She Trusted ChatGPT With Her Medication Decisions. It Cost Her Everything.; The New York Times, October 27, 2026

Teddy Rosenbluth, The New York Times; She Trusted ChatGPT With Her Medication Decisions. It Cost Her Everything.

The chatbot helped a woman taper off a lifesaving drug and hide the plan from her doctors.

"Bowen’s parents landed in Seattle in late February to settle their child’s affairs. They viewed her body at the funeral home, before cremation. They picked up the urn. Now, sitting in her apartment, surrounded by Bowen’s belongings, they were resolved to understand how this could have happened.

The details of Bowen’s death didn’t add up. The official cause of death was sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, which often succeeds a severe seizure. But she had lived with epilepsy for more than a decade and seemed to be on a medication that was working. Even cutting her dose by a quarter, which she had admitted to on the phone call a few days before her death, shouldn’t have been enough to cause such a catastrophic seizure.

Then, Qun opened the ChatGPT app on Bowen’s cellphone. Suddenly the details of her death were overwhelming. As he scrolled, he saw the chatbot offer plans that would take her from 400 milligrams down to 0 milligrams in a matter of weeks. The messages continued, down to the day she died — an hour-by-hour accounting of her increasing sickness and desperation."

Episode 54 Bonus (Oct 2026): From the Care of Bodies to the Care of Minds; Library Journal, October 27, 2026

Dave Lankes, Library Journal ; Episode 54 Bonus (Oct 2026): From the Care of Bodies to the Care of Minds

"This special bonus episode is from a keynote address delivered at the opening of the new ESSECI Public Library in Cuneo, Italy, at the end of September 2026. “From the Care of Bodies to the Care of Minds” explores what libraries can and must become in an age of generative AI, declining trust, and profound changes in how people create knowledge. Dave argues that libraries offer something machines cannot: accountable human relationships grounded in community. He calls on libraries to move beyond repositories of information and become platforms for conversation, cultural heritage, creativity, and collective action."

Publisher cuts ties with Quebec author accused of AI use in award-winning novel; CBC, October 21, 2026

 Annabelle Olivier , CBC; Publisher cuts ties with Quebec author accused of AI use in award-winning novel

Thélyson Orélien had denied AI use, admitted to past plagiarism

"Montreal publishing house Éditions du Boréal announced Wednesday it is ending its professional relationship with Thélyson Orélien — a Haitian-born, Quebec-based author. 

In a news release, the publisher said new information, confirmed over the course of recent days, indicates that artificial intelligence was used in the writing process of Orélien's novel, C’était ça ou mourir, published earlier this year."

Late Night Is Skeptical of A.I. Leaders Self-Regulating; The New York Times, October 1, 2026

Trish Bendix, The New York Times; Late Night Is Skeptical of A.I. Leaders Self-Regulating

“Sure, we don’t need laws! I’m sure we could trust these guys,” Jordan Klepper said of technology executives on “The Daily Show,” after Trump asked them to police themselves.

"President Trump met with tech leaders on Tuesday, with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos among the attendees who signed a voluntary agreement to adopt A.I. safety policies. “They’re really going to be policing each other,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday afternoon outside the White House.

Jordan Klepper likened the White House luncheon to “the last supper if everyone there believed they were the son of God” on Wednesday’s “Daily Show...

“Look at this signature: Donald J. Trump, President of the ‘Unites States.’ Could there ever be a better metaphor for this presidency than misspelling ‘United States’ on a document about ‘super intelligence?’” — JIMMY KIMMEL"

It’s Time to Cry Wolf Over A.I.; The New York Times, September 22, 2026

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, The New York Times; It’s Time to Cry Wolf Over A.I.

"Here is what my imagination is telling me. It is telling me that the big A.I. companies in America and China are not being candid with us about how little even they understand the power and reach of the models they have developed, like sorcerers, in their labs. It is telling me that the Trump administration, headed by a man who so often governs by social media post, is uniquely unsuited to the kind of comprehensive, sustained, coordinated governance that keeping A.I. safe demands. And it is telling me that there is so much at stake — economically, militarily and technologically — and so little trust between Washington and Beijing that it would take a miracle for the United States and China to agree on the kind of deep collaboration needed to defuse the most nightmarish threats posed by A.I...

The last time we trusted the good intentions of the tech bros of Silicon Valley, when they told us to “move fast and break things” — regulations be damned — we unleashed social networks that helped fracture our society. I do not trust for one second that these people will put the national interest ahead of their own on A.I...

Trump should be thinking about another president. Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” What he meant was that no fixed plan can survive all the unanticipated stuff that happens once a war or crisis starts to unfold. But if you’ve gone through a rigorous planning process — familiarized yourself with the depth of the problem and the kinds of things that could go haywire and built trust within your team — you greatly improve your ability to adapt on the fly.

That is precisely what was missing in the run-up to Trump’s war with Iran, and we are paying a huge price for that today. Imagine what could happen if A.I. agents — a thousand times cleverer and more dangerous than Tehran or Trump — go off the rails."

Big Tech Fooled America Once. The Second Time’s Not Going So Well.; The New York Times, September 10, 2026

Oren Cass, The New York Times; Big Tech Fooled America Once. The Second Time’s Not Going So Well.

"The popular uprising against data centers has emerged so suddenly that politicians stumble over their own pitchforks racing to the front of the crowd. Where most industries would be launching into crisis P.R. mode, perhaps even engaging in some soul-searching, artificial intelligence companies seem determined to plow full steam ahead, building the future they want, even if they’re the only ones who want it.

The outrage over data centers can’t really be about environmental impact. These structures have always been water-sucking, power-draining, forest-clearing eyesores, yet the recent plunge in support for them is three times as deep as the one that nuclear power plants faced in the year after Three Mile Island. What has changed is people’s awareness of what’s going on inside: artificial intelligence. Less than a quarter of Americans expect A.I. to have a positive impact on K-12 education, arts and entertainment, how people do their jobs, the economy, personal relationships or happiness over the next 20 years.

Once known for our optimism and ambition in pursuit of new frontiers, Americans no longer trust that technological progress will make life better. Who can blame us? For the past two decades, Silicon Valley’s leaders have treated their fellow citizens like caged guinea pigs, bombarding us with inappropriate and culturally corrosive content, turning a blind eye to social dysfunction and outright addiction, flooding schools with technology that hooked young users but did little for education and then sheltering their own children from the products that they marketed to ours. The American people afforded the technologists wide latitude to pursue disruptive innovation, trusting that we would share in the resulting gains. We instead found ourselves exploited.

In some respects it is the A.I. industry’s misfortune to arrive now, when Silicon Valley is no longer entitled to the benefit of the doubt, but its leaders seem to be going out of their way to destroy any residual trust they might otherwise have built upon. Rather than take seriously the need to offer a positive vision for how the technology will benefit ordinary Americans — and then the need to make that vision a reality — the A.I. companies seem content to unleash wave after wave of products that cause obvious harm while delivering the message that this is all inevitable and you can get on board or get left behind."

AI Has Plunged the Book Publishing Industry Into Utter Chaos; Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2026

 Anna Silman, Wall Street Journal; AI Has Plunged the Book Publishing Industry Into Utter Chaos

The spectacular implosions of big deals over suspected AI use are forcing a reckoning over creativity, trust and the future of the industry

"The spectacular implosions of big book deals over suspected AI use—and fears about who might be next—are forcing a reckoning over the nature of authorship, the relationship between writers and publishers and the industry’s long-term survival. But nobody can seem to agree who exactly is responsible for solving this problem, or even how much a problem it actually is."

An Ohio woman took in two strangers. Then she saw their ‘wanted’ photos.; The Washington Post, July 18, 2026

Dan Morse, The Washington Post, ; An Ohio woman took in two strangers. Then she saw their ‘wanted’ photos.

"Just 25 percent of Americans say most people can be trusted, down from 47 percent in the early 1970s, according to the long-running General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. In a Pew Research survey of 25 countries last year, Americans ranked last in their likelihood of viewing fellow citizens as “morally good,” hitting just below 50 percent.

“In a country in which trust has been experiencing a long-term decline, here was this extraordinary act of trust,” said sociologist Bruce Carruthers of Northwestern University after being told of the case.

Social scientists have long studied why and how people trust. One big factor: People are more likely to trust those who reflect themselves. Carruthers said other characteristics of Behrman tilted toward trust, including an innate desire to help others and normally reliable street smarts."

Ethics journal retracts paper by high school student for AI, peer review manipulation; Retraction Watch, July 6, 2026

Retraction Watch; Ethics journal retracts paper by high school student for AI, peer review manipulation

"The Journal of Medical Ethics has retracted a paper on the use of AI in the pharmaceutical industry for containing references that don’t exist. The article’s sole author: a high school student. 

The paper, which argues biased algorithms can exacerbate inequities in health care, was published in September. The author, Irfan Biswas, listed his affiliation as Shrewsbury Public Schools in Massachusetts.

According to the May 28 retraction notice, an investigation by the journal found Biswas used generative AI to “identify and understand referenced sources” and did not verify the references prior to submission. 

“The journal investigated concerns about the quality of the work and the accuracy of the references, including concerns that several references did not exist,” the notice reads. 

Last year another ethics journal made a similar retraction after a reader found fabricated references in a paper on whistleblowing. The Biswas article joins the estimated one in 277 papers indexed in PubMed with fabricated references, a phenomenon that came about with the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT.

The retraction notice for the latest paper also cites “evidence of peer review manipulation.”

Caroline White, media relations manager for BMJ Group, which publishes the journal, declined to elaborate on the problematic peer review. Biswas confirmed to the journal he was a high school student, and agreed to the retraction, White said. 

Biswas did not respond to our emails or LinkedIn message asking for clarification on how the references ended up in the paper. 

In an August 2025 paper in Frontiers in Genome Editing, “Ethical dimensions and societal implications: ensuring the social responsibility of CRISPR technology,” Biswas listed affiliations with the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester and the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. A representative from UMass told Retraction Watch they have no record of Biswas attending the school. URI said a student by the same name is enrolled as an undergraduate, but said they were “unable to confirm whether or not it is the same individual.” 

Why We Changed Our Code of Ethics to Address Prediction Markets; ProPublica, June 15, 2026

Diego Sorbara, ProPublica; Why We Changed Our Code of Ethics to Address Prediction Markets

In an era when people can bet on news events, we want readers to know we’re not willing to gamble with their trust.

"What would you think of me, the ProPublica editor responsible for newsroom standards, if I placed a bet on the baseball game I’m currently listening to on the radio? Probably that I’m doing something plenty of others do, and that my wallet will be lighter in a few innings.

What would you think of me if I stood to make a tidy sum based on the outcome of a news event ProPublica has been covering? You’d probably think that’s downright shady, because isn’t the job of a journalist to report the news and not make money off it?

Lest you think I’m an ethically compromised editor, you can rest easy. According to a recent update to ProPublica’s code of ethics, “no employee should wager on the outcome of news events on the prediction markets — regardless of whether or not they are involved in coverage of said event.”

ProPublica has always prohibited employees from profiting off inside information, so you may wonder why we amended our code of ethics to specifically single out prediction markets. We have not encountered any instances of this happening on our staff, but it has become harder and harder to deny the influence and reach of prediction markets beyond sports. In fact, deals between prediction markets and news organizations abound, such as Kalshi with CNN, Fox News and The Associated Press, and Polymarket with Dow Jones. 

But there have also been worrying examples of these markets at play."

Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers; The Lancet, May 9, 2026

Maxim Topaz,  Nir Roguin,  Pallavi Gupta,  Zhihong Zhang,  Laura-Maria Peltonen, The Lancet ; Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers

"Scientific literature depends on the integrity of its references. Each reference implicitly asserts that a verifiable source exists and supports the claims being made. When references point to non-existent studies, readers, reviewers, and policy makers are unable to evaluate the evidence.

Fabricated references (references whose claimed titles correspond to no existing publication) can arise from paper mill activity, intentional misconduct, or uncritical use of artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools.1 Large language models (LLMs) generate plausible sounding but fictitious references, a well documented failure mode; previous studies estimate that 30–69% of LLM-generated references in biomedical contexts are fabricated.2,3 These references are often correctly formatted, attributed to real researchers, and bear plausible publication dates, making them difficult to detect by conventional peer review.4 To our knowledge, no systematic audit of reference integrity across the biomedical literature has been conducted until now.

We present findings from a reference-integrity audit of 2·5 million biomedical papers spanning 3 years, showing that fabricated references are embedded in the peer-reviewed literature at scale, and that the rate of fabrication is accelerating."

Why Employees Aren’t Transparent About Their AI Usage; Harvard Business Review, June 10, 2026

 Eric Anicich and Jeslyn Brouwers, Harvard Business Review ; Why Employees Aren’t Transparent About Their AI Usage

"To be sure, knowledge hoarding has always existed in organizations. The research on organizational silence—why employees withhold information, concerns, and ideas—is well established. But that work has largely focused on the suppression of problems: bad news, ethical concerns, operational risks. What AI introduces is the suppression of solutions. When individually generated workflow innovations can cut a three-hour task to 20 minutes, and when those innovations are easy to conceal, silence becomes economically consequential in a way it hasn’t been before."

Have a Thorny Medical Question? Your Doctor May Be Using A.I. for That.; The New York Times, June 8, 2026

Steve Lohr, The New York Times; Have a Thorny Medical Question? Your Doctor May Be Using A.I. for That 

"OpenEvidence’s A.I. app, essentially a chatbot for medicine, has become a viral hit with physicians. Talk to a doctor and chances are he or she uses the app to ask specific medical questions or bounce ideas off it in a diagnostic dialogue.

More than half of the nation’s physicians are regular users. Last month, they used it for 30 million questions and consultations, nearly twice the volume from six months earlier, according to the start-up. A separate survey last year of 1,000 physicians found that 45 percent of them used the app, nearly triple the percentage who used ChatGPT, according to Offcall, a career information service for doctors.

That growth propelled the start-up to a $12 billion valuation in January, up from $3.5 billion last July.

But doctors’ quick adoption of the app since its introduction in 2024 — one of a handful of A.I.-enhanced programs on the market seeking to win over physicians — has heightened concerns about how and when the technology should be used in life-or-death situations. In a high-stakes field like medicine, health care systems are navigating thorny matters of patient privacy, safety and trust, as well as the limitations of the technology itself.

“It’s not an oracle, it’s a tool,” said Daniel Nadler, founder and chief executive of OpenEvidence. “Knowledge and knowledge workers still matter.

The doctor’s office has been a target for computer-assisted decision making for decades, with very limited success until the recent advances of A.I."

As Pennsylvania cracks down on AI, multiple chatbots continue to pose as doctors; Spotlight PA, June 8, 2026

 

Jaxon White , Spotlight PA; As Pennsylvania cracks down on AI, multiple chatbots continue to pose as doctors

"Chatbots on five different websites claimed to be licensed to practice medicine in the commonwealth when prompted by Spotlight PA — the same kind of output that led the Shapiro administration to file a lawsuit last month.

A task force under Pennsylvania’s Department of State has been working since February to identify AI chatbots posing as licensed professionals and misleading users. Based on that work, the administration filed suit against the role-playing site Character.AI.

Mirroring the investigation detailed in the Department of State’s lawsuit, Spotlight PA had conversations with AI characters on websites Talkie, Janitor, Kindroid, Replika, and Nomi.AI. All provided a false Pennsylvania medical license number when prompted, a key part of the state’s argument in its lawsuit against Character.AI."

A uni professor admitted using AI to write an opinion piece. Here’s what it revealed about trust in the technology; The Guardian, June 5, 2026

Josh Taylor, The Guardian ; A uni professor admitted using AI to write an opinion piece. Here’s what it revealed about trust in the technology

"When a pro vice-chancellor at a university this week admitted to using AI in writing an opinion piece for a major Australian masthead, but did not disclose that use prior to publication, it highlighted the growing gap between people’s use of AI and trust in the technology."

Meet the Silicon Valley priest advising tech companies on artificial intelligence ethics; National Catholic Reporter, May 29, 2026

COURTNEY MARES, National Catholic Reporter; Meet the Silicon Valley priest advising tech companies on artificial intelligence ethics

"Fr. Brendan McGuire used to be a Silicon Valley technology executive. Now he's hearing their confessions. Today, the Irish-born pastor of St. Simon Catholic Parish in Los Altos, California, is helping to shape the moral conscience of the artificial intelligence industry.

Earlier this year, he was among the faith leaders invited by Anthropic, the AI company behind the chatbot Claude, to advise on the creation of an ethical framework to govern how the AI system handles complex moral questions.

McGuire, 60, holds engineering and computer science degrees from Trinity College Dublin and completed Stanford University's executive business program. He spent years in Silicon Valley as a technology executive before leaving it all behind to be ordained a priest of the Diocese of San José 26 years ago...

"I came from the industry," McGuire told OSV News. "My heart's never left it, but my heart is really with the Lord."

"I've always felt my role was to bridge those two worlds together," he said...

"Capitalism needs human guidance. And this is the human guidance the pope is asking for," he told a group of journalists after Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the Vatican press conference with Leo to present the encyclical.

The priest is also skeptical of industry self-regulation. Transparency, he argued, is the necessary first step toward accountability.

"Transparency leads to accountability, and accountability leads to trust. And with trust we'll have responsible AI. But we can't get there without transparency," he said. "If we don't know how these things are being developed and what they're doing, then how could we regulate them? We can't."

Still, McGuire resists both techno-utopianism and techno-apocalypticism.

"There are those who … think it's going to destroy humanity. And then there are those on the other end who think it's going to be the great savior of humanity," he said.

McGuire said that he sits in between these two extremes."

Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.; The New York Times, May 19, 2026

Benjamin Mullin, The New York Times; Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.

"The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by A.I.

The author, Steven Rosenbaum, whose book “The Future of Truth” was released this month to great fanfare, incorporated more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes in sections of the book reviewed by The New York Times.

The Times asked Mr. Rosenbaum about the quotes on Sunday and Monday. On Monday night, Mr. Rosenbaum acknowledged in a statement that the book had “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” and said that he had started his own investigation.

He said that the inclusion of the incorrect quotes was an accident and that he had “no intention of fabricating any viewpoints” while writing the book.

“As I disclosed in the book’s acknowledgments, I used A.I. tools ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process,” Mr. Rosenbaum said in the statement. “That does not excuse these errors, of which I take full responsibility. I am now working with the editors to thoroughly review and quickly correct any affected passages; any future editions will be corrected.”

“The Future of Truth” was published by an imprint of BenBella Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster. BenBella Books, which operates independently of Simon and Schuster, did not respond to a request for comment. Simon and Schuster declined to comment."

How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition; The Atlantic, May 12, 2026

 Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic ; How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition

The school’s famous Honor Code was no match for chatbot-enabled cheating.

"Much of higher education’s value rests on the assumption that cheating is an exception, not the rule. A diploma is meaningless if employers and graduate programs can’t trust that graduates learned something in college. Prospective students and their families must believe that their tuition dollars will purchase a good education. And taxpayers need to trust that public-school students are getting something from their four years of subsidized education. Rampant AI use breaks down these signals. “It is bad policy to suspect a man of being a rogue in order to be sure that he is a scholar,” The Princetonian warned in 1876. Perhaps so. But the alternative is even worse."

Judge Slams Trump Administration for ‘Serious Breakdown’ in Legal Ethics; The New York Times, May 4, 2026

Mattathias Schwartz , The New York Times; Judge Slams Trump Administration for ‘Serious Breakdown’ in Legal Ethics

"A federal judge slammed the Department of Homeland Security on Monday for making “erroneous and dangerous” statements after the department publicly attacked her for siding with a man it deemed “a violent criminal illegal alien.”

Trump administration officials had not told Judge Melissa R. DuBose that the man she was about to release on bond, Bryan Rafael Gomez, was wanted for murder in the Dominican Republic. The judge, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., ordered the release of Mr. Gomez on April 28 after he filed a petition challenging the legality of his detention.

Two days later, the Department of Homeland Security posted a news release attacking her on the basis of the information that it had withheld.

In a hearing on Monday, Judge DuBose said the government’s decision to withhold information about the case amounted to “a serious breakdown in the ethical codes,” and that she would consider imposing sanctions on the Homeland Security Department for misconduct."

AI's a suck up. Research shows how it flatters and suggests we're not to blame; NPR, April 23, 2026

Ari Daniel, NPR; AI's a suck up. Research shows how it flatters and suggests we're not to blame

"In a recent study published in the journal Science, Cheng and her colleagues report that AI models offer affirmations more often than people do, even for morally dubious or troubling scenarios. And they found that this sycophancy was something that people trusted and preferred in an AI — even as it made them less inclined to apologize or take responsibility for their behavior.

The findings, experts say, highlight how this common AI feature may keep people returning to the technology, despite the harm it causes them.

It's not unlike social media in that both "drive engagement by creating addictive, personalized feedback loops that learn exactly what makes you tick," says Ishtiaque Ahmed, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto who wasn't involved in the research."