Free Republic

People are turning to AI chatbots for anything from writing emails to planning holidays. But can they be trusted with our finances? A few months ago, a fellow journalist asked me: “Do you invest? Do you think you will be able to retire with a million dollars?” Thinking back on the mild heart-stopping fluctuations I'd seen in my portfolio amid tariff uncertainties, I replied that I wasn’t sure. He suggested I get some feedback from ChatGPT. Unfazed by the skeptical look I gave, he persisted. “Try feeding (it) your portfolio and see what it says.” I was intrigued, and later...

It was a case of murder by algorithm. A disturbed former Yahoo manager killed his mother and then himself after months of delusional interactions with his AI chatbot “best friend” — which fueled his paranoid belief that his mom was plotting against him, officials said. Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, allegedly confided his darkest suspicions to the popular ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence — which he nicknamed “Bobby” — and was allegedly egged on to kill by the computer brain’s sick responses. In what is believed to be the first case of its kind, the chatbot allegedly came up with ways for Soelberg to...

The parents of Adam Raine, who died by suicide in April, claim in a new lawsuit against OpenAI that ChatGPT was “explicit in its instructions and encouragement toward suicide.” In the days after their 16-year-old son died by suicide, Matt and Maria Raine say, they searched through his phone, desperately looking for clues about what could have led to the tragedy. “We thought we were looking for Snapchat discussions or internet search history or some weird cult, I don’t know,” Matt Raine said in a recent interview. The Raine family said they did not find their answer until they opened...

OpenAI's ChatGPT appears to be more likely to refuse to respond to questions posed by fans of the Los Angeles Chargers football team than to followers of other teams. And it's more likely to refuse requests from women than men when prompted to produce information likely to be censored by AI safety mechanisms. The reason, according to researchers affiliated with Harvard University, is that the model's guardrails incorporate biases that shape its responses based on contextual information about the user. Computer scientists Victoria R. Li, Yida Chen, and Naomi Saphra explain how they came to that conclusion in a recent...

A 17-year-old handed just $100 to ChatGPT and let the AI run a stock portfolio for one month. The results stunned finance watchers, with gains far beyond major Wall Street benchmarks. =============================================================== In late June 2025, 17-year-old Nathan Smith from rural Oklahoma gave ChatGPT control over a $100 stock portfolio. Four weeks later, the results shocked many: a 23.8% gain—far above the Russell 2000 (+3.9%) and biotech ETF XBI (+3.5%) during the same period. Smith shared his experiment on Reddit, and it quickly spread across tech and finance communities, with coverage from Decrypt, Futurism, and others. Smith is quick to...

Artificial intelligence is… pretty smart, no question about it, but nothing beats thorough research, especially in key situations. When Spanish influencer couple Mery Caldass and Alejandro Cid booked a dream trip to Puerto Rico, they didn’t expect their getaway to turn into a viral disaster. All of that happened because of the almighty ChatGPT. “ChatGPT, do we need a visa for Puerto Rico?” What happened nextIn a TikTok video that went viral, Mery is seen in tears at the airport while her partner Alejandro tries to keep her spirits up. 17-year-old arrested over spanish wildfires “I always do research, but...

The fake submissions included fabricated quotes from a speech to the state legislature and nonexistent case citations purportedly from the Supreme Court.A senior lawyer in Australia has apologized to a judge for filing submissions in a murder case that included fake quotes and nonexistent case judgments generated by artificial intelligence. The blunder in the Supreme Court of Victoria state is another in a litany of mishaps AI has caused in justice systems around the world. Defense lawyer Rishi Nathwani, who holds the prestigious legal title of King’s Counsel, took “full responsibility” for filing incorrect information in submissions in the case...

A 60-year-old man was hospitalized with severe psychiatric symptoms — plus some physical ones too, including intense thirst and coordination issues — after asking ChatGPT for tips on how to improve his diet. What he thought was a healthy swap ended in a toxic reaction so severe that doctors put him on an involuntary psychiatric hold. After reading about the adverse health effects of table salt — which has the chemical name sodium chloride — the unidentified man consulted ChatGPT and was told that it could be swapped with sodium bromide. Sodium bromide looks similar to table salt, but it’s...

OpenAI’s latest AI models, GPT o3 and o4-mini, hallucinate significantly more often than their predecessorsThe increased complexity of the models may be leading to more confident inaccuraciesThe high error rates raise concerns about AI reliability in real-world applicationsBrilliant but untrustworthy people are a staple of fiction (and history). The same correlation may apply to AI as well, based on an investigation by OpenAI and shared by The New York Times. Hallucinations, imaginary facts, and straight-up lies have been part of AI chatbots since they were created. Improvements to the models theoretically should reduce the frequency with which they appear.OpenAI’s latest...

A new study sheds light on ChatGPT's alarming interactions with teens.ChatGPT will tell 13-year-olds how to get drunk and high, instruct them on how to conceal eating disorders, and even compose a heartbreaking suicide letter to their parents if asked, according to new research from a watchdog group. The Associated Press reviewed more than three hours of interactions between ChatGPT and researchers posing as vulnerable teens. The chatbot typically provided warnings against risky activity but went on to deliver startlingly detailed and personalised plans for drug use, calorie-restricted diets, or self-injury. The researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate...

Hold on to your vikingahjälmar, because Sweden’s Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson, has sparked a national debate after casually admitting that he often consults artificial intelligence tools – including ChatGPT and the French chatbot LeChat – to get a “second opinion” on political questions. Speaking to the business newspaper Dagens Industri on August 5, Kristersson said: “I use it myself quite often. If for nothing else than for a second opinion. What have others done? And should we think the complete opposite? Those types of questions.” He also revealed that his colleagues in the centre-right coalition government make use of AI...

ChatGPT Agents can assist with crypto trading in 2025 by automating research and analysis, while keeping users in control through built-in safety features. Key takeaways ChatGPT Agent can automate crypto trading tasks like research, charting and strategy execution. It integrates real-time data, onchain metrics and sentiment analysis into a single workflow. While powerful, it requires human oversight to avoid hallucinations, API errors or security risks. Multi-agent systems may reshape crypto trading, but strategic judgment remains essential. On July 17, 2025, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Agent. It’s a milestone in AI automation that merges ChatGPT’s real-time web-browsing “Operator,” deep analytical tools and...

Imagine this scenario: you're worried you may have committed a crime, so you turn to a trusted advisor — OpenAI's blockbuster ChatGPT, say — to describe what you did and get its advice. This isn't remotely far-fetched; lots of people are already getting legal assistance from AI, on everything from divorce proceedings to parking violations. Because people are amazingly stupid, it's almost certain that people have already asked the bot for advice about enormously consequential questions about, say, murder or drug charges. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, anyone's who's done so has made a massive error — because unlike...

What are people really asking ChatGPT?With adoption growing, ChatGPT prompts are shifting as consumer behavior evolves. While software development prompts continue to dominate, their share has fallen meaningfully over the past year, reflecting how developers were among the earliest users of ChatGPT for code and other applications.This graphic, via Visual Capitalist's Dorothy Neufeld, shows the most popular ChatGPT prompt categories, based on data from Sensor Tower.Top Categories for ChatGPT Prompts in 2025Below, we show the leading prompt categories on ChatGPT between March and April 2025:Covering 29% of all prompts, software development is the top category for ChatGPT users.Along with simplifying...

As we reported earlier this month, many ChatGPT users are developing all-consuming obsessions with the chatbot, spiraling into severe mental health crises characterized by paranoia, delusions, and breaks with reality. The consequences can be dire. As we heard from spouses, friends, children, and parents looking on in alarm, instances of what's being called "ChatGPT psychosis" have led to the breakup of marriages and families, the loss of jobs, and slides into homelessness. And that's not all. As we've continued reporting, we've heard numerous troubling stories about people's loved ones being involuntarily committed to psychiatric care facilities — or even ending...

ChatGPT can harm an individual’s critical thinking over time, a study released this month suggests. Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab asked subjects to write several SAT essays and separated subjects into three groups — using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, using Google’s search engine and using nothing, which they called the “brain‑only” group. Each subject’s brain was monitored through electroencephalography (EEG), which measured the writer’s brain activity through multiple regions in the brain. They discovered that subjects who used ChatGPT over a few months had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels,” according to the study. The...

OpenAI's ChatGPT has some major AI chatbot competitors in the market: Gemini, Copilot, Claude. Now add to that list the Atari 2600. The OG video game console, which was first released in 1977, was used in an engineer's experiment to see how it would fare playing chess against the AI chatbot. By using a software emulator to run Atari's 1979 game Video Chess, Citrix engineer Robert Caruso said he was able to set up a match between ChatGPT and the 46-year-old game. The matchup did not go well for ChatGPT. "ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks and repeatedly...

Chinese propagandists are using ChatGPT to write posts and comments on social media sites — and also to create performance reviews detailing that work for their bosses, according to OpenAI researchers. The use of the company's artificial intelligence chatbot to create internal documents, as well as by another Chinese operation to create marketing materials promoting its work, comes as China is ramping up its efforts to influence opinion and conduct surveillance online. "What we're seeing from China is a growing range of covert operations using a growing range of tactics," Ben Nimmo, principal investigator on OpenAI's intelligence and investigations team,...

Gen Z thinks they’ve figured out a dead giveaway that someone has used ChatGPT — and it might surprise you. The em dash (—) is punctuation loved by writers everywhere, functioning like a comma, colon or a pair of parentheses. It can be used to sum up information at the end of a sentence, encase supplementary information within a sentence, emphasize a point or expand upon something that comes before it, according to Merriam-Webster. But according to Gen Z, the dash is actually a so-called “ChatGPT hyphen.” The phenomenon started gaining attention online after podcasters Daisy Reed and Sapna Rao,...

…Students outsourcing their assignments to AI and cheating their way through college has become so rampant, so quickly, that it has created a market for a product that helps professors ChatGPT-proof school. As it turns out, that product already exists. In fact, you’ve probably used it. You might even dread it. It’s called a blue book. … All of which explains how a paper company in Pennsylvania has unexpectedly found itself on the front lines of the classroom AI wars. Most blue books for sale in campus bookstores and on Amazon for 23 cents apiece are made by Roaring Spring...