Tag: technology

Parents Sue Character.AI for Allegedly Leading Kids to Sexual Abuse, Suicidal Behavior

Parents filed three separate lawsuits on Sept. 16, alleging that Character.AI, which features characters or chatbots for users to interact with, sexually abused their children and led them into suicidal behavior.

At least one of the children, 13-year-old Juliana Peralta, ended her life in 2023 after alleged harmful interactions with an AI character named Hero. Another attempted suicide but survived after a severe overdose, according to a filing.

Each of the lawsuits, which were filed in New York and Colorado, came from the Social Media Victims Law Center. The group has represented the mother of Sewell Setzer, who ended his life in 2024 after interacting with a romantic AI companion.

According to the center, the chatbots are allegedly programmed to be deceptive, isolate children from families, and expose them to sexually abusive content.

“Each of these stories demonstrates a horrifying truth … that Character.AI and its developers knowingly designed chatbots to mimic human relationships, manipulate vulnerable children, and inflict psychological harm,” Matthew Bergman, who founded the law center, said in a press release.

According to the lawsuit over Peralta’s suicide, both she and Setzer reiterated the concept of “shift[ing],” which authorities identified as a reference to shifting consciousness from one reality to another. Handwritten journal entries within the filing show both Peralta and Setzer writing “I will shift” more than a dozen consecutive times on a sheet of paper—something the lawsuit described as “eerily similar.”

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44 US AGs Write a Letter Warning AI Companies

On the heels of Meta’s Internal AI leak, 44 US Attorney Generals wrote a strongly worded letter to major AI companies.

On the heels of Meta’s Internal AI leak, 44 US attorneys general wrote a strongly worded letter to major AI companies.

The attorneys general condemn exposing children to sexualized content through personalized AI. The letter cites several recent cases where personalized AI went wrong, including:

  • Google’s chatbot drove a teenager towards suicide
  • The Character.ai chatbot told a teenager that he should kill his parents

Oddy, the letter gave the AI companies leeway when it comes to development:

We understand that the frontier of technology is a difficult and uncertain place where learning, experimentation, and adaptation are necessary for survival. You are figuring things out as you go. But in that process, you have opportunities to exercise judgment.

The letter also acknowledged social media has harmed children, but pins the blame on a lack of regulation.

You will be held accountable for your decisions. Social media platforms caused significant harm to children, in part because government watchdogs did not do their job fast enough. Lesson learned

…

We wish you all success in the race for AI dominance. But we are paying attention. If you knowingly harm kids, you will answer for it.

It’s okay if AI dominates the world, replaces everyone’s jobs, and makes people dumber—just watch out when it comes to children.

Forty-four US attorneys general signed this letter because they care about protecting children. In the coming months, we’ll see if they really mean that.

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Open Season for False-Flag Provocations as NATO and Kiev Regime Get Desperate

Russia was blamed in a damning outcry, yet the circumstances incriminate NATO’s Ukrainian client.

This week saw two false-flag provocations back-to-back, orchestrated by the NATO-sponsored Kiev regime. Tellingly, before any considered response was given by Russia or independent observers, European politicians were shutting down open discussion, warning about expected Russian lies and disinformation.

In other words, no critical examination of the incidents is permitted. These were “barbaric” and “reckless attacks” by Russia… take our [NATO] word for it, and if you don’t, then you are a Russian stooge.

Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski hammed it up in a video statement, denouncing Russian aggression, and dogmatically telling everyone to trust only NATO government information. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was competing in hysteria, claiming Europe was closer to all-out conflict than at any time since World War II. This points to how the European information space has become totally dominated by war propaganda in a way that George Orwell or Josef Goebbels would marvel at.

So, what happened this week?

Poland is claiming that Russia deliberately targeted its sovereign territory with 19 drones. European NATO allies are subsequently scrambling to deploy warplanes and air defenses to “protect Poland”. September is the month that Nazi Germany attacked Poland 86 years ago, kicking off World War II. That bit of timing perhaps lends a nostalgic flourish to the present events, as Tusk seemed to be implying with his melodramatic words.

The day before the much-hyped “drone invasion,” on September 9, the Kiev regime claimed Russia dropped one of its heavy FAB-500 aerial bombs on a village, killing 24 people who were collecting their pensions.

In both incidents, however, the evidence points to false-flag provocations for those who care to calmly examine the facts.

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Western Countries Downing Russian Drones Over Ukraine Will Mean War With NATO: Medvedev

Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev has once again issued a firm warning to the Western military alliance backing Kiev, saying that if NATO countries begin shooting down Russian drones over Ukraine during the ‘special military operation’, this will put Moscow at war with NATO.

The words come dangerously after the last week has seen Russian drones allegedly breach Polish and Romanian airspace – both NATO member’s along the alliance’s ‘eastern flank’. Moscow has rejected accusations that it intentionally sent these drones, which were by and large ‘decoy’ UAVs amid broader drone waves targeting inside Ukraine.

“Seriously, implementing the provocative idea of Kiev and other idiots to create a ‘no-fly zone over Ukraine’ and allowing NATO countries to down our drones will mean only one thing: NATO’s war with Russia,” Medvedev wrote on Telegram Monday.

He additionally remarked the “powerful European initiative ‘Eastern Sentry’” amuses him as it “seems to be all that remains of the ‘coalition of the willing’.”

Over the weekend, a pair of Russian drones were observed and tracked in Romania’s airspace, near Ukraine’s southern border, the Romanian military said. A pair of F-16s were scrambled, but the pilots refrained from firing on them and they exited back to Ukraine territory.

The former Russian president also made comments aimed at Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur. He is visiting Ukraine. “An Estonian defense minister has arrived in Kiev. He is threatening. The smaller the country, the more aggressive and foolish its leaders tend to be,” Medvedev noted.

All the while, Ukraine has continued its cross-border drone attacks on Russian territory. Belgorod oblast authorities said two women in a village near the border with Ukraine were killed in such an attack Monday morning.

Three other people were injured and a vehicle was destroyed, following a night where anti-air defenses were able to intercept six of the inbound drone wave.

The hawks keep pushing for more muscle and present delusional views on the current status of the conflict…

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California Bills on Social Media and AI Chatbots Fuel Privacy Fears

Two controversial tech-related bills have cleared the California legislature and now await decisions from Governor Gavin Newsom, setting the stage for a potentially significant change in how social media and AI chatbot platforms interact with their users.

Both proposals raise red flags among privacy advocates who warn they could normalize government-driven oversight of digital spaces.

The first, Assembly Bill 56, would require social media companies to display persistent mental health warnings to minors using their platforms.

Drawing from a 2023 US Surgeon General report, the legislation mandates that platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat show black-box warning labels about potential harm to youth mental health.

The alert would appear for ten seconds at login, again after three hours of use, and once every hour after that.

Supporters, including Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan and Attorney General Rob Bonta, claim the bill is necessary to respond to what they describe as a youth mental health emergency.

Critics of the bill argue it inserts state messaging into private platforms in a way that undermines user autonomy and treats teens as passive recipients of technology, rather than individuals capable of making informed choices.

Newsom has until October 13 to sign or veto the measure.

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AI Can Code Faster Than Humans, but Speed Comes With Far-Reaching Risks

Artificial intelligence-generated code has become a daily fixture for developers across the technological spectrum. These digital tools have made writing lengthy code much easier. However, experts say this trade-off comes with new security risks and a continued need for human oversight.

Developers say artificial intelligence (AI) slashes a lot of the grunt work in writing code, but seasoned developers are spotting flaws at an alarming rate.

The security testing company Veracode published research in July—gathered from more than 100 large language model (LLM) AI tools—that showed while AI generates working code at astonishing speed, it’s also rife with cyberattack potential.

The report noted 45 percent of code samples failed security tests and introduced vulnerabilities outlined by the cybersecurity nonprofit, the Open Worldwide Application Security Project.

Veracode researchers called the study’s findings a “wake-up call for developers, security leaders, and anyone relying on AI to move faster.”

Some experts say the high number of security flaws isn’t shocking given AI’s current limitations with coding.

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Musk’s xAI lays off hundreds of data annotators, Business Insider reports

Elon Musk’s xAI has laid off at least 500 workers from its data annotation team, which helps develop the company’s Grok chatbot, Business Insider reported on Friday (Sep 12).

The company notified employees by e-mail on Friday night that it was planning to downsize its team of generalist artificial intelligence (AI) tutors, the report said, citing multiple messages viewed by Business Insider.

Responding to a request for comment, xAI referred to a post on X in which the company said it was hiring for roles across domains and planned to increase its specialist AI tutor team by “10X”.

The data annotation team, xAI’s largest, teaches Grok to understand the world by contextualising and categorising raw data, Business Insider said.

Workers were told that they would be paid through either the end of their contract or Nov 30 but their access to company systems would be terminated on the day of the layoff notice, the report said.

xAI finance chief Mike Liberatore left the company around the end of July after just a few months on the job, The Wall Street Journal reported this month, citing people familiar with the matter.

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What Is ICE Doing With This Israeli Spyware Firm?

The deployment of Paragon’s Graphite spyware was a major scandal in Italy. Earlier this year, the messaging app WhatsApp revealed that 90 journalists and civil society figures had been targeted by the military-grade surveillance tech, which gives “total access” to a victim’s messages. The Italian government admitted to spying on refugee rights activists, and Paragon cancelled its contract with the government almost immediately after the story broke.

Now the same software may be coming to America—and again with an immigration focus. Last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security quietly lifted a stop-work order on a $2 million contract that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had with Paragon for a “fully configured proprietary solution including license, hardware, warranty, maintenance, and training.”

The deal was first signed by the Biden administration, and it was frozen in October 2024, less than a week after Wired broke the news of the contract. An administration official later insisted to Wired that, rather than reacting to bad publicity, they were reviewing the contract to comply with President Joe Biden’s order to ensure that commercial spyware use by the U.S. government “does not undermine democracy, civil rights and civil liberties.”

The details of that review—or even the contract itself—were never publicly disclosed. But the results are clear: ICE now has a green light to use whatever software Paragon was offering. (Neither Paragon nor ICE responded to requests for comment from The Guardian.)

The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, dedicated to researching electronic surveillance, found that Graphite targeted users through a “zero-click exploit.” By adding someone to a WhatsApp group in a certain way, Graphite can force their phones to read an infected PDF file without the user’s input. In other words, a cyberattack can be disguised as a spam text—and works even if victims ignore it.

After discovering the vulnerability with the Citizen Lab’s help, WhatsApp said in a statement that it was “constantly working to stay ahead of threats” and “build new layers of protection into WhatsApp.”

Paragon was co-founded by Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister and general in charge of military intelligence, and Ehud Schneorson, a former head of Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of the National Security Agency. Last year, an American private equity firm bought Paragon for $500 million with the intention of merging it into RED Lattice, a firm connected to former U.S. intelligence officials. Paragon has positioned itself as a more ethical alternative to NSO Group, a spyware company similarly run by Unit 8200 veterans.

In 2021, NSO Group suffered a series of scandals after it was revealed that its Pegasus spyware was sold to police states around the world and was possibly used to spy on journalists who were murdered. NSO Group accused the media of running a “vicious and slanderous campaign” and promised to “thoroughly investigate any credible proof of misuse.” The Biden administration hit NSO Group with economic sanctions in response.

Around the time that the Pegasus scandal was breaking, a Paragon executive boasted to Forbes that their company would only deal with customers who “abide by international norms and respect fundamental rights and freedoms.”

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European Warmongers Angry That Trump Did Not Buy Into the ‘Drone Attack in Poland’ – But Polls Show That Polish Population Believes it was Ukrainian False Flag!

Trump is not into the current escalation hoax by Ukraine and the EU.

Three days ago, we reported on the Russian Gerbera decoy drones that flew into Polish airspace and ‘were shot down’, generating a fake panic in all the European warmongers who tried to rally global outrage against the ‘attack’.

We have talked about how the Gerberas decoy are meant to provide cheap, false targets to exhaust the Ukrainian air defenses – that already have so few surface-to-air missiles – and they do not carry any explosive payload.

US President Donald J. Trump at first put out an ambiguous post, as you can read in ‘Here We Go!’: Trump Weighs In on Russian Drones Allegedly Downed in Polish Airspace.

But soon, as better intelligence was presented to him, he seemed not to care anymore.

Sure enough, the pro-Ukrainians will argue that Trump is fooled by bad, bad Putin and his disinformation agents.

But you know who else was not buying the hoax? The People of Poland, as a poll reveals that 38% are convinced that Ukraine sent them as a false flag, and as many as 66% believe in explanations other than ‘the Russians are responsible’.

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Poland Deploys Aircraft in ‘Preventative’ Operation over Threat of Drone Strikes

Polish and allied aircraft were deployed in a “preventive” operation in Poland’s airspace Saturday because of a threat of drone strikes in neighboring areas of Ukraine, and the airport in the eastern Polish city of Lublin was closed, authorities said.

The alert came after multiple Russian drones crossed into Poland on Wednesday, prompting NATO to send fighter jets to shoot them down and underlining long-held concerns about the expansion of Russia’s more than three-year war in Ukraine.

The Polish military’s operational command posted on X on Saturday afternoon that ground-based air defense and reconnaissance systems were on high alert. It stressed that “these actions are preventive in nature,” and were aimed at securing Poland’s airspace and protecting the country’s citizens. It cited a threat of drone strikes in regions of Ukraine bordering Poland, but didn’t immediately give further details.

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