"
That hasn’t worked so far as a winning legal strategy that can be used by other chatbot makers anticipating similar discovery demands in exploding chatbot-related litigation.
Instead, it threatens to turn attention to just how much information chatbots like ChatGPT are collecting and retaining about their users."
, CNN; Inside the old church where one trillion webpages are being saved
"The Wayback Machine, a tool used by millions every day, has proven critical for academics and journalists searching for historical information on what corporations, people and governments have published online in the past, long after their websites have been updated or changed.
For many, the Wayback Machine is like a living history of the internet, and it just logged its trillionth page last month.
Archiving the web is more important and more challenging than ever before. The White House in January ordered vast amounts of government webpages to be taken down. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is blurring the line between what’s real and what’s artificially generated — in some ways replacing the need to visit websites entirely. And more of the internet is now hidden behind paywalls or tucked in conversations with AI chatbots.
It’s the Internet Archive’s job to figure out how to preserve it all."
OpenAI has largely promoted ChatGPT as a productivity tool, and in many conversations users asked for help with practical tasks such as retrieving information. But in more than 1 in 10 of the chats The Post analyzed, people engaged the chatbot in abstract discussions, musing on topics like their ideas for breakthrough medical treatments or personal beliefs about the nature of reality.
Data released by OpenAI in September from an internal study of queries sent to ChatGPT showed that most are for personal use, not work. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)...
Emotional conversations were also common in the conversations analyzed by The Post, and users often shared highly personal details about their lives. In some chats, the AI tool could be seen adapting to match a user’s viewpoint, creating a kind of personalized echo chamber in which ChatGPT endorsed falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, said his research has suggested ChatGPT’s design encourages people to form emotional attachments with the chatbot. “The optimization and incentives towards intimacy are very clear,” he said. “ChatGPT is trained to further or deepen the relationship.”"
Ken Bensinger, The New York Times; Who Pays When A.I. Is Wrong?
"Search results that Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence technology, delivered at the top of the page included the falsehoods. And mentions of a legal settlement populated automatically when they typed “Wolf River Electric” in the search box.
With cancellations piling up and their attempts to use Google’s tools to correct the issues proving fruitless, Wolf River executives decided they had no choice but to sue the tech giant for defamation.
“We put a lot of time and energy into building up a good name,” said Justin Nielsen, who founded Wolf River with three of his best friends in 2014 and helped it grow into the state’s largest solar contractor. “When customers see a red flag like that, it’s damn near impossible to win them back.”
Theirs is one of at least six defamation cases filed in the United States in the past two years over content produced by A.I. tools that generate text and images. They argue that the cutting-edge technology not only created and published false, damaging information about individuals or groups but, in many cases, continued putting it out even after the companies that built and profit from the A.I. models were made aware of the problem.
Unlike other libel or slander suits, these cases seek to define content that was not created by human beings as defamatory — a novel concept that has captivated some legal experts."
Evan Gorelick , The New York Times; Vigilante Lawyers Expose the Rising Tide of A.I. Slop in Court Filings
"Mr. Freund is part of a growing network of lawyers who track down A.I. abuses committed by their peers, collecting the most egregious examples and posting them online. The group hopes that by tracking down the A.I. slop, it can help draw attention to the problem and put an end to it.
While judges and bar associations generally agree that it’s fine for lawyers to use chatbots for research, they must still ensure their filings are accurate.
But as the technology has taken off, so has misuse. Chatbots frequently make things up, and judges are finding more and more fake case law citations, which are then rounded up by the legal vigilantes.
“These cases are damaging the reputation of the bar,” said Stephen Gillers, an ethics professor at New York University School of Law. “Lawyers everywhere should be ashamed of what members of their profession are doing.”...
The problem, though, keeps getting worse.
That’s why Damien Charlotin, a lawyer and researcher in France, started an online database in April to track it.
Initially he found three or four examples a month. Now he often receives that many in a day.
Many lawyers, including Mr. Freund and Mr. Schaefer, have helped him document 509 cases so far. They use legal tools like LexisNexis for notifications on keywords like “artificial intelligence,” “fabricated cases” and “nonexistent cases.”
Some of the filings include fake quotes from real cases, or cite real cases that are irrelevant to their arguments. The legal vigilantes uncover them by finding judges’ opinions scolding lawyers."
Santa Clara University ; Chatbot Psychosis: Data, Insights, and Practical Tips for Chatbot Developers and Users
"A number of recent articles, in The New York Times and elsewhere, have described the experience of “chatbot psychosis” that some people develop as they interact with services like ChatGPT. What do we know about chatbot psychosis? Is there a trend of such psychosis at scale? What do you learn if you sift through over one million words comprising one such experience? And what are some practical steps that companies can take to protect their users and reduce the risk of such episodes?
A computer scientist with a background in economics, Steven Adler started to focus on AI risk topics (and AI broadly) a little over a decade ago, and worked at OpenAI from late 2020 through 2024, leading various safety-related research projects and products there. He now writes about what’s happening in AI safety–and argues that safety and technological progress can very much complement each other, and in fact require each other, if the goal is to unlock the uses of AI that people want."
Blake Brittain, Reuters; OpenAI loses bid to dismiss part of US authors' copyright lawsuit
"A New York federal judge has denied OpenAI's early request to dismiss authors' claims that text generated by OpenAI's artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT infringes their copyrights.
U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein said on Monday that the authors may be able to prove the text ChatGPT produces is similar enough to their work to violate their book copyrights."
MATT O’BRIEN, AP; Reddit sues AI company Perplexity and others for ‘industrial-scale’ scraping of user comments
"Social media platform Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three other entities on Wednesday, alleging their involvement in an “industrial-scale, unlawful” economy to “scrape” the comments of millions of Reddit users for commercial gain.
Reddit’s lawsuit in a New York federal court takes aim at San Francisco-based Perplexity, maker of an AI chatbot and “answer engine” that competes with Google, ChatGPT and others in online search.
Also named in the lawsuit are Lithuanian data-scraping company Oxylabs UAB, a web domain called AWMProxy that Reddit describes as a “former Russian botnet,” and Texas-based startup SerpApi, which lists Perplexity as a customer on its website.
It’s the second such lawsuit from Reddit since it sued another major AI company, Anthropic, in June.
But the lawsuit filed Wednesday is different in the way that it confronts not just an AI company but the lesser-known services the AI industry relies on to acquire online writings needed to train AI chatbots."
Kevin Stacey, Brown; New study: AI chatbots systematically violate mental health ethics standards
"As more people turn to ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) for mental health advice, a new study details how these chatbots — even when prompted to use evidence-based psychotherapy techniques — systematically violate ethical standards of practice established by organizations like the American Psychological Association.
The research, led by Brown University computer scientists working side-by-side with mental health practitioners, showed that chatbots are prone to a variety of ethical violations. Those include inappropriately navigating crisis situations, providing misleading responses that reinforce users’ negative beliefs about themselves and others, and creating a false sense of empathy with users.
“In this work, we present a practitioner-informed framework of 15 ethical risks to demonstrate how LLM counselors violate ethical standards in mental health practice by mapping the model’s behavior to specific ethical violations,” the researchers wrote in their study. “We call on future work to create ethical, educational and legal standards for LLM counselors — standards that are reflective of the quality and rigor of care required for human-facilitated psychotherapy.”
The research will be presented on October 22, 2025 at the AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society. Members of the research team are affiliated with Brown’s Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination and Redesign."
Rachel Fieldhouse, Nature; Can AI chatbots trigger psychosis? What the science says
"Accounts of people developing psychosis — which renders them unable to distinguish between what is and is not reality — after interacting with generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots have increased in the past few months.
At least 17 people have been reported to have developed psychosis, according to a preprint posted online last month1. After engaging with chatbots such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, some of these people experienced spiritual awakenings or uncovered what they thought were conspiracies.
So far, there has been little research into this rare phenomenon, called AI psychosis, and most of what we know comes from individual instances. Nature explores the emerging theories and evidence, and what AI companies are doing about the problem."
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous; GPT-5’s Ethics Guidelines for Using It in Philosophical Research
Blake Brittain, Reuters; Anthropic’s surprise settlement adds new wrinkle in AI copyright war
"Anthropic's class action settlement with a group of U.S. authors this week was a first, but legal experts said the case's distinct qualities complicate the deal's potential influence on a wave of ongoing copyright lawsuits against other artificial-intelligence focused companies like OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms.
Amazon-backed Anthropic was under particular pressure, with a trial looming in December after a judge found it liable for pirating millions of copyrighted books. The terms of the settlement, which require a judge's approval, are not yet public. And U.S. courts have just begun to wrestle with novel copyright questions related to generative AI, which could prompt other defendants to hold out for favorable rulings."
Ezra Klein, The New York Times ; How ChatGPT Surprised Me
"In some corners of the internet — I’m looking at you, Bluesky — it’s become gauche to react to A.I. with anything save dismissiveness or anger. The anger I understand, and parts of it I share. I am not comfortable with these companies becoming astonishingly rich off the entire available body of human knowledge. Yes, we all build on what came before us. No company founded today is free of debt to the inventors and innovators who preceded it. But there is something different about inhaling the existing corpus of human knowledge, algorithmically transforming it into predictive text generation and selling it back to us. (I should note that The New York Times is suing OpenAI and its partner Microsoft for copyright infringement, claims both companies have denied.)
Right now, the A.I. companies are not making all that much money off these products. If they eventually do make the profits their investors and founders imagine, I don’t think the normal tax structure is sufficient to cover the debt they owe all of us, and everyone before us, on whose writing and ideas their models are built...
As the now-cliché line goes, this is the worst A.I. will ever be, and this is the fewest number of users it will have. The dependence of humans on artificial intelligence will only grow, with unknowable consequences both for human society and for individual human beings. What will constant access to these systems mean for the personalities of the first generation to use them starting in childhood? We truly have no idea. My children are in that generation, and the experiment we are about to run on them scares me."
MARTY LEVINE, University Times; PittGPT debuts today as private AI source for University
"Today marks the rollout of PittGPT, Pitt’s own generative AI for staff and faculty — a service that will be able to use Pitt’s sensitive, internal data in isolation from the Internet because it works only for those logging in with their Pitt ID.
“We want to be able to use AI to improve the things that we do” in our Pitt work, said Dwight Helfrich, director of the Pitt enterprise initiatives team at Pitt Digital. That means securely adding Pitt’s private information to PittGPT, including Human Resources, payroll and student data. However, he explains, in PittGPT “you would only have access to data that you would have access to in your daily role” — in your specific Pitt job.
“Security is a key part of AI,” he said. “It is much more important in AI than in other tools we provide.” Using PittGPT — as opposed to the other AI services available to Pitt employees — means that any data submitted to it “stays in our environment and it is not used to train a free AI model.”
Helfrich also emphasizes that “you should get a very similar response to PittGPT as you would get with ChatGPT,” since PittGPT had access to “the best LLM’s on the market” — the large language models used to train AI.
Faculty, staff and students already have free access to such AI services as Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot. And “any generative AI tool provides the ability to analyze data … and to rewrite things” that are still in early or incomplete drafts, Helfrich said.
“It can help take the burden off some of the work we have to do in our lives” and help us focus on the larger tasks that, so far, humans are better at undertaking, added Pitt Digital spokesperson Brady Lutsko. “When you are working with your own information, you can tell it what to include” — it won’t add misinformation from the internet or its own programming, as AI sometimes does. “If you have a draft, it will make your good work even better.”
“The human still needs to review and evaluate that this is useful and valuable,” Helfrich said of AI’s contribution to our work. “At this point we can say that there is nothing in AI that is 100 percent reliable.”
On the other hand, he said, “they’re making dramatic enhancements at a pace we’ve never seen in technology. … I’ve been in technology 30 years and I’ve never seen anything improve as quickly as AI.” In his own work, he said, “AI can help review code and provide test cases, reducing work time by 75 percent. You just have to look at it with some caution and just (verify) things.”
“Treat it like you’re having a conversation with someone you’ve just met,” Lutsko added. “You have some skepticism — you go back and do some fact checking.”
Lutsko emphasized that the University has guidance on Acceptable Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools as well as a University-Approved GenAI Tools List.
Pitt’s list of approved generative AI tools includes Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, which is available to all students, faculty and staff (as opposed to the version of Copilot built into Microsoft 365 apps, which is an add-on available to departments through Panther Express for $30 per month, per person); Google Gemini; and Google NotebookLM, which Lutsko said “serves as a dedicated research assistant for precise analysis using user-provided documents.”
PittGPT joins that list today, Helfrich said.
Pitt also has been piloting Pitt AI Connect, a tool for researchers to integrate AI into software development (using an API, or application programming interface).
And Pitt also is already deploying the PantherAI chatbot, clickable from the bottom right of the Pitt Digital and Office of Human Resources homepages, which provides answers to common questions that may otherwise be deep within Pitt’s webpages. It will likely be offered on other Pitt websites in the future.
“Dive in and use it,” Helfrich said of PittGPT. “I see huge benefits from all of the generative AI tools we have. I’ve saved time and produced better results.”"
KRIS NAGEL , Fast Company; Your employees may be leaking trade secrets into ChatGPT
"Every CEO I know wants their team to use AI more, and for good reason: it can supercharge almost every area of their business and make employees vastly more efficient. Employee use of AI is a business imperative, but as it becomes more common, how can companies avoid major security headaches?
Sift’s latest data found that 31% of consumers admit to entering personal or sensitive information into GenAI tools like ChatGPT, and 14% of those individuals explicitly reported entering company trade secrets. Other types of information that people admit to sharing with AI chatbots include financial details, nonpublic facts, email addresses, phone numbers, and information about employers. At its core, it reveals that people are increasingly willing to trust AI with sensitive information."
CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY, EurekAlert!; AI chatbots remain overconfident -- even when they’re wrong
"Artificial intelligence chatbots are everywhere these days, from smartphone apps and customer service portals to online search engines. But what happens when these handy tools overestimate their own abilities?
Researchers asked both human participants and four large language models (LLMs) how confident they felt in their ability to answer trivia questions, predict the outcomes of NFL games or Academy Award ceremonies, or play a Pictionary-like image identification game. Both the people and the LLMs tended to be overconfident about how they would hypothetically perform. Interestingly, they also answered questions or identified images with relatively similar success rates.
However, when the participants and LLMs were asked retroactively how well they thought they did, only the humans appeared able to adjust expectations, according to a study published today in the journal Memory & Cognition.
“Say the people told us they were going to get 18 questions right, and they ended up getting 15 questions right. Typically, their estimate afterwards would be something like 16 correct answers,” said Trent Cash, who recently completed a joint Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in the departments of Social Decision Science and Psychology. “So, they’d still be a little bit overconfident, but not as overconfident.”
“The LLMs did not do that,” said Cash, who was lead author of the study. “They tended, if anything, to get more overconfident, even when they didn’t do so well on the task.”
The world of AI is changing rapidly each day, which makes drawing general conclusions about its applications challenging, Cash acknowledged. However, one strength of the study was that the data was collected over the course of two years, which meant using continuously updated versions of the LLMs known as ChatGPT, Bard/Gemini, Sonnet and Haiku. This means that AI overconfidence was detectable across different models over time.
“When an AI says something that seems a bit fishy, users may not be as skeptical as they should be because the AI asserts the answer with confidence, even when that confidence is unwarranted,” said Danny Oppenheimer, a professor in CMU’s Department of Social and Decision Sciences and coauthor of the study."
Will Oremus , The Washington Post; AI guzzled millions of books without permission. Authors are fighting back.
[Kip Currier: I've written this before on this blog and I'll say it again: technology companies would never allow anyone to freely vacuum up their content and use it without permission or compensation. Period. Full Stop.]
[Excerpt]
"Baldacci is among a group of authors suing OpenAI and Microsoft over the companies’ use of their work to train the AI software behind tools such as ChatGPT and Copilot without permission or payment — one of more than 40 lawsuits against AI companies advancing through the nation’s courts. He and other authors this week appealed to Congress for help standing up to what they see as an assault by Big Tech on their profession and the soul of literature.
They found sympathetic ears at a Senate subcommittee hearing Wednesday, where lawmakers expressed outrage at the technology industry’s practices. Their cause gained further momentum Thursday when a federal judge granted class-action status to another group of authors who allege that the AI firm Anthropic pirated their books.
“I see it as one of the moral issues of our time with respect to technology,” Ralph Eubanks, an author and University of Mississippi professor who is president of the Authors Guild, said in a phone interview. “Sometimes it keeps me up at night.”
Lawsuits have revealed that some AI companies had used legally dubious “torrent” sites to download millions of digitized books without having to pay for them."
Blake Brittain, Reuters; Anthropic wins key US ruling on AI training in authors' copyright lawsuit
"A federal judge in San Francisco ruled late on Monday that Anthropic's use of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal under U.S. copyright law.
Siding with tech companies on a pivotal question for the AI industry, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said Anthropic made "fair use" of books by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson to train its Claude large language model.
Alsup also said, however, that Anthropic's copying and storage of more than 7 million pirated books in a "central library" infringed the authors' copyrights and was not fair use. The judge has ordered a trial in December to determine how much Anthropic owes for the infringement."
TIMOTHY B. LEE , Ars Techcnica; Study: Meta AI model can reproduce almost half of Harry Potter book
"In recent years, numerous plaintiffs—including publishers of books, newspapers, computer code, and photographs—have sued AI companies for training models using copyrighted material. A key question in all of these lawsuits has been how easily AI models produce verbatim excerpts from the plaintiffs’ copyrighted content.
For example, in its December 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI, The New York Times Company produced dozens of examples where GPT-4 exactly reproduced significant passages from Times stories. In its response, OpenAI described this as a “fringe behavior” and a “problem that researchers at OpenAI and elsewhere work hard to address.”
But is it actually a fringe behavior? And have leading AI companies addressed it? New research—focusing on books rather than newspaper articles and on different companies—provides surprising insights into this question. Some of the findings should bolster plaintiffs’ arguments, while others may be more helpful to defendants.
The paper was published last month by a team of computer scientists and legal scholars from Stanford, Cornell, and West Virginia University. They studied whether five popular open-weight models—three from Meta and one each from Microsoft and EleutherAI—were able to reproduce text from Books3, a collection of books that is widely used to train LLMs. Many of the books are still under copyright."
Talya Minsberg , The New York Times; A.I.-Generated Reading List in Chicago Sun-Times Recommends Nonexistent Books
"The summer reading list tucked into a special section of The Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer seemed innocuous enough.
There were books by beloved authors such as Isabel Allende and Min Jin Lee; novels by best sellers including Delia Owens, Taylor Jenkins Reid and Brit Bennett; and a novel by Percival Everett, a recent Pulitzer Prize winner.
There was just one issue: None of the book titles attributed to the above authors were real. They had been created by generative artificial intelligence.
It’s the latest case of bad A.I. making its way into the news. While generative A.I. has improved, there is still no way to ensure the systems produce accurate information. A.I. chatbots cannot distinguish between what is true and what is false, and they often make things up. The chatbots can spit out information and expert names with an air of authority."
