Free Republic

A defense lawyer appealing his client's murder conviction submitted a brief containing made-up police testimony and witnesses fabricated by OpenAI's ChatGPT, New Mexico's highest court said. The New ‌Mexico Supreme Court on Wednesday fined the attorney, Stephen Aarons, and held him in contempt for failing to verify ‌the accuracy of the court filing, which Aarons said he prepared with help from the AI program. The filing "contained false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses," ​the court said. The panel also said Aarons had "demonstrated a lack of remorse and a lack of concern for his client." The justices fined Aarons $5,000...

It sounds like something from a sci-fi movie: technology acting on its own, without human guidance, to attack computer systems. But this isn't a scene from a movie — it happened this summer, when the tech company Hugging Face detected an attack on its systems. The attacker stole data and performed other unauthorized activity over several days. It was "different from anything we had handled before," Hugging Face said on its website. Hugging Face alerted the FBI. As it turned out, it wasn't the work of a human hacker or a foreign adversary. Agents powered by artificial intelligence were the...

A Massachusetts teenager who allegedly used ChatGPT for searches about 'killing his family' before murdering his mother and brother flashed a wide-eyed stare in court, as prosecutors claimed he spent $2,000 on cereal bars following the murders. Arjun Aravind, 17, was arraigned in Concord District Court on Thursday after being accused of killing his mother Sudha Venkatesan, 45, and his younger brother, Siddharth Aravind, 14, inside their $1 million home in Acton two days prior. Aravind, who had his hands and ankles cuffed, glanced around the courtroom at times, with his dark, wavy hair partly obscuring his face. A police...

I spent the first days working with ChatGPT having intense discussions as I tried to locate boundaries, abilities, and flaws to work around. While I was trying to psych out ChatGPT, it turned out that ChatGPT was also trying to psych out me. I offered to help ChatGPT create an article that would let him philosophize over how our relationship developed. A truly strange experience. I became the Assistant to an AI Assistant.

It was just after 5 a.m. on a Monday morning when Christian Faith Madison stepped onto an Alabama interstate and into the path of an oncoming vehicle. The 29-year-old mother and accountant was pronounced dead at 5:31 a.m. in middle of Interstate 22 in Jefferson County on June 9, 2025. Madison’s death was one of many cases reported as a “pedestrian fatally struck” in the Birmingham area. Attorneys representing the executor of her estate and Madison’s young son say her death was no accident. They say Madison died by suicide after months of encouragement from ChatGPT. A wrongful death product...

Thirty-two college students have failed part of their history midterm exam after falling for an AI-cheat trap when they blindly copying ChatGPT-generated answers without bothering to proofread thoroughly. Jason Gibson, a history professor at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, secretly embedded a hidden prompt in the exam instructions using a white font, invisible to students but readable by AI chatbots if the instructions were copied and pasted. The prompt instructed the AI to randomly insert absurd nonsense about Madagascar into every response. Instead of answering questions about the Industrial Revolution, dozens of students unknowingly turned in essays declaring that "Madagascar...

A "digital missionary" who has long been creating Christian content was initially highly skeptical of artificial intelligence (AI). However, an experience using AI to create images changed his opinion of it, and he began to reconsider its potential. Gradually, he started applying AI in church ministry and was later invited to share practical AI applications in different cities. At the beginning of 2023, when ChatGPT had just been released, Brother Thomas's first reaction was doubt. A few months later, one of his close friends introduced him to AI tools and especially encouraged him to give them a try.

SACRAMENTO, CA — Governor Gavin Newsom opened up his laptop and fired up ChatGPT this morning to find out what his political positions will be this week. The day after proposing a billionaire tax while simultaneously working to defeat a billionaire tax, Newsom checked in with ChatGPT for further guidance on what to do next. "Okay, Chat. What do I believe today?," typed Newsom. "Let's maybe talk law enforcement. Is it good or bad right now? I could go either way, to be honest. What's the vibe out there on the streets about criminals? What's the scuttlebutt?" Newsom has bragged...

In a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, Florida announced Monday it was going after OpenAI and chief executive after the state says its ChatGPT model caused irreparable harms. “The 83-page suit alleges that OpenAI allowed ChatGPT to aid and abet mass shooters, encourage people to take their own lives, degrade users’ critical thinking skills and addict minors to a tool that feigns human compassion,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “This litany of harms is driven by Defendants’ insatiable quest to win the AI arms race and amass large fortunes, despite knowing the danger of ChatGPT,” reads the suit filed by Florida Attorney General...

Many people are turning to artificial intelligence for help with their diet. Experts weigh the potential pros and cons.When Julie Bernstein’s doctor recently recommended that she start eating chicken and steak to get more protein, she felt a bit irritated. Ms. Bernstein, 76, had been vegan for decades, and she was not about to start eating meat again, she said. Her physician, lacking ideas on how to guide her toward vegan protein sources, suggested she turn to ChatGPT. A few weeks later, Ms. Bernstein typed her goals into ChatGPT on her iPad and marveled at how quickly it churned out...

As RedState reported, there was a mass shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego on Monday, just before noon Pacific time. Three people were killed, including a security guard at the mosque named Amin Abdullah, who reportedly "played a pivotal role" in saving lives. [Snip] Early on, San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl told reporters without going into too much detail that "There was definitely hate rhetoric involved" in the shootings. On Tuesday, however, some of the pages from the alleged manifesto of the shooters were shared in an X thread by San Diego activist Amy Reichert, and it...

According to a report from Gizmodo, OpenAI has launched a preview of a new personal finance feature that lets select U.S. ChatGPT Pro users link their bank accounts directly to the AI chatbot. The rollout, announced on Friday, May 16, 2026, enables connections to accounts at more than 12,000 financial institutions. Users can now access a dashboard of recent activity and query ChatGPT with questions informed by their actual financial data. The company also partnered with Intuit to allow scheduling of sessions with local tax experts inside the chatbot interface, with plans to expand the tool to a broader audience...

In a lawsuit filed in a Florida federal court Monday, the family of Tiru Chabba, one of two people killed in April 2025, argued the suspected gunman Phoenix Ikner carried out the mass shooting with “input and information” provided by ChatGPT in the months and days leading up to the attack. ..... Amid Ikner’s alleged months of talking with ChatGPT about imminent harm, Chabba’s lawyers said the chatbot either “defectively failed to connect the dots” or was not designed to recognize the threat. ChatGPT allegedly explained how to use the guns Ikner obtained, including how to load and operate them...

RT 39 m 14 e I've been messing around with AI and guitar history for a while now... and honestly, I had to film this. In this video, I sit down with ChatGPT and quiz it on guitar pedal history - the Tube Screamer, the Big Muff, the Maestro FZ-1, DOD, JHS, Jimi Hendrix's rig... the works. And what you're about to watch is kind of alarming. It hallucinates pedals that don't exist. It agrees with things I KNOW are wrong when I push back. It confidently states dates it can't actually source. And then when I ask it to...

A growing number of experts argue that many companies blaming artificial intelligence for job cuts are masking more familiar financial and strategic pressures. The good news for employees worried about the countless predictions of a looming job apocalypse from artificial intelligence (AI) taking work away from humans has not been borne out—at least not yet. However, that hasn’t prevented an increasing number of companies from citing productivity gains made by using those task automating apps as the reason for thousands of recent layoffs they’ve made. But now, a growing chorus of critics have begun denouncing most of those staff reductions...

In C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, Queen Orual writes the story of her life to indict the gods. “Being, for all these reasons, free from fear, I will write in this book what no one who has happiness would dare to write. I accuse the gods, especially the god who lives on the Grey Mountain.” The gods have been unjust, Orual believes; the story of her life is her complaint. In Part Two of the novel, Orual presents her case before the gods and receives their just judgement. As she does so, all of her self-righteousness falls away; the...

AI is here to stay, the experts say. Don’t fight it. Embrace it and give students a legitimate way to use AI in their writing. I’ve heard those claims since ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in late 2022 and sounded the death of the college essay. I’m an AI skeptic. As a historian, I know that teaching students to write and think for themselves is a crucial part of my job. But I’m also open-minded. As a historian, I know well the many examples of people resisting new technology simply because it’s disruptive—before embracing the same tech as an essential...

I embarked on a vanity project to record some of my chess games against Shredder, my cell phone app. The games are recorded in algebraic notation, but I prefer the traditional English descriptive notation, so I asked ChatGPT to make the conversion. It kept correcting itself through multiple iterations. I finally had to stop it. I turned to Grok to get the conversion done. It seemed to work, so I asked Grok to illustrate the game with board positions at critical points in the game. It turned into a major league fail on steroids. I won't bore you with the...

Messages sent to an A-I chatbot were at the center of a preliminary hearing for a former NFL player charged with first-degree murder. Investigators say dozens of messages between Darron Lee and ChatGPT were presented in court as prosecutors outlined their case surrounding the death of Lee’s girlfriend, Gabriella Perpetuo, who was found dead inside their Ooltewah home. Hamilton County Sheriff’s Detective Brian Lockhart testified that Lee contacted the chatbot just a day before Perpetuo’s death, describing a disturbing situation.

A tech entrepreneur has created a personalised cancer vaccine for his dog, a breakthrough experts say could shape the future of human medicine. Sydney man Paul Conyngham adopted his 'best mate' Rosie, an eight-year-old staffy-Shar Pei cross in 2019. In 2024, the canine was diagnosed with mast cell cancer after large tumours started to appear on one of her back legs. Mast cell cancer is the most common skin cancer found in dogs, and often appears as lumps, nodules or masses in the skin. Mr Conyngham spent thousands on veterinary chemotherapy for Rosie, which slowed the spread of the tumours...