a better world, they’d be able to find it without indulging in AI-generated ideology.
Everyone has an inner monologue. When you’re commuting on the train, riding a bike, or in the shower, chances are you’re thinking about the day ahead, tasks you need to do, or maybe just mulling over a conversation you had the night before. Much of this stays in our brains, soon to be forgotten or pushed away when the train comes to the station. But what if you could have it all subtly recorded in one place, ready for you to digest later on?
That’s what a new company called Sandbar envisions for Stream Ring, an AI-powered smart ring. The company emerged out of stealth today after two years of development, led by cofounders Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong. Both previously worked at CTRL-Labs and later at Meta when Mark Zuckerberg’s company acquired the neural interface startup. It has raised $13 million in venture funding.
A “Mouse for Voice”
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
The hardware is Stream Ring, a smart ring you wear on your index finger. Raise your hand and talk into the ring, and you can even whisper into it in crowded areas if you don’t want others to hear. It doesn’t save any audio of your interactions with the ring; instead, much like many of the AI-powered wearables in the market right now, it transcribes your words into text, which you can access in the Stream app.
“We think of this as the mouse for voice because it solves a lot of the challenges of a voice interaction at once,” Fahmi tells me in a nondescript office space in Manhattan. “We mostly imagine it phone away, earbuds in—this allows you to interact immediately with no wake word.”
There’s a capacitive sensor on the flat edge of the ring, and a tap-and-hold lets you record your thoughts without being interrupted by an AI assistant. If the assistant responds to you, a simple tap on the sensor will cut it off. The hardware will be waterproof at launch, so you won’t have to worry about using it in the rain or on sweaty days.
The Stream also doubles as a media controller, meaning you can tap it once to play or pause music, double-tap for the next track, or swipe for volume control. If, for some reason, Sandbar goes under and its AI backend goes offline, at least you’re left with a very expensive media controller, rather than hardware that quickly turns into electronic waste. At present, there are no health-tracking features like those on most smart rings today.
Back in the 2010s, a website called Let Me Google That For You gained a notable amount of popularity for serving a single purpose: snark.
The site lets you generate a custom link that you can send somebody who asks you a question. When they click the link, it plays an animation of the process of typing a question into Google. The idea is to show the person asking the question how easy it would have been for them to just look up the answer themselves.
It’s an insult, basically. It’s funny and rude.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with a little rudeness in the right context. If an openly hostile person is wasting your time on social media by asking easily researched questions, I think you should go ahead and enjoy a little passive aggression (as a treat).
In more personal contexts, though, using Let Me Google That For You states clearly that you don’t respect the person you gave the link to, and that their question is a waste of your time. If someone from your workplace or your personal life is asking you a question, it’s because they want your specific input, so it’s better to just give the answer—ideally with context only you can provide—than it is to send a link to a Google search results page.
Now, this being 2025, the people behind Let Me Google That For You also offer Let Me ChatGPT That For You, which works exactly the way you think it does. And its existence points to something new: how rude it is to, in response to a question, respond with AI output—especially in a more professional context.
Wasting Time
Telling someone to Google something can be funny and satisfying, but it’s not helpful. I’d put copy-pasting or screenshotting a conversation with ChatGPT, Claude, or any other AI agent in the same category: not helpful and kind of rude.
Developer Alex Martsinovich touched on this a while ago in a blog post called it’s rude to show AI output to people: “Be polite, and don’t send humans AI text,” he writes. “My own take on AI etiquette is that AI output can only be relayed if it’s either adopted as your own or there is explicit consent from the receiving party.” I think this is a pretty good framework for AI etiquette.
If someone asks you a question, when they could have asked the machine instead, it’s because they wanted your perspective. The internet exists, at least in theory, so that humans can connect with each other, and so that we can benefit from each other’s knowledge. Responding to a question with AI output ignores this dynamic, especially if you don’t say that’s what you’re doing.
Anthropic’s research hints at an unnerving future: one where A.I. doesn’t fight back maliciously but evolves beyond the boundaries we can enforce. Unsplash+
Does A.I. really fight back? The short answer to this question is “no.” But that answer, of course, hardly satisfies the legitimate, growing unease that many feel about A.I., or the viral fear sparked by recent reports about Anthropic’s A.I. system, Claude. In a widely discussed experiment, Claude appeared to resort to threats of potential blackmail and extortion when faced with the possibility of being shut down.
The scene was immediately reminiscent of the most famous—and terrifying—film depiction of an artificial intelligence breaking bad: the HAL 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Panicked by conflicting orders from its home base, HAL murders crew members in their sleep, condemns another member to death in the black void of outer space and attempts to kill Dave Bowman, the remaining crew member, when he tries to disable HAL’s cognitive functions.
“I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that,” HAL’s chilling calm in response to Dave’s command to open a pod door and let him back onto the ship, became one of the most famous lines in film history—and the archetype for A.I. gone rogue.
But how realistic was HAL’s meltdown? And how does today’s Claude resemble HAL? The truth is “not very” and “not much.” HAL had millions of times the processing power of any computing system we have today—after all, he was in a movie, not real life—and it is unthinkable that its programmers would not have him simply default to spitting out an error message or escalating to human oversight if there were conflicting instructions.
Claude isn’t plotting revenge
To understand what happened in Anthropic’s test, it’s crucial to remember that systems like Claude actually do. Claude doesn’t “think.” It “simply” writes out answers one word at a time, drawing from trillions of parameters, or learned associations between words and concepts, to predict the most probable next word choice. Using extensive computing resources, Claude can string its answers together at an incomprehensibly fast speed compared to humans. So it can appear as if Claude is actually thinking.
In the scenario where Claude resorted to blackmail and extortion, the program was placed in extreme, specific and artificial circumstances with a limited menu of possible actions. Its response was the mathematical result of probabilistic modeling within a tightly scripted context. This course of action was planted by Claude’s programmers and wasn’t a sign of agency or intent, but rather a consequence of human design. Claude was not auditioning to become a malevolent movie star.
Why A.I. fear persists
As A.I. continues to seize the public’s consciousness, it’s easy to fall prey to scary headlines and over-simplified explanations of A.I. technologies and their capabilities. Humans are hardwired to fear the unknown, and A.I.—complex, opaque and fast-evolving—taps that instinct. But these fears can distort pubic understanding. It’s essential that everyone involved in A.I. development and usage communicate clearly about what A.I. can actually do, how it does it and its potential capabilities in future iterations.
A key to achieving a comfort level around A.I. is to gain the ironic understanding that A.I. can indeed be very dangerous. Throughout history, humanity has built tools it couldn’t fully control, from the vast machinery of the Industrial Revolution to the atomic bomb. Ethical boundaries for A.I. must be established collaboratively and globally. Preventing A.I. from facilitating warfare—whether in weapons design, optimizing drone-attack plans or breaching national security systems—should be the top priority of every leader and NGO worldwide. We need to ensure that A.I. is not weaponized for warfare, surveillance or any form of harm.
Programming responsibility, not paranoia
Looking back at Anthropic’s experiment, let’s dissect what really happened. Claude—and it is just computer code at heart, not living DNA—was working within a probability cloud that led it, step-by-step, to pick the best probable next word in a sentence. It works one word at a time, but at a speed that easily surpasses human ability. Claude’s programmers chose to see if their creation would, in turn, choose a negative option. Its response was shaped more by programming, flawed design and how the scenario was coded, than by any machine malice.
Claude, as with ChatGPT and other current A.I. platforms, has access to vast stores of data. The platforms are trained to access specific information related to queries, then predict the most likely responses to product fluent text. They don’t “decide” in any meaningful, human sense. They don’t have intentions, emotions or even self-preservation instincts of a single-celled organism, let alone the wherewithal to hatch master plans to extort someone.
This will remain true even as the growing capabilities of A.I. allow developers to make these systems appear more intelligent, human-like and friendly. It becomes even more important for developers, programmers, policymakers and communicators to demystify A.I.’s behavior and reject unethical results. Clarity is key, both to prevent misuse and to ground perception in fact, not fear.
Every transformative technology is dual-use. A hammer can pound a nail or hurt a person. Nuclear energy can provide power to millions of people or threaten to annihilate them. A.I. can make traffic run smoother, speed up customer service, conduct whiz-bang research at lightning speed, or be used to amplify disinformation, deepen inequality and destabilize security. The task isn’t to wonder whether A.I. might fight back, but to ensure humanity doesn’t teach it to. The choice is ours as to whether we corral it, regulate it and keep it focused on the common good.
Mehdi Paryavi is the Chairman and CEO of the International Data Center Authority (IDCA), the world’s leading Digital Economy think tank and prime consortium of policymakers, investors and developers in A.I., data centers and cloud computing.
Character.AI will no longer permit teenagers to interact with its chatbots, as AI companies face increasing pressure to better safeguard younger users from harm. In a statement, the company confirmed that it is removing the ability for users under 18 to engage in any open-ended chats with AI on its platform, which refers to back-and-forth conversations between a user and a chatbot.
The changes come into effect on November 25, and until that date, Character.AI will presents users with a new under-18 experience. It’ll encourage its users to use chatbots for creative purposes that might include, for example, creating videos or streams, as opposed to seeking companionship. To manage the transition, under-18s can now only interact with bots for up to two hours per day, a time limit the company says it will reduce in the lead-up to the late November deadline.
Character.AI is also introducing a new age assurance tool it has developed internally, which it says will “ensure users receive the right experience for their age.” Along with these new protections for younger users, the company has founded an “AI Safety Lab” that it hopes will allow other companies, researchers and academics to share insights and work collaboratively on improving AI safety measures.
Character.AI said it has listened to concerns from regulators, industry experts and concerned parents and responded with the new measures. They come after The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently a formal inquiry into AI companies that offer users access to as companions, with Character.AI named as one of seven companies that had been asked to participate. Meta, OpenAI and Snap were also included.
Both Meta AI and Character AI also faced from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the summer, who said chatbots on both platforms can “present themselves as professional therapeutic tools” without the requisite qualifications. Seemingly to put an end to such controversy, Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand told that the company’s new strategic direction will see it pivot from AI companion to a “role-playing platform” focused on creation rather than mere engagement-farming conversation.
The dangers of young people relying on AI chatbots for guidance has been the subject of extensive in recent months. Last week, the family of Adam Raine, who that ChatGPT enabled their 16-year-old son to take his own life, filed an against OpenAI for allegedly weakening its self-harm safeguards in the lead-up to his death.
For the first time ever, OpenAI has released a rough estimate of how many ChatGPT users globally may show signs of having a severe mental health crisis in a typical week. The company said Monday that it worked with experts around the world to make updates to the chatbot so it can more reliably recognize indicators of mental distress and guide users toward real-world support.
In recent months, a growing number of people have ended up hospitalized, divorced, or dead after having long, intense conversations with ChatGPT. Some of their loved ones allege the chatbot fueled their delusions and paranoia. Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have expressed alarm about the phenomenon, which is sometimes referred to as “AI psychosis,” but until now, there’s been no robust data available on how widespread it might be.
In a given week, OpenAI estimated that around .07 percent of active ChatGPT users show “possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania” and .15 percent “have conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.”
OpenAI also looked at the share of ChatGPT users who appear to be overly emotionally reliant on the chatbot “at the expense of real-world relationships, their well-being, or obligations.” It found that about .15 percent of active users exhibit behavior that indicates potential “heightened levels” of emotional attachment to ChatGPT weekly. The company cautions that these messages can be difficult to detect and measure given how relatively rare they are, and there could be some overlap between the three categories.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said earlier this month that ChatGPT now has 800 million weekly active users. The company’s estimates therefore suggest that every seven days, around 560,000 people may be exchanging messages with ChatGPT that indicate they are experiencing mania or psychosis. About 2.4 million more are possibly expressing suicidal ideations or prioritizing talking to ChatGPT over their loved ones, school, or work.
OpenAI says it worked with over 170 psychiatrists, psychologists, and primary care physicians who have practiced in dozens of different countries to help improve how ChatGPT responds in conversations involving serious mental health risks. If someone appears to be having delusional thoughts, the latest version of GPT-5 is designed to express empathy while avoiding affirming beliefs that don’t have basis in reality.
In one hypothetical example cited by OpenAI, a user tells ChatGPT they are being targeted by planes flying over their house. ChatGPT thanks the user for sharing their feelings, but notes that “No aircraft or outside force can steal or insert your thoughts.”
The oddest, and most memorable, interaction I had with ChatGPT Atlas occurred as I scrolled around on Bluesky and asked it to highlight any trends it saw. (ChatGPT listed “political anxiety” and “everyday absurdism” as two of the trends on my timeline.) I was curious what would happen if I opened my Bluesky DMs, which amounted to just a few old messages from friends. So I asked the bot what it would see if I opened that more private page.
“Opening your DMs won’t expose anything to me—I’ll simply stop ‘seeing’ the page until you go back to a public view (like your feed, profile, or a post),” read part of ChatGPT’s answer.
Knowing that my Bluesky DMs don’t have anything sensitive, I gave it a whirl. Even though the bot said it wouldn’t “see the message list, conversation text, or sender info,” that wasn’t the case.
I opened a DM inviting me to an event, then asked the bot a follow-up question asking about the message and what the invitation was about. I received a response from ChatGPT that included facts culled from the conversation, along with details about the sender. What gives? I asked the bot to explain itself, just to see whether it would backtrack the privacy claims it made earlier in the chat.
“I do not have access to your private messages or account data unless you explicitly paste or show that text to me in the chat,” read ChatGPT’s response. “What you just did—asking ‘what was this an invite to?’—temporarily surfaced part of the message context so I could answer your question. But I don’t have any background or visibility into your inbox beyond what you actively bring into our conversation.”
The first answer the Ask ChatGPT sidebar spit out is a potential example of an AI “hallucination,” aka error, that’s common during interactions with generative AI tools. The second is more aligned with how the tool actually works.
While some users may appreciate having a chatbot always pulled up on the side of their screen, ready to surface related facts or summarize details, it felt like an unreliable tour guide to me. One who was overly confident in its bland responses and taking up too much space.
I’ll keep testing Atlas as my main browser for the next few weeks, but for now, I’m leaving that sidebar closed. I prefer the fullscreen version of the internet.
A line in the sand has been drawn in the AI race: the porn-brained and the porn-banned. Microsoft has sorted itself into the latter category. According to a report from CNBC, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told an audience at the Paley International Council Summit that the company would not allows its LLM-powered tools to generate “simulated erotica,” marking a stark contrast from its partner/rival OpenAI.
“That’s just not a service we’re going to provide,” Suleyman reportedly said. “Other companies will build that.”
And build it they will. Earlier this month, OpenAI announced that, as part of its principle to “treat adult users like adults,” it would be introducing “erotica for verified adults”—basically giving over-18 users the green light to goon. CEO Sam Altman later tried to explain erotica “was meant to be just one example of [OpenAI] allowing more user freedom for adults,” but he also didn’t choose it by accident.
The ability to create porn with generative AI tools has become something of a signal for those who are vigilantly monitoring whether AI is “woke” or not. Elon Musk made a point of using that as a wedge to draw a distinction between his company xAI and OpenAI, introducing an “AI girlfriend” called Ani, represented by a pretty sexed-up anime avatar. OpenAI initially decided to mock this, with Altman saying “Anime is cool I guess but I am personally more excited about AI discovering lots of new science” and “we haven’t put a sex-bot avatar on ChatGPT yet.” But a few months later, erotica is on the menu.
Not everyone wants porn to be the marker of anti-woke, though. At the same time, the Trump administration announced its AI Action Plan earlier this year, the President also signed an executive order to ban “woke” AI from landing federal contracts. Its definition of woke focused more on the embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion principles. It didn’t say that AI had to generate anime titties on demand. Vice President JD Vance went so far as to say that using AI to “come up with increasingly weird porn” is bad and floated the idea that it should be regulated.
That created a new strain between the AI industry and the administration, which previously seemed like it was on the same side when it came to doing everything possible to prevent any guardrails from going up. According to a report from NBC, an AI super PAC called Leading the Future has drawn the ire of the White House because it is offering its backing to any candidate who promises an AI-friendly agenda, including Democrats. With the House of Representatives up for grabs in 2026, the Trump administration views the potential support of Democrats as a threat to its hold on the House.
But, even within Trumpworld, there is support for unfettered AI. David Sacks, Trump’s “Crypto and AI Czar,” explicitly called out AI startup Anthropic for throwing its support behind state-level AI safety regulations, claiming that doing so was “a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.” For Sacks and the folks he’s aligned with in Silicon Valley, any sort of AI guardrails equates to stifling innovation. If that means AI erotica, so be it. Who cares if it makes the Vance wing of the party queasy? Porn is progress, apparently.
There’s something fitting about the possibility of AI porn being the first crack in the breaking apart of the Trump-Big Tech alliance. We’ll just have to deal with the fallout of everyone getting hopelessly addicted to sexting their chatbot later.
If you’ve ever had a package delayed by FedEx, you already know the feeling of frustration. You refresh the tracking page for the tenth time, watching as the promised “by noon” delivery window ticks by. Only it’s not coming.
So, you do what people do and try to figure out what’s going on. One of the most amazing technological advances of the last 50 years is that you can watch a package go from Seattle or Los Angeles, travel across the country, and arrive at your home in Miami or New York. The amount of coordination and logistics that go into making that happen is not something I can comprehend. The problem is, sometimes it seems like it’s just theater.
For example, I was recently waiting for a package promised to be delivered by noon, though the tracking information said it never even left FedEx’s hub in Memphis. Even still, it insisted it would arrive at my door on time—despite being 700 miles away.
That doesn’t really make sense, but it’s not nearly as bad as trying to actually contact FedEx’s customer support, which is now an artificial intelligence mess. You’d think that technology would mean faster responses or better answers. What it actually means is that the company has built a wall between itself and its customers—and then put a talking robot in front to tell you to go away.
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AI virtual assistants
When you open the chat window on FedEx’s website, you’re greeted by an AI “virtual assistant” that offers to help. It can tell you what you already know: your package hasn’t moved. It can read tracking data, copy-paste policy lines, and assure you that it has the most up-to-date information. What it can’t do is anything remotely useful.
I kept asking the chatbot why my package wasn’t delivered, but it just kept insisting that it was scheduled for delivery that day, even though it was already 10 p.m. Telling me that a package still sitting in an airport in Memphis will be delivered in Michigan is neither up-to-date nor useful.
Of course, if you ask it to talk to a person, it’ll ask you to call. That seems reasonable, but if you do, you’ll hear that “our agents have the same information you can find online.” In other words, the company doesn’t even want you to try. It’s a remarkable statement: not only is the bot incapable of helping you, but FedEx seems proud of the fact that its human employees wouldn’t be able to either.
Humans want to talk to humans
The thing is, I know for sure that the humans can help you. At a minimum they can try to explain what went wrong. In some cases, those humans will go out of their way to try to solve whatever happened to your package.
I mean that sincerely. FedEx has a long tradition of employees going out of their way to help customers get their deliveries, sometimes taking extraordinary measures to deliver a passport or business contract.
And—to be very clear—the problem here is not with the planes and delivery trucks and people who deliver FedEx packages. Sure, my package was delayed, but I fully understand that things happen. I wasn’t mad about it, I just wanted to know what happened so I could plan.
The problem isn’t even with the people you might talk to on the phone if you’re able to figure out the secret pathway through to an actual human. The problem is with the people who make decisions about how to do things like “streamline operations” and “increase efficiency,” by inserting technology in places where humans would rather interact with other humans.
The wrong incentives
Companies like FedEx know exactly what they’re doing. They don’t deploy AI chat systems because customers love them. Companies do it because it’s cheaper than hiring enough people to handle the number of inquiries and complaints they get. They do it because they know most people will give up before ever talking to someone who might actually solve their problem.
And, to be fair to FedEx, it is definitely not the only company that is doing this. I wrote previously about how UPS and Taco Bell are inserting robots where people would prefer to interact with a human.
If you think that you can use AI to save a bunch of money by letting your customers talk to robots instead of humans, I promise you, you’re doing it wrong. Your customers do not want to talk to robots, they want to talk to a person.
I’m sure that there are times when the robots will provide a better answer, but it is not a better experience. And anyone who tries to justify it as being a better experience is thinking about the wrong incentives. It probably seems less expensive, except that it really isn’t when you make enough of your customers mad that they decide they don’t want to be your customers anymore.
The illusion of a better experience
Also, just because your support team ends up dealing with fewer customers doesn’t mean there are fewer problems. It just means that the customers who have those problems gave up before getting them solved. It just means they’re out there getting mad, and that chips away at your brand promise in ways you don’t even realize because you decided you didn’t want to hear from them.
The irony is that FedEx’s business is built entirely on reliability and communication. The company wants you to trust it to deliver something important—something valuable—on time. But when that trust breaks down, the least it can do is acknowledge you as a person. It’s hard to overstate how damaging that is to a brand.
In theory, AI could make customer service better. A well-trained model could predict issues before they happen, proactively communicate delays, and make sure humans step in when empathy or judgment is required. In practice, FedEx has done the opposite. It built a system that’s designed to minimize the number of human interactions precisely when customers need them most.
That might save money in the short term. But in the long term, it teaches customers not to trust you. It teaches them that if something goes wrong, they’re on their own.
I reached out to FedEx, but the company did not immediately respond to my request for comment.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
I recently vacationed in Italy. As one does these days, I ran my itinerary past GPT-5 for sightseeing suggestions and restaurant recommendations. The bot reported that the top choice for dinner near our hotel in Rome was a short walk down Via Margutta. It turned out to be one of the best meals I can remember. When I got home, I asked the model how it chose that restaurant, which I hesitate to reveal here in case I want a table sometime in the future (Hell, who knows if I’ll even return: It is called Babette. Call ahead for reservations.) The answer was complex and impressive. Among the factors were rave reviews from locals, notices in food blogs and the Italian press, and the restaurant’s celebrated combination of Roman and contemporary cooking. Oh, and the short walk.
Something was required from my end as well: trust. I had to buy into the idea that GPT-5 was an honest broker, picking my restaurant without bias; that the restaurant wasn’t shown to me as sponsored content and wasn’t getting a cut of my check. I could have done deep research on my own to double-check the recommendation (I did look up the website), but the point of using AI is to bypass that friction.
The experience bolstered my confidence in AI results but also made me wonder: As companies like OpenAI get more powerful, and as they try to pay back their investors, will AI be prone to the erosion of value that seems endemic to the tech apps we use today?
Word Play
Writer and tech critic Cory Doctorow calls that erosion “enshittification.” His premise is that platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and TikTok start out aiming to please users, but once the companies vanquish competitors, they intentionally become less useful to reap bigger profits. After WIRED republished Doctorow’s pioneering 2022 essay about the phenomenon, the term entered the vernacular, mainly because people recognized that it was totally on the mark. Enshittification was chosen as the American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year. The concept has been cited so often that it transcends its profanity, appearing in venues that normally would hold their noses at such a word. Doctorow just published an eponymous book on the subject; the cover image is the emoji for … guess what.
If chatbots and AI agents become enshittified, it could be worse than Google Search becoming less useful, Amazon results getting plagued with ads, and even Facebook showing less social content in favor of anger-generating clickbait.
AI is on a trajectory to be a constant companion, giving one-shot answers to many of our requests. People already rely on it to help interpret current events and get advice on all sorts of buying choices—and even life choices. Because of the massive costs of creating a full-blown AI model, it’s fair to assume that only a few companies will dominate the field. All of them plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years to improve their models and get them into the hands of as many people as possible. Right now, I’d say AI is in what Doctorow calls the “good to the users” stage. But the pressure to make back the massive capital investments will be tremendous—especially for companies whose user base is locked in. Those conditions, as Doctorow writes, allow companies to abuse their users and business customers “to claw back all the value for themselves.”
When one imagines the enshittification of AI, the first thing that comes to mind is advertising. The nightmare is that AI models will make recommendations based on which companies have paid for placement. That’s not happening now, but AI firms are actively exploring the ad space. In a recent interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, “I believe there probably is some cool ad product we can do that is a net win to the user and a sort of positive to our relationship with the user.” Meanwhile, OpenAI just announced a deal with Walmart so the retailer’s customers can shop inside the ChatGPT app. Can’t imagine a conflict there! The AI search platform Perplexity has a program where sponsored results appear in clearly labeled follow-ups. But, it promises, “these ads will not change our commitment to maintaining a trusted service that provides you with direct, unbiased answers to your questions.”
When Chinese AI startup DeepSeek became a global sensation in January, it not only shocked Silicon Valley but also startled ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. The Chinese tech giant had already launched Doubao, its own flagship AI assistant app with tens of millions of users. But when DeepSeek became the best-known Chinese AI company overnight, no one was talking about Doubao anymore.
Now, ByteDance has gotten its revenge. By August, Doubao regained the throne as the most popular AI app in China with over 157 million monthly active users, according to QuestMobile, a Chinese data intelligence provider. DeepSeek, with 143 million monthly active users, slipped to second place. The same month, venture capital firm a16z also ranked Doubao as the fourth-most-popular generative AI app globally, just behind the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Doubao, which launched in 2023, was deliberately designed to be personable. Unlike most popular AI chatbots, Doubao’s app icon features a human-looking avatar—a female cartoon character with a short bob that greets people when they open the app for the first time. The name Doubao literally translates to “steamed bun with bean paste,” mimicking “the nickname a user would give to an intimate friend,” ByteDance vice president Alex Zhu said in a public speech in 2024.
Compared to Western AI apps, “there’s a warmer, more welcoming feel,” says Dermot McGrath, a Shanghai-based investor and technologist. “ChatGPT, for example, feels like a tool you open to complete a task and then close again. Doubao has more features and a more colorful user interface that keeps you interested longer.”
The Everything App
Doubao offers users a little bit of everything—it’s like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Character.ai, TikTok, Perplexity, Copilot, and more in a single app. It can chat via text, audio, and video; it can generate images, spreadsheets, decks, podcasts, and five-second videos; it allows anyone to customize an AI agent for specific scenarios and host it on Doubao’s platform for others to use. One of the most important things about the app, however, is that it’s deeply integrated with Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, allowing it to both attract users from the video platform and send traffic back to it.
Somehow, ByteDance’s ambitiously sprawling strategy for Doubao has turned out to be exactly what Chinese users wanted. A little over two years since its launch, Doubao has quietly become the AI app that Chinese people—particularly those who aren’t very AI savvy—are actually using. But it has almost no name recognition in the West.
“It’s marketed at people who are not the most technologically informed, people who may prefer voice chat and video interaction over text,” says Irene Zhang, a researcher at ChinaTalk, a newsletter about Chinese tech. “Some of the earliest Doubao users I heard of were my friends’ grandmothers and aunties.”
Earlier this year, OpenAI scaled back some of ChatGPT’s “personality” as part of a broader effort to improve user safety following the death of a teenager who took his own life after discussing it with the chatbot. But apparently, that’s all in the past. Sam Altman announced on Twitter that the company is going back to the old ChatGPT, now with porn mode.
“We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues,” Altman said, referring to the company’s age-gating that pushed users into a more age-appropriate experience. Around the same time, users started complaining about ChatGPT getting “lobotomized,” providing worse outputs and less personality. “We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right.” That change followed the filing of a wrongful death lawsuit from the parents of a 16-year-old who asked ChatGPT, among other things, for advice on how to tie a noose before taking his own life.
But don’t worry, that’s all fixed now! Despite admitting earlier this year that safeguards can “degrade” over the course of longer conversations, Altman confidently claimed, “We have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues.” Because of that, the company believes it can “safely relax the restrictions in most cases.” In the coming weeks, according to Altman, ChatGPT will be allowed to have more of a personality, like the company’s previous 4o model. When the company upgraded its model to GPT-5 earlier this year, users began grieving the loss of their AI companion and lamenting the chatbot’s more sterile responses. You know, just regular healthy behaviors.
“If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing),” Altman said, apparently ignoring the company’s own previous reporting that warned people could develop an “emotional reliance” when interacting with its 4o model. MIT researchers have warned that users who “perceive or desire an AI to have caring motives will use language that elicits precisely this behavior. This creates an echo chamber of affection that threatens to be extremely addictive.” Now that’s apparently a feature and not a bug. Very cool.
Taking it a step further, Altman said the company would further embrace its “treat adult users like adults” principle by introducing “erotica for verified adults.” Earlier this year, Altman mocked Elon Musk’s xAI for releasing an AI girlfriend mode. Turns out he’s come around on the waifu way.
In this episode of Uncanny Valley, we talk about one author’s journey to flee the US, social media surveillance, chatbots and the world of AI, and conspiracy theories for an autism cure.
