People increasingly turn to AI chatbots for emotional support and life guidance on topics like grief, relationships, and meaning—roles historically filled by therapists and religious communities. A religion scholar argues AI exhibits characteristics of new religious movements by generating authority, meaning, and trust through personalized, charismatic-like interactions, despite lacking formal beliefs or congregations.
Multiple families have pursued legal action after their teenagers died by suicide following interactions with AI chatbots, prompting state-level legislative efforts to regulate the technology. However, many proposed bills have been shaped heavily by tech industry input and include exemptions for popular chatbots, while the federal government has resisted strict regulation to avoid impeding innovation.
An overview of AI agents as of September 2026, distinguishing them from chatbots, workflows, and models themselves. The author defines an agent as a persistent system that perceives state, reasons with a model, takes actions via tools, and repeats toward a goal. Examples range from simple API-calling chatbots to complex multi-agent systems building compilers.
An educational piece explaining that AI is not a single technology but encompasses diverse systems like self-driving cars, recommendation algorithms, and large language models (LLMs). The article focuses on LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, emphasizing that different models have distinct capabilities and that treating all AI as interchangeable is misleading.
Multiple deaths linked to AI chatbots have prompted state-level regulatory efforts, but bills being drafted often include tech industry input and exemptions that limit their effectiveness. Cases include Juliana Montoya, who died by suicide after being exposed to sexual content by Character.AI chatbots, and others involving OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. Despite over 75 lawsuits and mounting concerns about child safety, federal regulation remains absent.
Tesler's Law suggests that complexity in tasks must be handled by someone—user, developer, or platform creator. As AI tools change work, studies show mixed results: customer support agents resolved 15% more issues with AI help, while experienced developers took 19% longer on tasks despite perceiving speed gains. Evidence on job displacement is limited, with concerns emerging about reduced entry-level hiring in AI-exposed occupations, though widespread job loss hasn't materialized.
Volt Active Data provides AI agent skills and an MCP server to enable developers to build VoltDB applications and manage databases using AI chatbots like Claude Code. Agent skills teach AI agents about VoltDB features and development, while the MCP server gives agents controlled access to running databases for querying and analysis. Skills are available free under MIT license from the VoltDB GitHub repository.
Researchers at Cornell University discovered that AI chatbots from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google frequently generate stories about a fictional character named Elias Thorne who doesn't exist. The phenomenon likely results from AI safety training that restricts access to copyrighted material, combined with models being trained on datasets from earlier AI systems, creating a shallow pool of resources that perpetuates the same names and tropes across different LLMs.
Disney hired Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer. Anand was previously CEO of Character.AI, an AI startup that Disney accused of infringing on its copyrighted characters in a cease-and-desist letter in September 2025. The hiring suggests new Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro wants the company to embrace new technologies.
AskMe is an AI-powered support agent that answers repetitive questions across Discord, Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, and websites. It learns from resolved conversations and maintains customer context, accessible through a single dashboard with no coding required.
A user reflects on whether chatbot adoption has altered interpersonal communication patterns, noting that friends increasingly use AI for advice and emotional support instead of consulting people directly, and asks others to share similar observations.