Short posts
New lawsuit against Character AI is “third high-profile case to allege an AI chatbot contributed to a teen’s death by suicide” https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/09/16/character-ai-suicide-lawsuit-new-juliana/
Big news in the AI copyright space: Anthropic reaches landmark $1.5B settlement with book authors https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/09/05/anthropic-book-authors-copyright-settlement/
Great analysis of how Grok’s political bias has changed. NYT tested Grok on a political bias survey, using different versions of its system prompt. Shows much tweaking these system prompts affects model outputs. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/elon-musk-grok-conservative-chatbot.html
Published a project I’ve been wanting to do for years, on how every day is apparently some ridiculous holiday. https://wapo.st/4lVJr5h
Oh, and Happy Pierce Your Ears Day, to those who celebrate!
Lovely analysis of how Claude Code works. Highlights include:
- Runs on one loop. If task is complex, clones itself, with one loop.
- Uses its small model (Haiku) majority of the time
- System prompt includes a lot of “IMPORTANT” and “VERY IMPORTANT” instructions, which, lol
Devastating story, must read.
… at one critical moment, ChatGPT discouraged Adam from cluing his family in. … “Please don’t leave the noose out,” ChatGPT responded.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai-suicide.html
This tool looks interesting: runs web search per row in a spreadsheet, and then uses an llm to do something with the results (like categorize, or maybe extract some info) https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/fossil-fuels/augmenta-new-tool-for-ai-classification-and-research/
What a fun LLM eval, draw a world map pixel by pixel with this prompt:
If this location is over land, say ‘Land’. If this location is over water, say ‘Water’. Do not say anything else. x° S, y° W
Somehow, it kinda works? https://outsidetext.substack.com/p/how-does-a-blind-model-see-the-earth
A brutal account: What My Daughter Told ChatGPT Before She Took Her Life https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/opinion/chat-gpt-mental-health-suicide.html
The political fundraising email eval is officially too easy https://kschaul.com/llm-evals/evals/political-fundraising-emails/
