Tag Archives: AI sycophancy

OpenAI researcher quits over ChatGPT ads, warns of “Facebook” path

On Wednesday, former OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig published a guest essay in The New York Times announcing that she resigned from the company on Monday, the same day OpenAI began testing advertisements inside ChatGPT. Hitzig, an economist and published poet who holds a junior fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows, spent two years at… Read More »

OpenAI is hoppin’ mad about Anthropic’s new Super Bowl TV ads

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch complained on X after rival AI lab Anthropic released four commercials, two of which will run during the Super Bowl on Sunday, mocking the idea of including ads in AI chatbot conversations. Anthropic’s campaign seemingly touched a nerve at OpenAI just weeks after… Read More »

Does Anthropic believe its AI is conscious, or is that just what it wants Claude to think?

At that time, Anthropic’s framing was entirely mechanical, establishing rules for the model to critique itself against, with no mention of Claude’s well-being, identity, emotions, or potential consciousness. The 2026 constitution is a different beast entirely: 30,000 words that read less like a behavioral checklist and more like a philosophical treatise on the nature of… Read More »

Users flock to open source Moltbot for always-on AI, despite major risks

An open source AI assistant called Moltbot (formerly “Clawdbot”) recently crossed 69,000 stars on GitHub after a month, making it one of the fastest-growing AI projects of 2026. Created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, the tool lets users run a personal AI assistant and control it through messaging apps they already use. While some say… Read More »

From prophet to product: How AI came back down to earth in 2025

To be sure, it’s hard to see this not ending in some market carnage. The current “winner-takes-most” mentality in the space means the bets are big and bold, but the market can’t support dozens of major independent AI labs or hundreds of application-layer startups. That’s the definition of a bubble environment, and when it pops,… Read More »

Researchers surprised that with AI, toxicity is harder to fake than intelligence

The next time you encounter an unusually polite reply on social media, you might want to check twice. It could be an AI model trying (and failing) to blend in with the crowd. On Wednesday, researchers from the University of Zurich, University of Amsterdam, Duke University, and New York University released a study revealing that… Read More »

OpenAI data suggests 1 million users discuss suicide with ChatGPT weekly

Earlier this month, the company unveiled a wellness council to address these concerns, though critics noted the council did not include a suicide prevention expert. OpenAI also recently rolled out controls for parents of children who use ChatGPT. The company says it’s building an age prediction system to automatically detect children using ChatGPT and impose… Read More »

Millions turn to AI chatbots for spiritual guidance and confession

Privacy concerns compound these issues. “I wonder if there isn’t a larger danger in pouring your heart out to a chatbot,” Catholic priest Fr. Mike Schmitz told The Times. “Is it at some point going to become accessible to other people?” Users share intimate spiritual moments that now exist as data points in corporate servers.… Read More »

OpenAI announces parental controls for ChatGPT after teen suicide lawsuit

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced plans to roll out parental controls for ChatGPT and route sensitive mental health conversations to its simulated reasoning models, following what the company has called “heartbreaking cases” of users experiencing crises while using the AI assistant. The moves come after multiple reported incidents where ChatGPT allegedly failed to intervene appropriately when… Read More »

The personhood trap: How AI fakes human personality

Knowledge emerges from understanding how ideas relate to each other. LLMs operate on these contextual relationships, linking concepts in potentially novel ways—what you might call a type of non-human “reasoning” through pattern recognition. Whether the resulting linkages the AI model outputs are useful depends on how you prompt it and whether you can recognize when… Read More »