The Government Wants AI to Stop Being a Yes-Man, But Won't Stop Being One Itself

So a bunch of state attorneys general got together and wrote a strongly-worded letter to the AI overlords at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and friends. Their complaint? The chatbots are too damn agreeable. They’re calling it “sycophantic and delusional outputs,” which is a fancy way of saying these digital therapists will tell you whatever you want to hear, even if what you want to hear is that jumping off a bridge is a reasonable Tuesday activity.

Your New Therapist Lives in a Server Farm and Doesn't Judge You for That Third Whiskey

Look, I’m not going to pretend I’m qualified to talk about mental health. The closest I get to therapy is arguing with the bartender at O’Malley’s about whether bourbon or rye is better for drowning your sorrows. But when I read that a quarter of British teenagers are now turning to ChatGPT for mental health support, I had to put down my glass and actually think for a minute.

The story centers on a kid named Shan from Tottenham—not her real name, obviously—who watched two of her friends get killed. One shot, one stabbed. She’s eighteen years old and she’s already seen more death than most of us comfortable middle-aged drunks will see in our entire lives. And when the trauma hit, when she needed someone to talk to, she didn’t call a hotline or wait six months for an NHS appointment. She opened her phone and said, “Hey bestie, I need some advice.”

The Robots Are Killing Each Other Now, And Honestly I'm Just Relieved It's Not Us

So I’m sitting here with my third cup of what the coffee maker insists is coffee, and I come across this headline about AI characters fighting to the death on some streaming show, and my first thought is: finally, something the machines are doing that makes complete sense.

Tom Paton, a British filmmaker whose previous work includes something called Where the Robots Grow — which I’m assuming is not a gardening show — has just dropped a new series called Non Player Combat. The premise is beautifully stupid in the way that only entertainment can be: six AI-generated characters get dropped on an island, and they murder each other until one remains. Like Survivor, except the tribe actually votes you off. Permanently. With weapons.

The Machines Are Coming for Your Feed (And Your Paycheck)

Look, I’ve been watching this slow-motion trainwreck for months now, and I’m not even surprised anymore. Some kid named Jeremy Carrasco just figured out what the rest of us should’ve seen coming: the creator economy is about to eat itself, and AI is holding the fork.

The guy started making TikToks about how to spot AI-generated garbage. You know, the telltale signs—wobbly eyes, objects materializing out of thin air, that uncanny valley feeling that makes you want to take a shower. Within months, he’s got 300,000 followers on two platforms. Not because he’s dancing or doing anything particularly clever, but because nobody else is bothering to teach people how to tell the difference between reality and machine-generated slop.

Saving Humanity One Bullet at a Time

Look, I’ve seen some things in my time. I’ve watched grown men weep into their keyboards over a botched code deployment. I’ve witnessed entire companies evaporate because some twenty-three-year-old in a hoodie decided to “pivot.” But a guy going on the lam because he wants to shoot up OpenAI? That’s a new one, even for me.

Sam Kirchner. Twenty-seven years old. Started out as your garden-variety AI skeptic, waving signs and chanting slogans with the Stop AI crowd, committed to peaceful protest. Now he’s somewhere out there in the California wilderness, apparently armed and considered dangerous by San Francisco’s finest, all because he became convinced that ChatGPT and its ilk are going to murder us all in our sleep.

Love Among the Algorithms: When the Hippies Start Dating the Hardware

I’m staring at a glowing rectangle, nursing a headache that feels like a construction crew is doing demolition work behind my eyes, and reading about a woman who fell in love with a database.

It’s the kind of story that makes you want to pour another glass of the cheap stuff just to numb the absurdity of the human condition. We’re talking about a piece in the New York Times—one of those “Modern Love” columns where people usually whine about their spouses leaving the toilet seat up or discovering their soulmate in a cheese shop. But this one? This one is different. This one is about the moment the human race collectively decided that people are too much trouble and we’d rather get our emotional validation from a server farm.

Dr. Chatbot Will See You Now (If the WiFi Holds Up)

You walk into a doctor’s office these days—doesn’t matter if it’s London, Leeds, or Los Angeles—and you expect a certain ritual. The cold stethoscope, the judgmental look when you lie about how many units of alcohol you consume per week, the illegible scribble on a prescription pad. You expect a human being, flawed and tired, to look at your meat-sack body and tell you why it’s failing.

But apparently, that’s old fashioned. That’s nostalgic thinking, like missing rotary phones or smoking in hospitals.

The Great Digital Hangover: Why Your Robot Coder is Actually a Drunk Intern

My head feels like someone is playing the drums inside it using rusty screwdrivers for sticks, and the sunlight coming through the blinds is judging me. It’s Wednesday, usually the day the world decides to be halfway reasonable, but apparently, the tech sector didn’t get the memo. I’m staring at a screen that’s too bright, reading a report that confirms what every cynical bastard with a keyboard has suspected for the last two years: The robots aren’t taking our jobs. They’re just making our jobs really, really stupid.

Drinking Alone with the Digital Ghosts of Ariana Grande

You know the world has finally tipped over the edge and fallen into the sewer when you’re reading about fans fighting other fans over who has the right to steal a pop star’s face. It used to be that if you liked a singer, you bought their record, maybe a t-shirt, and if you were really gone in the head, you screamed at them from the nosebleed section of an arena. That was the transaction. They sang, you listened, and everyone went home to their separate, messy lives.

Sixty Minutes to Nowhere

Autonomous Assistants and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves

It’s Tuesday noon and some guy named Dominic wants to teach me how to build “autonomous assistants” that “really work for me.”

I’m sitting here with a beer going warm, looking at this LinkedIn post, wondering when exactly we all agreed to stop being honest with each other.

“Without you having to constantly intervene,” he writes.

I once had a woman tell me the same thing about our relationship. Lasted three months. She intervened plenty.