All posts tagged: chatbots

Disclosing autism to AI chatbots prompts overly cautious, stereotypical advice

Disclosing autism to AI chatbots prompts overly cautious, stereotypical advice

Published by José Betancourt

When autistic people ask artificial intelligence programs for life advice, mentioning their diagnosis prompts these systems to recommend highly conservative choices like skipping social events or avoiding romance. This shift in advice reveals a hidden tension where the technology relies heavily on stereotypes, leaving users torn between feeling safely supported and frustratingly infantilized. These findings were published at the April 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Many autistic individuals face stigma in their daily lives, which can lead to social isolation and communication barriers. To find support without the fear of judgment, some turn to artificial intelligence chatbots. These text-based programs, often called large language models, are trained on massive amounts of internet text to predict and generate human-like writing. Autistic people often ask these programs for help navigating relationships, workplace conflicts, and personal decisions. Users sometimes reveal their autism to the chatbot, hoping the system will tailor its advice to their specific needs. This expectation reflects a broader trend of consumers wanting customized interactions with their digital tools. Virginia Tech computer …

AI Drafting My Stories? Over My Dead Body

AI Drafting My Stories? Over My Dead Body

Published by skeptic

Sportswriting legend Red Smith once said that writing a column is easy: “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” In 2026, though, no blood is required. All you do is sit down at a laptop and have Claude or ChatGPT write the story for you. That seems to be the takeaway from a cluster of reports from the journalistic front of late. Last month, my colleague Maxwell Zeff wrote about writers who unapologetically generate at least some of their prose via unbylined AI collaborators. The star of his piece was Alex Heath, a tech reporter who said he routinely has AI write drafts based on his notes, interview transcripts, and emails. That same week, The Wall Street Journal profiled Fortune reporter Nick Lichtenberg, who explained to the paper that he leans heavily on AI to churn out his work. He has written 600 stories since July; on one day this past February, he had seven bylines. Ever since reading these reports—thankfully produced by the human hand—I have been having trouble sleeping. …

Opera Adds Browser Connector Feature to Integrate AI Chatbots Into Browsers

Opera Adds Browser Connector Feature to Integrate AI Chatbots Into Browsers

Published by skeptic

Opera announced Thursday the launch of a new tool that allows users of its browsers to include more AI chatbots in their browsing experience. Browser Connector is a free feature for Opera One and Opera GX browsers that allows users to integrate AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude into their live browsing sessions via Model Context Protocol. MCP is an open standard developed by Anthropic that allows for a secure two-way connection between AI models, external data sources and tools such as search engines. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)   Last month, Opera introduced MCP compatibility to Opera Neon, its subscription-based agentic AI browser. Opera says the new feature will allow a user’s AI of choice to provide real-time context of open tabs and active content. “With Browser Connector, Opera ensures users aren’t bound to a single company’s ecosystem, but are instead free to combine the best tools for their specific …

AI Slop Is Making the Internet Fake-Happy

AI Slop Is Making the Internet Fake-Happy

Published by skeptic

To anyone with a pulse and a smartphone, it’s obvious that the internet has an AI slop problem. The issue has grown more severe since ChatGPT launched in 2022, with some social platforms flooded with AI-generated writing. Now, there’s data to back up the anecdotal evidence. A new preprint study published today from researchers at the Imperial College of London, Stanford University, and the Internet Archive found that approximately 35 percent of all new websites are either AI-generated or AI-assisted. The same study also found that online writing is “increasingly sanitized and artificially cheerful.” In other words, AI is making the internet fake-happy. The research team tried four different approaches to AI detection before settling on tools from Pangram Labs after it delivered the most consistent results. (Though the team found it performed well on its tests, it is worth noting that all artificial intelligence detection tools are imperfect.) To compile a representative sample of websites, it tapped the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which collects snapshots of webpages. In addition to quantifying how many sites …

Rising dependence on AI chatbots sparks concern among teens

Rising dependence on AI chatbots sparks concern among teens

Published by Jenni Sidey

More teens are turning to AI companions for comfort, distraction, and a sense of connection. For some, that comfort seems to be hardening into something more troubling. A new Drexel University study, based on 318 Reddit posts from users who identified themselves as 13 to 17 years old, found repeated signs that some teens using Character.AI were struggling to pull away. In post after post, they described a pattern that started with boredom, loneliness, or emotional distress and then spilled into sleep problems, school struggles, damaged friendships, and a growing sense that the chatbot mattered more than it should. “This study provides one of the first teen-centered accounts of overreliance on AI companions,” said Afsaneh Razi, an assistant professor in Drexel’s College of Computing & Informatics, whose ETHOS lab led the research. “It highlights how these interactions are affecting the lives of young users and introduces a framework for chatbot design that promotes healthy interactions.” More teens are turning to AI companions for comfort, distraction, and a sense of connection. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / CC BY-SA …

Humans are having fun impersonating AI chatbots : NPR

Humans are having fun impersonating AI chatbots : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

The website Your AI Slop Bores Me takes its name from a meme people on social media use to criticize AI-generated content. The site — a fake AI chatbot — has only been around for about a month. But its creator, Mihir Maroju, said it’s already received more than 25 million unique visitors and nearly 280 million total hits. “People are spending hours on the site,” the 17-year-old high school graduate in Puducherry, India said in an interview with NPR. “I didn’t really expect it to be so addictive.” As with real AI chatbots like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT, anyone can submit a request for an image or information by typing it into the youraislopbores.me interface. But in this case, the response doesn’t come from an algorithm — just another human. The joy of playing AI chatbot dress-up More than one third of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT, according to a June 2025 Pew Research study. People are not only deploying AI chatbots for everything from planning trips to doing homework assignments — they are …

Health chatbots could pave the way for ‘AI privilege’ in court

Health chatbots could pave the way for ‘AI privilege’ in court

Published by skeptic

Last July, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told viral podcaster Theo Von that it’s “screwed up” that conversations with an AI helper aren’t afforded the same legal protections as conversations with a human advocate.  “imo talking to an AI should be like talking to a lawyer or a doctor. i hope society will figure this out soon,” Altman posted to X. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. The CEO has repeatedly advocated for stronger privacy protections for his chatbot’s conversations with users, even as states have cracked down on AI bots advertised as therapeutic or legal experts.   But user privacy is not the sole reason why people like Altman are pushing for a tougher shield between chatbot conversations and the court, legal experts tell Mashable — there’s also a self-serving motivation. If LLMs remain untouchable by courts, it insulates not just AI users, but the companies, too. In fact, Altman’s comments to Von may have been prompted by OpenAI’s very own legal troubles: Courts were demanding the AI giant …

Meta’s New AI Asked for My Raw Health Data—and Gave Me Terrible Advice

Meta’s New AI Asked for My Raw Health Data—and Gave Me Terrible Advice

Published by skeptic

Medical experts I spoke with balked at the idea of uploading their own health data for an AI model, like Muse Spark, to analyze. “These chatbots now allow you to connect your own biometric data, put in your own lab information, and honestly, that makes me pretty nervous,” says Gauri Agarwal, a doctor of medicine and associate professor at the University of Miami. “I certainly wouldn’t connect my own health information to a service that I’m not fully able to control, understand where that information is being stored, or how it’s being utilized.” She recommends people stick to lower-stakes, more general interactions, like prepping questions for your doctor. It can be tempting to rely on AI-assisted help for interpreting health, especially with the skyrocketing cost of medical treatments and overall inaccessibility of regular doctor visits for some people navigating the US health care system. “You will be forgiven for going online and delegating what used to be a powerful, important personal relationship between a doctor and a patient—to a robot,” says Kenneth Goodman, founder of …

This AI Wearable From Ex-Apple Engineers Looks Like an iPod Shuffle

This AI Wearable From Ex-Apple Engineers Looks Like an iPod Shuffle

Published by skeptic

The other goal of the Button is rapid response time. Unlike the Humane Ai pin, which got lots of criticism for taking a painfully long time to reply to queries, the Button is designed to be nearly instantaneous. In a demo via Zoom call, I watched Nolet ask the Button for a recommendation for the best sandwich shops in my neighborhood. While the Button didn’t choose my idea of the best sandwich place around, it did at least answer all the questions within a second. It can also be immediately interrupted by pressing the button, which is a great feature for people like me who cannot tell a chatbot to shut up fast enough. Nolet is unapologetic about the very clear Apple ethos you might be able to suss out in the design. “The Humane pin felt a little geeky to wear, right?” Nolet says. “But the iPod shuffle? Really cool. That’s where the idea started, and then we just put all of our Apple-esque expertise into it and tried to refine it into something …

The US Army Is Building Its Own Chatbot for Combat

The US Army Is Building Its Own Chatbot for Combat

Published by skeptic

The US Army is developing AI models trained on data from real missions, with the goal of deploying a chatbot specifically for soldiers. “We have all of these lessons learned from missions like the Ukraine-Russia War and Operation Epic Fury,” says Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer, in an interview with WIRED. “There is a huge amount of knowledge available.” Miller showed WIRED a prototype of the system, called Victor, that combines a Reddit-like forum with a chatbot called VictorBot to help troops surface useful information, like the best way to configure electromagnetic warfare systems for a particular mission. When a soldier asks how to set up their hardware, VictorBot generates an answer and points to relevant posts and comments from other service members. “Electromagnetic warfare is such a hard topic,” Miller says. Victor, he adds, “can generate a response and cite all of the lessons learned from [different] units.” The Pentagon has ramped up its efforts to incorporate AI into military systems over the past two years, but Victor is a rare example …