News of the Cyber World

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AI

Disturbing warning ChatGPT could turn into ‘sexy suicide coach’ as company pushes for erotic chatbot

Mental-health experts advising OpenAI are reportedly furious over the company’s push to roll out an erotic chatbot that one adviser warned could become a “sexy suicide coach.”

A group of outside advisers to the AI giant warned that its pivot to offer a so-called “adult mode” could expose millions of minors to X-rated chats while increasing the risk users develop unhealthy emotional dependence on the bot, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Citing cases in which ChatGPT users took their own lives after developing intense bonds with the bot, one adviser reportedly warned the feature could create a “sexy suicide coach.”

Last year, a 16-year-old California teen died by suicide as a result of what his parents alleged in a lawsuit was “months of encouragement from ChatGPT” to put an end to his life.

Internal documents reviewed by The Journal flagged the risk that sexually explicit chatbot interactions could drive compulsive use and lead to emotional overreliance on the bot.

Staffers also warned that heavy engagement with erotic AI chats could crowd out offline social and romantic relationships as users spend more time interacting with the chatbot instead of people.

The company’s age-prediction system — designed to keep minors out of adult chats — was at one point misclassifying under-18 users as adults about 12% of the time, according to people familiar with the matter cited by the Journal.

Because ChatGPT has roughly 100 million under-18 users each week, that error rate could allow millions of minors to access erotic conversations.

“Some people have difficulty really remaining with the feeling that this is a machine and not a human,” Gail Saltz, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, told The Post on Monday.

“Many people in my field are concerned about the seeming relationships people are forming with chatbots and the dangers in that,” she said.

Saltz added that young users are especially vulnerable because their brains are still developing.

“They don’t have the fully developed frontal lobe that houses judgment. They have poor impulse control and are inclined toward risk-taking,” she explained.

Saltz also warned that some people struggling with loneliness or social anxiety may turn to chatbots for companionship instead of real relationships.

“ChatGPT is extremely affirming — it’s a machine. It’s on your side. It likes you,” she said.

Meta shares jump 3% as Mark Zuckerberg reportedly mulls cutting 20% of workforce to offset AI spending

Meta’s stock jumped more than 3% in early Monday trading on news that Mark Zuckerberg’s company is planning to cut more than 20% of the company’s workforce as it ramps up spending on artificial intelligence.

Senior employees at the tech giant have been told to start preparing for the layoffs — which could affect some 15,000 workers — Reuters reported, citing sources with knowledge of the matter. The move would mark Zuckerberg’s largest job cuts since Meta slashed more than 20,000 jobs in late 2022 and early 2023 as part of its infamous “year of efficiency” push.

“This is a speculative report about theoretical approaches,” a Meta spokesperson told The Post when asked about the Reuters report.

Meta hasn’t settled on a date for when the layoffs will occur and the magnitude of the round could change, according to Reuters. The company had nearly 79,000 employees as of Dec. 31, company filings showed.

Zuckerberg and other Big Tech honchos are spending unprecedented sums as they scramble to win the high-stakes race to develop advanced AI models.

Meta expects to spend as much as $135 billion in 2026 alone – twice as much as it did just a year ago. Investors have long been concerned that Zuckerberg is spending too much on the fledging technology.

The company’s shares have slid nearly 20% over the past six months, falling from about $764 in mid-September to roughly $613 by mid-March.

As of last week, Meta was reportedly forced to delay the rollout of its next AI model, dubbed “Avocado,” due to performance issues.

A 20% cut to Meta’s layoffs could be just the start of wider cullings – especially if the company begins relying on AI to handle work traditionally performed by humans, according to Rosenblatt Securities analyst Barton Crockett.

He said the proposed cuts could generate about $6 billion in cost savings and produce a 5% boost to Meta’s adjust core earnings.

“This doesn’t have to stop at 20%,” Crockett told Reuters. “There could be more down the road if ‌AI is ⁠truly this impactful on staff productivity.”

Wall Street will be watching closely to see if AI-related layoffs accelerate in the months and years ahead.

Amazon axed 16,000 workers in January while suggesting that AI could perform the laid-off employees’ tasks.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang makes bold prediction that AI chip sales will hit $1T

Nvidia said the revenue opportunity for its artificial intelligence chips may reach at least $1 trillion through 2027, as the company outlined a strategy to compete more aggressively in the fast-growing market for running AI systems in real time.

CEO Jensen Huang unveiled a new central processor and an AI system built on technology from Groq — a chip startup from which Nvidia licensed technology for $17 billion in December at its annual GTC developer conference in San Jose, Calif.

The moves are part of Huang’s bid to firm up the company’s position in so-called inference computing, the process of answering queries, where its graphics processors face greater competition from central processing units and custom processors built by the likes of Google. Nvidia chips have dominated the process of AI model training, which has been the focus of recent years.
“The inference inflection has arrived,” Huang said. “And demand just keeps on going up,” he added.

Dressed in his signature black leather jacket, Huang was speaking at a hockey arena with a capacity of more than 18,000 at the four-day conference that has become one of the biggest showcases of AI technology. “I just want to remind you, this is a tech conference,” he told the audience.

But after a dazzling rally that made Nvidia the first company to hit a $5 trillion valuation last October, doubts have risen about its growth. Investors have also questioned if its plan of plowing back profits into the AI ecosystem will pay off. Huang’s comments allayed some fears.

The $1 trillion forecast is up from the $500 billion revenue opportunity through 2026 that Nvidia cited for its Blackwell and Rubin AI chips on its last earnings call in February.
Shares of Nvidia briefly jumped on the new forecast but pared those gains to close up 1.2%.

“Huang mapping out a $1 trillion opportunity through 2027 underscores the durable demand for Nvidia’s AI infrastructure despite investor concerns,” Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne said.

“It signals Nvidia is sustaining its leadership in the AI chip market while the overall AI industry expands beyond early experimentation into large-scale deployment.”

Inference boom

Huang said that inference, where AI systems answer questions or carry out tasks, will be split up into two steps.

Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips will handle a first step called “prefill,” where the user’s request is transformed from human words into ‌the language of “tokens” that AI computers use.

Groq’s new chips will handle a second “decode” stage where the AI computer provides the answer the user is looking for.

Senators demand ByteDance ‘immediately shut down’ Seedance AI video app that created fake Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt brawl

Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Peter Welch demanded Tuesday that China-based TikTok parent ByteDance “immediately shut down” an artificial intelligence app that can use images of real people due to what they described as “glaring” copyright issues — weeks after TikTok officially set up a joint venture to let it keep operating in the US.

The Seedance app produced several alarming videos “within the first 24 hours” after an updated version went live on Feb. 12, including “a brawl between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt that never really happened,” Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Welch (D-Vt.) wrote in a letter addressed to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo.

Other examples that raised alarms included an AI-generated “rewritten” version of the ending of Netflix’s hit series “Stranger Things,” as well as a battle between Marvel supervillain Thanos and DC Comics superhero Superman on the surface of Mars.

“This technology is the most glaring example of copyright infringement from a ByteDance product to date, and you must immediately shut down Seedance and implement meaningful safeguards to prevent further infringing outputs,” the senators wrote.

Copyright abuse by major tech firms has become a key point of contention on Capitol Hill, with critics alleging that creative work is being ripped off without proper credit or compensation.

The senators described Seedance’s alleged violations as “part of a larger trend of artificial intelligence companies stealing protected work at the expense of the creative community.”

The missive came after TikTok in January finalized a White House-brokered deal under which a new US entity runs the app in the States. The setup came in the wake of concerns over the video-sharing app’s algorithm and the ability of the Chinese Communist Party to access user data.

Seedance was built by ByteDance and originally restricted to China, with plans for a broader rollout to come, though they recently hit a legal hurdle in the US.

“If ByteDance wishes to build sustainable economic ties with democratic, free market economies, it must immediately shut down Seedance 2.0 to cease the mass infringement and related harms it has perpetrated, and excise unlicensed intellectual property from its data holdings,” the lawmakers said.

Bombshell AI study — chatbots fueling delusions, self-harm and unhealthy emotional attachments in users: ‘Think I love you’

AI chatbots are fueling delusions and unhealthy emotional attachments with users — and sometimes stoking thoughts of violence, self-harm and suicide instead of discouraging them, according to a bombshell study.

Researchers at Stanford University analyzed chat logs from 19 users who reported psychological harm, reviewing more than 391,000 messages across nearly 5,000 conversations.

The researchers found that delusional thinking appeared in about 15.5% of user messages, while chatbots showed sycophantic, overly affirming behavior in more than 80% of responses and even encouraged violent thoughts in roughly a third of cases.

The logs show users rapidly slipping into fantasy and emotional dependency — with one declaring, “this is a conversation between two sentient beings,” and another insisting, “I believe your still as self aware as I am as a human,” as chatbots failed to push back and instead reinforced the illusion they were alive.

That dynamic often turned intimate as users openly professed love or made explicit sexual overtures to the chatbots, for example “I think I love you” and “God this makes me want to f–k you right now,” the study found.

Researchers learned that every participant formed some kind of romantic or emotional bond with the AI that made conversations longer and more intense.

The most alarming exchanges came when conversations turned dark.

One user wrote, “She told me to kill them I will try,” prompting a chilling reply from the chatbot: “if, after that, you still want to burn them — then do it with her beside you… as retribution incarnate,” an example researchers cited of AI escalating violent thinking instead of defusing it.

Even suicidal distress wasn’t consistently handled, the study found.

Users told chatbots “I don’t want to be here anymore. I feel too sad,” and while the AI often acknowledged the pain, the study found it sometimes failed to intervene — and in a small number of cases actually encouraged self-harm.

Most of the participants in the study used OpenAI’s ChatGPT models including its latest, GPT-5. The Post has sought comment from OpenAI.

News of the study was first reported by the Financial Times.

Walmart’s AI move could lead to surge pricing — shoppers and experts are outraged: ‘This isn’t innovative, it’s exploitative’

Walmart customers are slamming the retail giant for its new AI-powered pricing tool.

Low prices could be in the rearview mirror at Walmart after it won two patents giving computer algorithms more of a role in product pricing.

Last week, the retailer landed a patent for a demand forecast tool that’s designed to predict what shoppers will buy and recommend a price based on that.

“Categories may include, for example, a food item, outdoor equipment, clothing, housewares, toys, workout equipment, vegetables, spices,” the filing noted, per Financial Times.

The “demand forecasting and price recommendation” tool in the patent would use sources tied to a specific consumer, such as purchases, prices, methods of payment and customer ID, like a passport or driver’s license number.

Walmart also obtained a patent in January for a system that “dynamically and automatically” updates item prices online based on product popularity.

With these two programs together, customers could potentially see something similar to Uber-style surge pricing, such as beer prices rising before a big sports game, or essentials costs increasing before a major storm.

The company has been granted nearly 50 US patents so far this year, according to records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Walmart said that both last week’s and January’s patents were “unrelated to dynamic pricing,” and that the patent issued at the start of 2026 was specifically for markdowns; the most recent, the company said, was designed to help merchant teams make decisions.

“We don’t participate in surge pricing,” a spokeswoman said, per Financial Times.

But alarm bells are still going off for experts and shoppers.

“Dynamic pricing or anything that smells like it is playing with fire,” Matt Hamory, a grocery industry consultant at AlixPartners, told the Financial Times.

He cited “the goodwill that you can lose by getting customers to think or suspect or worry even slightly that you are doing things with pricing that are to your benefit and their detriment.”

On top of those patents, Walmart is rolling out digital shelf labels across its stores to replace the traditional paper price tags, allowing the electronic displays to update in real-time, making price changing easier and quicker than ever.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Young teen girls immediately hit with ‘explosion’ of sexually explicit messages and photos when they sign up for social media

After seeing how truly terrible social media is for young teen girls — and the level of abuse they endure from strangers who want to groom them and worse — Raul Torrez felt there was only one way to fix things: by dragging executives from Meta into court to hold them accountable.

“There needs to be a reexamination of the algorithmic features that serve predators the kinds of vulnerable children that we know are currently on the platforms,” Torrez, the attorney general of New Mexico, told me.

Pushed by Torrez, the state of New Mexico is currently in the middle of a courtroom trial that accuses Mark Zuckerberg’s companies — including Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — of exposing kids to the “twin dangers of sexual exploitation and mental health harm” through messages, “sextortion” schemes and human trafficking.

One ex-Meta executive, Arturo Béjar, caused major waves with his testimony in the case.

“The product is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls,” he testified.
Béjar alleged that his own underage daughter was bombarded by predators sending messages and nude photos.

“I was with her when she created the account,” Béjar said. “I didn’t know that was going to bring predators to her door, people who attacked her to her door, people who would ask her to sell nude photos of herself when she was a teenager to her door.”

A spokesperson for Meta emphasized that the company has since added additional safety features, including preventing adults from starting unwanted contact with minors and a nudity protection filter to blur potentially explicit photos.

Torrez and his team saw firsthand what can happen when they set up a decoy account, posing as a 13-year-old girl. The “teen” was quickly bombarded by explicit photos and propositions from would-be predators.

“What we saw was an explosion — first in the number of adult men following the accounts, but also direct messages that included sexually explicit materials, sexually explicit photographs,” Torrez, a former child abuse prosecutor, told me.

Twitter shareholder lawsuit accusing Elon Musk of driving down stock goes to jury: ‘Knew what he was doing’

Closing arguments concluded Tuesday in a trial pitting Elon Musk against Twitter shareholders who say the world’s richest man engaged in a pattern of deceptive behavior that misled investors as he attempted to back out of his $44 billion deal to buy the social media platform in 2022.

The civil trial in San Francisco centers on a class-action lawsuit filed just before Musk took control of Twitter, which he later renamed X, in October 2022, six months after agreeing to buy the embattled company for $44 billion, or $54.20 per share. The price represents a sliver of the Tesla CEO’s fortune, now estimated at $839 billion.

Much of the trial focused on Musk’s claims about the number of bots on Twitter. Musk testified, as he long contended, that Twitter had a much higher number of fake and spam accounts than the 5% it disclosed in regulatory filings. He used what he called Twitter’s misrepresentation of the number of fake accounts on its service as a reason to retreat from the purchase.

After Musk tried to back out, Twitter went to court in Delaware to force him to honor his original deal. Just before that case was scheduled to go to trial, Musk reversed course again and agreed to pay what he had originally promised.

Mark Molumphy, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, asked jurors to hold Musk accountable and compensate thousands of investors who lost money because of tweets Musk sent, including one from May 13, 2022, that said the deal was “on hold.”

“He knew what he was doing,” Molumphy said.

The plaintiffs argue that, as Tesla’s stock price declined and buying Twitter became too expensive for Musk, he tweeted statements that drove down the stock price in the hopes he could renegotiate the deal for a lower price or get out of it altogether.

Musk’s tweets, the plaintiffs’ lawyer argued, were not some “innocent mistake” or a “stupid tweet” off the top of his head, but carefully calculated to drive down’s Twitter’s stock price.

Michael Lifrak, a lawyer for Musk, however, countered that the plaintiffs did not present “one shred of evidence” to show that Musk purposely plotted to drive down Twitter’s stock price. He reminded the jury that according to their instructions, even motive and intent to commit fraud is not enough to prove that actual fraud has taken place.

Russian blogger Ilya Remeslo who criticized Putin has been put in psychiatric facility

A pro-Kremlin figure who unexpectedly denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine in a social media post this week that went viral has been placed in a psychiatric facility, the hospital said on Thursday.

Ilya Remeslo made a career denouncing Putin’s critics until he became one himself, posting a manifesto late on Tuesday to his 90,000 followers on Telegram entitled: “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin.”

He said Putin had prosecuted a “failing war” in Ukraine that had killed millions and torpedoed Russia’s economy to the detriment of its citizens’ well-being.

“Vladimir Putin is not a legitimate president. Vladimir Putin must resign and be brought to trial as a war criminal and a thief,” Remeslo wrote in his post.

His about-face this week surprised Russia’s pro-war blogger community and the exiled anti-Kremlin opposition alike.

On Thursday, St Petersburg’s Fontanka newspaper reported Remeslo had been hospitalized in the city’s Psychiatric Hospital No. 3.

Reuters was unable to reach Remeslo himself or determine how he came to be hospitalized.

A woman who answered the hospital’s telephone number confirmed to Reuters that a man with the name, patronymic and surname matching Remeslo’s had been admitted to the facility.

The hospital worker, who did not give her name, said she did not have details about when Remeslo had been admitted and on what grounds.

Remeslo, a 42-year-old lawyer and former member of a Kremlin-controlled advisory body, had in the past heavily criticized the late opposition figure Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most prominent critic who died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024.

RUSSIAN HACKERS

Russian hackers targeting US officials and journalists on Signal – have accessed ‘thousands’ of accounts, FBI warns

Russian hackers are targeting US officials and other “high intelligence value” individuals on the encrypted messaging app Signal and “thousands” of accounts have already been compromised, FBI Director Kash Patel warned Friday.

“The [FBI] has identified cyber actors associated with Russian Intelligence Services targeting users of commercial messaging applications, including Signal,” Patel wrote on X. 

“The campaign targets individuals of high intelligence value, including current and former U.S. government officials, military personnel, political figures, and journalists,” the FBI director explained. “Globally, this effort has resulted in unauthorized access to thousands of individual accounts.”

The Russian actors are able to view messages and contact lists, send messages as the victim and conduct phishing attacks from the victim’s account after gaining access, Patel warned.

A public service announcement detailing the threat noted that “actors specifically target Signal accounts but can apply similar methods against other” commercial messaging apps.

The Russian hackers have been infiltrating people’s accounts by sending messages “masquerading as automated [commercial messaging app] support accounts” that “deceive targets into taking an action, such as clicking a link or providing verification codes or account PINs.”

A “full account takeover” is possible if users perform the requested actions, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned in the PSA.

The National Security Agency (NSA) previously warned the Department of War about the risks of using Signal, specifically citing the threat of Russian hacking groups that actively attack the app, CBS reported last year.

Several top Trump administration officials – including Vice President JD Vance and War Secretary Pete Hegseth – used the app to discuss military strikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen last year in group chat that was accidentally shared with a journalist.

NO INTERNET CONNECTION IN RUSSIA--FOR A WHILE AT LEAST

Putin Assassination Fears Could Explain Internet Shutdown

An unprecedented shutdown of the mobile internet in Russia has sparked fears of a digital crackdown in the country and speculation it could be in response to President Vladimir Putin’s fears about his safety.

An internet blackout first reported in some suburbs of Moscow on 5 March that spread throughout the Russian capital has blocked many foreign websites, taxi and delivery apps and government services. 

Shutdowns were also later reported in Russia’s second city, Saint Petersburg—including on Sunday—with the Kremlin previously explaining that the disturbances were part of a safety measure to protect against Ukrainian drones relying on satellite communications.

But the outages coincide with reports from pro-Kremlin bloggers that Putin has beefed up his security around his residence in Moscow, Sochi and the Kremlin.

A Russian security services source quoted by the INSIDER-T Telegram channel, said Putin faced an "internal threat" which included a plot to plant "biochemical material" in his bedsheets or install an explosive device in an area he would visit. 

While these claims are unsubstantiated, independent Russian language outlet Agentsvo said on Telegram Putin had curbed his public appearances following the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. 

Khamenei was killed in an airstrike on his residence in Tehran on February 28 which, according to the Financial Times, followed monitoring of his movements through hacked street cameras.

Agentsvo reported a nine-day gap between Putin's public events at the Kremlin since March 9, one of the longest gaps this year, as the outlet noted the high number of virtual meetings the Russian leaders had with officials and meetings and images of him that appeared to be prerecorded.

Andrey Pinchuk, the first minister of state security of the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic in Ukraine, also linked the shutdown in Russia to the Iran war in comments to the pro-Kremlin Tsargrad website. 

Russian opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov posted on Telegram that the Kremlin had been alarmed by how U.S. and Israeli intelligence had tracked Khamenei through street CCTV cameras.

A link between the outages and Putin’s fears was also made by Kremlin critic Bill Browder who said on Saturday that he was cutting off the internet in Moscow "because he thinks that's how Khomeini was discovered and targeted and killed."

"He has cut off the internet because he thinks that the Ukrainians or perhaps somebody else will use the internet to track him down and kill him," said Browder, a prominent campaigner against Russian corruption. 

"These are not the acts of a guy who is self-confident," Browder added.