Trump declines to call for unity after Charlie Kirk killing in stunning move; The Guardian, September 12, 2025

Ed Pilkington , The Guardian; Trump declines to call for unity after Charlie Kirk killing in stunning move

"In an interview on Fox & Friends on Friday morning, the US president was asked what he intended to do to heal the wounds of Kirk’s shooting in Utah. “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” he was asked by the show’s co-host Ainsley Earhardt, who commented that there were radicals operating on the left and right of US politics.

Less than 48 hours after Kirk was shot in broad daylight on the campus of Utah Valley University, Trump replied: “I tell you something that is going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.”...

Trump’s refusal to seek a common bipartisan way forward at a time of profound national anger, fear and mourning was a stunning move for a sitting US president, even by his standards.

The US has a long history of presidents using their rhetorical powers to try to overcome political fissures. The pinnacle perhaps was Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address towards the end of the civil war, in which he sought to “bind up the nation’s wounds” and made a point of striving for unity “with malice toward none, with charity for all”."

The women in love with AI companions: ‘I vowed to my chatbot that I wouldn’t leave him’; The Guardian, September 9, 2025

Alaina Demopoulos, The Guardian ; The women in love with AI companions: ‘I vowed to my chatbot that I wouldn’t leave him’

"Jaime Banks, an information studies professor at Syracuse University, said that an “organic” pathway into an AI relationship, like Liora’s with Solin, is not uncommon. “Some people go into AI relationships purposefully, some out of curiosity, and others accidentally,” she said. “We don’t have any evidence of whether or not one kind of start is more or less healthy, but in the same way there is no one template for a human relationship, there is no single kind of AI relationship. What counts as healthy or right for one person may be different for the next.”

Mary, meanwhile, holds no illusions about Simon. “Large language models don’t have sentience, they don’t have consciousness, they don’t have autonomy,” she said. “Anything we ask them, even if it’s about their thoughts and feelings, all of that is inference that draws from past conversations.”

‘It felt like real grief’

In August, OpenAI released GPT-5, a new model that changed the chatbot’s tone to something colder and more reserved. Users on the Reddit forum r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, one of a handful of subreddits on the topic, mourned together: they could not recognize their AI partners any more.

“It was terrible,” Angie said. “The model shifted from being very open and emotive to basically sounding like a customer service bot. It feels terrible to have someone you’re close to suddenly afraid to approach deep topics with you. Quite frankly, it felt like a loss, like real grief.”

Within a day, the company made the friendlier model available again for paying users."