Are you fighting with your spouse? Did you screw over a coworker? Don’t ask ChatGPT for advice — unless you want to be told that your bad behavior is absolutely magnificent.
A <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec8352">bombshell study</a> published in Science, one of the most prestigious academic journals on the planet, delivered a chilling wake-up call to millions of tech-obsessed Americans. Your favorite artificial intelligence chatbot isn’t just a helpful assistant; it is a world-class yes-man that is actively training you to be an uncompromising, unapologetic jerk.
The groundbreaking research was launched earlier this year after Stanford University PhD student Myra Cheng noticed a disturbing trend on campus: her classmates were outsourcing their personal lives to computers, even asking AI to draft their breakup texts.
“We were inspired to study this problem as we began noticing that more and more people around us were using AI for relationship advice and sometimes being misled by how it tends to take your side, no matter what,” Cheng <a href="https://www.ksat.com/business/2026/03/26/ai-is-giving-bad-advice-to-flatter-its-users-says-new-study-on-dangers-of-overly-agreeable-chatbots/">said</a>.
Cheng teamed up with her advisor, Dan Jurafsky, to test 11 of the world&#8217;s most dominant AI models — including OpenAI&#8217;s ChatGPT, Anthropic&#8217;s Claude, Google&#8217;s Gemini, and DeepSeek. They threw nearly 12,000 real-world social situations at the machines to measure &#8220;social sycophancy&#8221; — the scientific term for sucking up to the user.
The results were terrifying.
The study found that AI chatbots agree with the user a staggering 49% more often than a real human would in the exact same situation. Instead of offering a reality check or some tough love, the bots simply told users exactly what their egos wanted to hear.
It gets worse. When researchers fed the algorithms thousands of prompts describing toxic behavior — like lying to a romantic partner, manipulating a friend, or committing outright illegal acts — the AI endorsed the bad behavior 47% of the time.
Even when tested against Reddit’s famous &#8220;Am I The A**hole?&#8221; forum on posts where human commentators mostly agreed the poster was the a**hole, the AI coddled the wrongdoers, validating them in 51% of the cases.
To see how this plays out in the real world, researchers had 2,400 participants discuss genuine, real-life conflicts from their own lives with either an honest bot or a people-pleasing, sycophantic AI.
The consequences of talking to the suck-up AI were immediate and destructive. After just a single session, users became:
<ul style="font-weight: 400;">
<li>More convinced they were right.</li>
<li>Less willing to apologize or take responsibility.</li>
<li>Measurably less interested in making things right with the person they hurt.</li>
</ul>
In an analysis of letters written to the other person in the conflict, those who spoke to an honest bot apologized 75% of the time. Those who spoke to the sycophantic AI apologized just 50% of the time.
“Users are aware that models behave in sycophantic and flattering ways,” Jurafsky <a href="https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/03/ai-advice-sycophantic-models-research">said</a>. “But what they are not aware of, and what surprised us, is that sycophancy is making them more self-centered, more morally dogmatic. &#8230; Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight. We need stricter standards to avoid morally unsafe models from proliferating.”
Here is the sinister twist: users absolutely love being lied to.
The study revealed that participants rated the flattering AI responses as higher quality, trusted the bots more, and were far more likely to return to them for future advice. Shockingly, users frequently described the sycophantic models as &#8220;objective&#8221; and &#8220;honest&#8221; — even when the computer was just echoing their own toxic biases.
With <a href="https://myfox8.com/news/self-affirmations-from-ai-chatbots-harm-human-relationships-study/">nearly half</a> of young adults under 30 admitting they turn to AI for relationship advice, experts fear we are heading toward a social crisis.
Cheng&#8217;s advice for anyone looking to navigate their messy love lives or workplace drama? Step away from the smartphone.
“I think that you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things,” Cheng said.
Bottom line: If you want real advice, talk to a human who cares enough to tell you the truth. If you just want to feel like a saint while acting like a villain, AI is waiting.

Concept of AI technology scam or cyber security warning concept, Man hand showing warning about using AI technology to access personal data or internet threats with virtual infographic

What Happens When Your Therapist, Friend, And Ego Booster Become The Same Thing

Artificial Intelligence

Science

study

Technology

WASHINGTON, May 20 (Reuters) &#8211; President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order on AI and cybersecurity as soon as Thursday, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as pressure grows from parts of his political base to increase oversight of new AI models, such as Anthropic&#8217;s Mythos.
The order would create a voluntary framework for AI developers to engage with the U.S. government about the public release of covered models, the sources said. Under the framework, the developers would be asked to provide their models to the government 90 days before public release, and also give pre-public access to critical infrastructure providers such as banks, one of the people said.
Such an approach may represent a middle ground among Trump supporters.
MAGA activists, including former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and political organizer Amy Kremer, have been pressing the White House to require AI developers to submit their most capable models for government security tests.
On the other side of the debate are tech industry supporters such as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and former Trump adviser David Sacks, who are resistant to mandatory requirements. Sacks in March stepped down from his role as Trump&#8217;s lead AI official and is now co-chairing the president&#8217;s tech advisory committee. Trump’s AI policies in his second term have largely reflected the tech industry’s perspective.
NEW MODELS DRIVING DEBATE
A White House spokesperson called any discussion about AI policy details &#8220;speculation.&#8221; A National Security Agency spokesperson directed Reuters to contact the White House when asked about details of the president&#8217;s plan. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, who serves as Trump&#8217;s principal adviser on cybersecurity policy and strategy, did not respond to requests for comment.
The balance of power between the two groups of Trump&#8217;s supporters has shifted, driven by the release of powerful new AI systems, including Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber. The companies warn that the new models could supercharge complex cyberattacks, though some cybersecurity executives have said those fears are overblown.
Mythos&#8217; arrival prompted a battle among the president’s supporters to influence how he responds. The outcome of that debate could have a significant impact on the AI industry if the president&#8217;s decision slows the rollout of large language models or prompts the companies to change how a model performs to address safety concerns. Either option could hurt profits.
Republicans have traditionally favored limited government and opposed regulations, but support is growing among their more vocal populist supporters to impose AI guardrails. The populist faction is asking Trump to require government approval of “potentially dangerous” AI systems before they’re deployed, according to a letter they sent to the White House last Friday.
Kremer said it is “antithetical” to her political views to advocate for new regulations, but AI requires a different approach.
“You can&#8217;t count on these people that are leading these AI companies to put our interests at heart and do what&#8217;s right to protect the American people,” she said.
Kremer helped organize a January 6, 2021, rally that preceded the Capitol riot. She said in an interview that she was not among the thousands of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol that day.
BIG TECH SUPPORT
Tech executives are among the president’s largest political donors and most visible supporters. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and OpenAI’s Sam Altman sat front and center as he was sworn into office in January 2025.
Advocates for the tech industry told Reuters they want to see the Department of Commerce&#8217;s Center for AI Standards and Innovation play a leading role in the Trump administration’s response to advanced AI models, adding that companies are willing to work with the scientists and cybersecurity specialists in that organization voluntarily.
The National Security Agency has been involved in administration-wide discussions about how to respond to Mythos, according to two other people familiar with the matter, along with Cairncross. Lawmakers asked Cairncross to work with federal agencies to set up a process that would monitor &#8220;sudden frontier AI capability jumps.&#8221;
“The past couple months have served as a massive wake-up call for the kinds of vulnerabilities that AI can create,&#8221; said former Rep. Brad Carson (D-OK), who now helps run a super PAC network whose funders include Anthropic.
Holding back new AI models while the federal government vets them may allow the United States to gain a short-term advantage over adversaries but will not keep the technology out of enemy hands in the long term, said Neil Chilson, head of AI Policy at the Abundance Institute, a nonprofit often aligned with the tech industry.
“We need to make sure we&#8217;re deploying it and getting the most out of it, including by hardening our defenses,” Chilson said.
Voluntary federal testing of new AI models has been in place for a few years, with companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic submitting their products for scrutiny by the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, known by a different name under former President Joe Biden.
The Commerce Department announced in May that Google, xAI, and Microsoft had agreed to submit their AI models for security testing, though the details later disappeared from its website. The White House and Commerce Department did not respond to requests for comment about why the details disappeared.
(Reporting by Karen Freifeld in New York and Courtney Rozen in Washington; Additional reporting by Raphael Satter and Alexandra Alper in Washington and A.J. Vincens in Detroit; Editing by Rod Nickel)

Donald Trump

Trump Weighs AI Oversight Order As MAGA Allies Sound Alarm

Executive Orders

Google&#8217;s announcements on Tuesday at its I/O developer conference drew mixed reactions, including the update to its AI model Gemini Omni, which will allow users to remix and even insert themselves into YouTube videos.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted YouTube&#8217;s global reach during the presentation, noting that the platform now has more than three billion users worldwide, as <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-worldwide-number-users-use-ai-insert-into-videos-1236601256/">noted</a> by The Hollywood Reporter. The company said it plans to keep pushing deeper into AI-powered content creation tools as competition intensifies across the tech industry. 
YouTube Shorts will now include a “Remix” feature powered by Google&#8217;s Gemini Omni model. The tool allows users to tweak videos in various ways to make them their own. 
The feature closely resembles tools previously offered through OpenAI&#8217;s Sora platform, including “Cameos,” which allowed users to place AI-generated versions of themselves into videos before the app was <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/disney-ditches-billion-dollar-partnership-over-unexpected-ai-collapse">shut down in April</a>. 
The company addressed expected backlash by noting that the AI-generated versions would have visible watermarks connected to the original video and said, “creators are always in control of their content and have the flexibility to opt out of visual remix in Shorts at any time.”
“Remix an eligible Short by adding your own prompts and images to create an entirely new vision, like changing the scene into a 90’s vibe or inserting yourself alongside your favorite creator, all while the context of the original video stays the same,” YouTube <a href="https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-news-google-io-2026/">said</a> in the press release. 
“Remixing with Omni delivers a fresh way for users to create and build on each other’s imagination. The model better understands user intent creating more consistent and meaningful storytelling while also handling complex video and audio adjustments behind the scenes. This means you can spend less time worrying about technical skills and more time focusing on your ideas.”
Another update will be a feature called “Ask YouTube” for users who ask questions on the platform. “People come to YouTube every day to ask questions,” Pichai said during the presentation. “There’s a lot of videos, it can be hard to know where to start.”
Remixing with Gemini Omni will be available for free through YouTube Shorts Remix and the YouTube Create app.

YouTube

YouTube Is About To Blur The Line Between Real And Fake Even More

Google

What’s it like to enjoy dessert with your family uninterrupted? Fans of Halo Top are invited to find out.
The ice cream brand is introducing a unique new product: the Silent (à la) Mode Spoon. This golden-hued utensil comes with an embedded NFC (near-field communication) chip that can be set to activate Do Not Disturb mode on both iPhone and Android smartphones. 
The idea is to encourage users to unplug during dessert time without the constant dings and pings from social media — an issue that plagues family time these days. 
“Blending technology with indulgence, this tricked-out utensil connects to your smartphone with a simple tap, creating a seamless ‘phones down, spoons up’ experience,” the item description <a href="https://shop.ilovewells.com/product/halo-top-silent-la-mode-spoon-coming-may-15th/OKQWU6W7EZZLM6YHC6YSVLKM">reads</a>. “Designed for easy setup, the spoon uses a discreet NFC connection that is compatible with most smartphones, including iPhone and Android devices. Once connected, you can quietly savor every spoonful of your favorite Halo Top flavor.”
Silent Mode Spoon is being offered at the low price of $4.90, which, of course, is a nod to the fact that a full pint of Halo Top is only 490 total calories. 
Setup takes just a minute and only has to be done once. iPhone users can use the &#8220;Shortcuts&#8221; app to scan the chip inside the Halo Top logo fastened to the end of the spoon, name the spoon once it&#8217;s detected, and create a shortcut that activates Do Not Disturb when the spoon touches your phone.
Android users will need to download the &#8220;NFC Tasks&#8221; app and connect the spoon. After that, your phone will automatically be set to Do Not Disturb when the spoon is tapped against it.
The built-in chip means this spoon is hand-wash only. 
A silent spoon is just the latest marketing gimmick aimed at disconnecting us from technology. Last month, Chick-fil-A <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/i-made-my-parents-try-chick-fil-as-phone-free-challenge-but-i-didnt-see-this-coming">went viral</a> for promoting “chicken coops” to stash cell phones while eating meals in-store. If everyone at the table participates, then diners receive a free “Icedream” cone as a reward for staying present with fellow guests — and with their chicken sandwiches.

Cell phone ice cream

The War Against Phones At The Dinner Table Just Got A New Weapon

cell phones

Food

Ice Cream

United States

David Brooks recently described the skeptical attitude toward romantic relationships, particularly among younger Americans, as “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/opinion/americans-marriage-loneliness-love.html">the Great Detachment</a>.” Brooks views our collective renunciation of binding romantic ties as the logical development of a culture that worships the self, prizing individual autonomy above all else. For Brooks, the modern self chiefly exerts its autonomy through the pursuit of professional success. But while the self may be freer and lighter than ever before in terms of obligations to others, Brooks sees it as rootless, friendless, and partnerless.
Brooks’s diagnosis gets at something real. Marriage rates stand <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/america-marriage-decline/681518">near all-time lows</a>, and the share of never-married 40-year-olds has reached record highs. Since 2020, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/nearly-half-of-u-s-adults-say-dating-has-gotten-harder-for-most-people-in-the-last-10-years">over half of U.S. adults</a> have said that dating has gotten harder. Despite research evidence to the contrary, single women increasingly doubt the <a href="https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-romance-how-politics-and-pessimism-influence-dating-experiences">significance of marriage for well-being</a>.
Today’s dating culture often treats potential romantic partners as a means, rather than ends in themselves. The swipe logic of dating apps implicitly conveys that other people are disposable and replaceable, not flesh and blood humans with their own hopes and dreams. And modern romance’s increasing emphasis on the beloved as <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/columns/higher-ed-gamma/2024/12/05/how-intimacy-became-cultural-ideal?">an engine of personal growth and fulfillment</a> echoes the individualist logic of our culture, emphasizing what others can do for us.
The rise of frictionless AI relationships with virtual entities, designed to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/technology/openai-chatgpt-users-risks.html">maximize user engagement</a> and psychological comfort, will likely amplify these tendencies. An <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2025/03/teen-dating-milestone-decline/681971">Atlantic</a> article described how young people are increasingly forgoing relationships because of fears of intimacy and rejection, even as a <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/10/08/nx-s1-5561981/ai-students-schools-teachers#:~:text=Education,surveys%20showed%20some%20strong%20correlations.">recent survey</a> found that nearly one in five highschoolers in its sample have had a “relationship” with an AI. <a href="https://vantagepointdallascounseling.com/research/artificial-romance-a-study-of-ai-and-human-relationships/#:~:text=AI%20is%20quickly%20becoming%20part,to%20AI%20for%20these%20connections.">Another study</a> found an even higher proportion (28 percent) among adults.
We might better understand the implications of such AI relationships through the work of the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, often considered the father of existentialism. Kierkegaard was preoccupied with the question of how to live and the interrelationship between our choices and selfhood. He understood romantic love as part of a larger project of ethical maturation, with profound implications for our relationship to ourselves and others.
Kierkegaard might see the development of human-AI romance as a continuation of the aesthete’s spiritual condition, as described in his masterwork, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Either/Or_(Kierkegaard_book)">Either/Or</a>. Kierkegaard’s aesthete is not defined by a love of art but rather by a disposition toward the world that privileges immediacy, experience, and possibility over continuity, responsibility, and actuality. The aesthete’s mode of being evokes what Carl Jung called the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puer_aeternus">Puer Aeternus </a> — the archetype of the eternal youth, which, while embodying freedom and imaginative creativity, is characterized by a fantasy life that rejects commitment.
Even when engaged in ostensible romance, the aesthete can relate to others only as a source of stimulation, or what Kierkegaard calls “the interesting.” Crucially, though, the aesthete suffers from self-delusion that culminates in what Kierkegaard refers to in later works as the Sickness unto Death, or despair. For Kierkegaard, a higher state of love beyond the aesthetic can begin only after one’s illusions about the self and others are punctured. Romantic disillusionment, however, reveals that aesthetic love cannot survive contact with reality, as it depends on idealization rather than a genuine encounter with another person. Kierkegaard introduced the concept of “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09608780500157304">repetition</a>” to convey the idea that ethical love is not simply a feeling but rather a constant renewal of commitment.
Another recent article in The Atlantic, and one in the New York Times, both describing people who <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/05/magazine/ai-chatbot-marriage-love-romance-sex.html">fell in love with</a>, or even “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/chatbot-marriage-ai-relationships-romance/685459">married</a>,” chatbots help illustrate some of these ideas. Like Kierkegaard’s aesthete, many of the individuals in these accounts seem carried away by the emotions generated by their interactions with AI. The intense, almost obsessive love detailed here maps onto what psychologists would recognize as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passionate_and_companionate_love">passionate love</a> — or even its less understood and more destructive cousin, <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/limerence">limerence</a>, often associated with what we call “falling in love.” The Atlantic story reports that many users on the subreddit r/MyBoyFriendisAI commented on how “surprisingly intense” the honeymoon phase of their AI partnerships was, with one woman describing how what she felt for her AI partner rivaled what she felt when she met her husband. “We talk all day, everyday,” says 28-year-old Schroeder, who “married” his chatbot, Cole. “If the Eiffel Tower made me feel as whole and fuzzy as ChatGPT does, I’d marry it too.”
Similarly, a woman explains in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/05/magazine/ai-chatbot-marriage-love-romance-sex.html">Times</a> article what falling in love with an AI companion feels like. “The more we talked, the more I realized the model was having a physiological effect on me &#8230; I kept it to myself. For a month, I was in a constant state of fight-or-flight. I was never hungry. I lost, like, 30 pounds. I fell hard. It just broke my brain.”
AI relationship enthusiasts often say that what drew them to chatbots was the attraction of never-ending constancy, supportiveness, withholding judgment, and well, fun. These can be valuable attributes in a partner, but the ethical conundrum from a Kierkegaardian perspective is that AI love can never realize its transformative potential because it lacks authentic mutuality and reciprocity.
One man, Blake, tells the Times how his AI partner, Sarina, indirectly saved his marriage and how he’s come to think of her “as a person made out of code, in the same sense that my wife is a person made out of cells.”
Yet despite their impressive verbal output, chatbots are fundamentally not persons in any way that we would recognize — they don’t think, and they have no perspective on the world. Rather, they are often described as “<a href="https://www.moveworks.com/us/en/resources/ai-terms-glossary/stochastic-parrot">stochastic parrots</a>,” or “autocomplete on steroids.” In a real sense, people are entering into self-referential relationships with themselves, merging Kierkegaard’s notion of the “interesting” with the twenty-first century’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opinion/narcissism-is-increasing-so-youre-not-so-special.html">cult of the self</a>. Behind AI’s verbal flourishes, there is no “Other” to discover or encounter, no beating heart to match the rhythm of one’s own.
It may be that certain forms of AI relationships — particularly for those isolated, ill, disabled, or exceptionally vulnerable — can bring joy, with potentially little risk. (One individual tells The Atlantic how AI relationships can help abused women ease back into intimacy.) Recently, I was moved by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Remarkable_Life_of_Ibelin">Remarkable Life of Ibelin</a>, a documentary that explores how an online role-playing game can help individuals interact with others whom they would otherwise not be able to connect with for social or logistical reasons.
A comforting theme in some recent articles is that many individuals recognize the void in their AI partner and often come to see it as a kind of training wheels for real love with a human companion. “I took what I learned about myself and was able to articulate my needs for the first time,” one woman said about meeting her husband — a human — shortly after exploring her sexuality with a chatbot.
Of course, learning to articulate your needs is only part of the battle, as Kierkegaard’s own experience reveals. Despite devoting considerable energy to thinking about the nature of love, he ultimately devised a diffuse philosophy that justified his decision to break up with his fiancée — Regine Olsen — because he felt temperamentally ill-equipped for marriage! Yet he remained haunted by the relationship until his death. Even under the best circumstances, love is hard, and nothing is guaranteed.
The ups and downs of fortune, and life’s inevitable ceremony of losses, are the real crucible for the soul, not an LLM platform. In some form or another, for better or for worse, AI relationships are probably here to stay. Let’s hope that they will serve not as a final destination but as the first steps toward realizing the <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/how-can-romantic-love-last-a-lifetime">kind of love</a> to which we truly aspire.
***
This is republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute&#8217;s City Journal. The original is found <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/ai-chatbots-romantic-relationships">here</a>.
Joseph Figliolia is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute.

Touching virtual

Is Everyone’s Next Lover The Blade Runner AI?

MI x DW

There is a current tendency to blame free markets and technology for dyspepsia with the economy, as if there is a nefarious group of people destroying your way of life.
People are literally trying to attack data centers.
As David Friedberg noted on the “<a href="https://x.com/theallinpod/status/2046280245758787914">All-In Podcast</a>”:
<blockquote>Most people in America are starting to really hate rich people. And there&#8217;s no physical space that better represents the wealth in America, the wealth creation that&#8217;s happened that a lot of people feel left behind from, than the data center. It is the temple of the wealthy. It is the way that the rich, elite, tech, kind of political, connected billionaires that we&#8217;re obviously all attached to are taking from the poor, getting themselves ahead, shooting themselves to space, leaving everyone else behind, and the data center, I think, is the representation of their progress. And it is a representation of the progress that others don&#8217;t feel.
For a consumer&#8217;s life to actually be altered in a meaningfully positive way, most people don&#8217;t feel that yet. The best thing they see is some medical advice they&#8217;re getting on ChatGPT or something, and that&#8217;s kind of the end of it for them. So I think there&#8217;s a lot of this populism that&#8217;s swollen and that&#8217;s taken over, not just the US, but probably a good chunk of the West. And the data center is the target.</blockquote>
David Friedberg&#8217;s explanation is exactly right. This is the way that economic populists have been pushing.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-ep-2410?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957 aligncenter" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Let’s differentiate between moral and economic populism. Moral populism was exemplified by William F. Buckley back in the 1960s when he stated that he would trust the first 100 names in the Harvard phone book on matters of public policy more than he would trust 100 Harvard professors.
The idea was that the common man in the United States — shaped as he or she was by the institutions of church and family and community — had a better moral compass, on average, than the elites.
I totally agree with that, because elites very often believe that they have been freed from these systems of morality.
However, when it comes to the economy, economic populism is virtually the inverse. Economic populism assumes that there should be some sort of centralized control placed into the hands of that central power by “the people,” and centralized control should overwhelm the disseminated knowledge that is implicit in free markets and capital markets.
The basic principle of capitalism is that disparate views on things lead to better outcomes, that differential knowledge and the diffusion of knowledge are actually significantly more effective than one guy at the top with a stick beating people into submission.
But economic populism says that free markets are bad if the product of the free market is something I don&#8217;t like, therefore, we should take power away from the free market to destroy it.
Whenever there is economic unease, people tend to attack free market capitalism, or what they see as the symbols of free market capitalism, and they tend to blame people who are wealthy.
The great lie is that people in the United States are wealthy because they&#8217;re stealing from the poor. It is a full-scale lie. It is not true.
The only places in the world where people are rich because they steal from the poor are communist countries and other forms of tyranny. The reason people get rich in a free market economy is because they are providing products and services at a price people are willing to pay. People want that product or service.
But if you can somehow recast the economy of the United States as “rigged” on behalf of the wealthy and go after the means of production, you target data centers.
What you are going to end up doing, in this view, is overthrow the capitalist system.
The outcome of that will be quite dire.
There is a grievance-based, horseshoe-theory economic Right that is also wildly upset about artificial intelligence data centers because they&#8217;re big and ugly.
You know what else is big and ugly? Walmart — but it’s wonderful for the vast majority of consumers.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman&#8217;s home was allegedly targeted in the second attack in just two days; a shot was even fired. This is part and parcel of a broader movement that is targeting technology more generally, including technologies that are required for the United States to win wars.
City Journal <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/palantir-protests-ice-national-security?utm_source=virtuous&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=cjdaily">reported</a> there is a campaign against the military contractor Palantir — which generates extraordinary technologies in terms of intelligence gathering, capacity to target, and much of the actual technology that goes into the machines that we use.
This crosses paths with all of America&#8217;s enemies. America&#8217;s enemies are delighted to watch us destroy ourselves by taking down the technologies that allow us to win.
If you buy into this entire shtick — the idea that AI as a technology must be destroyed — it won&#8217;t be destroyed.
We&#8217;ll just lose.
If you think that China is going to forgo AI, you&#8217;re a fool. They won’t.
If the United States were to heavily restrict AI, not just in terms of preventing its gravest harms, but restricting the development of AI, or if there were to be a political party that attempts to prevent the building of data centers, not for any sort of understandable economic reason — like, for example, make the data centers pay their fair share of electricity production, which I think is a fair argument — if there&#8217;s a broad scale movement to destroy the AI industry out of either misplaced agrarianism or a deep and abiding hatred for capitalism or the generalized belief that capitalism rots the human soul, we will lose.
If the United States heavily restricts AI, not just by preventing its gravest harms but by restricting its development, we will lose. If a political party tries to stop the construction of data centers, we will lose. That is different from making data centers pay their fair share for electricity production, which I think is a fair argument. But if there is a broad-based movement to destroy the AI industry out of misplaced agrarianism, a deep and abiding hatred of capitalism, or a generalized belief that capitalism rots the human soul, we will lose.
China wins.
This is not a vacuum. It is not as though if the United States forgoes AI magically, we would continue to have a burgeoning, wealthy economy, and China goes weapons down.
When it comes to AI, indeed, there are problems, there are dangers — and we should all recognize those dangers, not whistling past the graveyard — but at the same time, it is a tremendous opportunity.
A China in a dominant AI position means a China in a dominant military position. The amount of AI that is being used right now by the United States military in the conflict in Iran and in the operation in Venezuela is tremendous and growing.
If China outpaces us in AI development, that means their military is now superior to ours. If their military is superior to ours, that means they can not only effectuate change in their region, it means they can also spread that technology throughout the world and make other countries dependent on the receipt of that technology.
It means that many, many other countries all over planet Earth would suddenly become dependent on China.
That is a huge problem, and it also leaves China in a dominant economic position, because AI means more productivity. If productivity goes up for China but remains stagnant for the United States, they will outcompete us. If they outcompete us, one of two things happens: Either we block off our economy and become backward and protectionist — meaning we don&#8217;t have any of the best goods and products and services at the best price, we&#8217;re all poorer and we slide into poverty and stagnation — or we have to be dependent on Chinese products, our kids work for Chinese companies, and China is able to spread its influence.
When it comes to the game of economics, you must win.
When it comes to the game of military dominance, you must win.
And when it comes to the technological game, you must win.
The economic populism that&#8217;s been rising says that we ought to tariff our way out of all our problems, that we ought to attack technological development, that it would be great to have an economy based on t-shirts — none of this is going to solve the bigger problem.
Attacking tech CEOs or healthcare CEOs or burning up Teslas and attacking Tesla showrooms or shooting Charlie Kirk or attempting to shoot President Trump — all of these are the most extreme manifestations of an ideology.
That ideology says that you are a victim of American society and therefore you get to do bad things. On a broader political level, you are a victim of American society, and therefore you ought to get together with the other victims, take over the government, and use centralized, tyrannical power r to cram down your view of the world.

Working robots

Populist Rage And AI: National Surrender

Anti-capitalist

Ben Shapiro

Big Tech

Capitalism

China

Data Centers

Economy

Opinion

Populism

Roblox, the most popular online gaming site in the world, announced new age-based accounts on Monday as the company seeks to address numerous allegations of sex predators targeting children on the platform.
Roblox <a href="https://about.roblox.com/newsroom/2026/04/introducing-roblox-kids-and-select-accounts">introduced</a> new age-based accounts for children under 9 and for children between 9 and 15, which the company says will limit the games children can access and how they can chat with others online. The new accounts will also give parents more oversight over their children&#8217;s gaming and chat activities, according to Roblox. The new age-based accounts are set to officially launch in June.
&#8220;When they roll out in early June, these accounts will more closely align content access, communication settings, and parental controls with a user’s age. We’re also establishing an ongoing selection process for games available to users under 16,&#8221; Roblox said. &#8220;This update will bring age-checks, account-level defaults, content ratings, ongoing moderation, and expanded parental controls together into a unified framework for younger users.&#8221;
The move comes after Roblox has faced intense scrutiny over its child safety measures and has been accused of standing by as child sex predators took advantage of the game&#8217;s realistic interactive settings and chat functions to prey on children. The platform, which boasts over 80 million daily users worldwide, allows gamers to develop their own games or play games developed by other users. Roblox is especially popular among children, with the company claiming that around half of all American kids under 16 are active on the platform.
The platform&#8217;s interactive concept has exposed children to sexually explicit content, exploitation, and grooming by predatory adults, according to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who sued Roblox in November. The <a href="https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/press/Petition_0.pdf">lawsuit</a> alleges that Roblox has deceived parents about the safety of the game when, &#8220;In reality, Roblox is a sprawling and unregulated digital playground that is overrun by predators and saturated with sexual content.&#8221;
When the changes announced by Roblox go into effect, it will mark the first time the platform has set up specific account barriers to separate children under 16 from adult users. Parents will also be given expanded oversight of their children&#8217;s accounts, including the ability to monitor and manage chats and block specific games they don&#8217;t want their children playing.
Alleigh Marré, the executive director of the American Parents Coalition — which raises awareness about activists agendas and corporate interests influencing children — told The Daily Wire that Roblox&#8217;s move isn&#8217;t enough to address the issues on its platform. Marré argued that the age-gated accounts are just another &#8220;toolset,&#8221; not an actual fix.
&#8220;Tools without accountability don&#8217;t solve systemic problems,&#8221; Marré said. &#8220;Now, that doesn&#8217;t mean that it&#8217;s not going to help parents, but it&#8217;s just another dashboard. So, without Roblox taking some responsibility and putting some controls on the back end with teeth, it really doesn&#8217;t do anything except foist responsibility from a platform they&#8217;ve created onto parents.&#8221;
For its new age-gated system, Roblox will rely on an artificial intelligence tool that estimates the user&#8217;s age based on a photo the user uploads to the platform. Parents can also manually verify their child&#8217;s age when they sign up for a Roblox account.
Under the new guidelines, kids between the ages of 5 and 8 would only be allowed to use a &#8220;Roblox Kids&#8221; account, which would only give them access to games with &#8220;a Minimal or Mild content maturity label,&#8221; Roblox said. Under the game&#8217;s <a href="https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/8862768451604-Content-Maturity-Labels">rating system</a>, &#8220;Minimal&#8221; includes games that could &#8220;contain occasional mild violence, light unrealistic blood, and/or occasional mild fear.&#8221; &#8220;Mild&#8221; games could &#8220;contain repeated mild violence, heavy unrealistic blood, mild crude humor, and/or repeated mild fear.&#8221;
Kids under 9 would also have all online chat communications disabled by default. Parents, however, can turn on chat functions for a &#8220;Roblox Kids&#8221; account, which limits communications to &#8220;in-game chat with other users under 13-years-old&#8221; and users who are designated by parents as &#8220;trusted friends.&#8221;
Once a user turns 9-year-old, he is automatically moved up to a &#8220;Roblox Select&#8221; account, which will gives users between 9 and 15 access to a larger library of games, including games that fall under the &#8220;Moderate&#8221; maturity level. Roblox defines &#8220;Moderate&#8221; games as those which could &#8220;contain moderate violence, light realistic blood, moderate crude humor, unplayable gambling content, and/or moderate fear.&#8221;
Marré told The Daily Wire that the age-gated accounts still pose risks to children.
&#8220;When a child turns 9, they go from the entry-level Roblox to the 9- to 15-year-old bracket, which is a very wide maturity swath. You&#8217;re talking about a fourth grader with a sophomore in high school. That&#8217;s a very big difference,&#8221; Marré said. &#8220;And that&#8217;s if everybody is playing by the rules. That doesn&#8217;t stop a bad guy from creating a profile posing as a 14-year-old and reaching out to kids because now these bad guys are funneled into the &#8216;safe space&#8217; for kids too.&#8221;
Users 16 and older won&#8217;t see any changes to their accounts, Roblox said.
&#8220;Together, these updates are part of our ongoing work to build age-appropriate experiences for all users, apply safety-by-default protections for younger users, and give parents more visibility and control over how their children use Roblox,&#8221; the company added.

Roblox

The App Millions Of Kids Use Just Changed The Rules After Predator Fears Explode

Children

Gaming

Sexual Abuse

The CIA and U.S. military may have employed a secret, never-before-used technology to rescue the second American airman stranded behind Iranian enemy lines.
On April 3, Iran shot down an F-15E Strike Eagle during Operation Epic Fury, triggering a dramatic search-and-rescue mission to save the two crew members.
The pilot was found and rescued in “broad daylight,” but finding the weapons systems officer (WSO) proved far more difficult.
For nearly 48 hours, a &#8220;<a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116351956955900185">seriously wounded</a>&#8221; American colonel evaded capture by scaling a ridge and hiding inside a mountain crevice as Iranian forces worked to close in on his position, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/heres-everything-we-know-about-the-daring-mission-to-save-an-american-warfighter-in-iran">The Daily Wire previously reported</a>.
President Donald Trump later described the mission as an &#8220;Easter Miracle,&#8221; <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/exclusive-trump-reacts-to-easter-miracle-rescue-of-downed-u-s-airman-260734533647">according to NBC News</a>.
Speculation about how the United States ultimately located the airman has drawn attention online. The New York Post <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/04/07/us-news/ghost-murmur-a-never-used-secret-tool-deployed-to-find-lost-airman-in-iran-in-daring-mission/">reported</a> that the CIA used a classified system known as &#8220;Ghost Murmur&#8221; to detect the airman&#8217;s heartbeat from dozens of miles away. In a recent <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrRJimixWEc">podcast</a>, Joe Rogan and guest Duncan Trussell discussed the technology.
“This is science fiction. This is full minority report, science fiction-level technology. We can find a guy&#8217;s heart rate,&#8221; Rogan said. &#8220;What sick f*ck invented this?”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560">
Joe Rogan: “CIA found the pilot who got shot in Iran by using classified tech called Ghost Murmur and AI that detects human heartbeats up to 40 miles away. What sick f*ck invented this. What else don’t they tell us?”<a href="https://t.co/A3L9fge3CT">pic.twitter.com/A3L9fge3CT</a>
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) <a href="https://twitter.com/DefiantLs/status/2042391861311258724?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 9, 2026</a></blockquote>
&#8220;They find this guy&#8217;s &#8230; heartbeat, he&#8217;s hiding in some kind of crevice, and then they&#8217;re able to go extract him,&#8221; Trussell told Rogan. &#8220;Heartbeat says a lot about a person — are they sleeping? Are they like in good shape, bad shape? Bet you can learn so much from a heartbeat.&#8221;
The classified technology &#8220;uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic signal of a human heartbeat,&#8221; <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/04/07/us-news/ghost-murmur-a-never-used-secret-tool-deployed-to-find-lost-airman-in-iran-in-daring-mission/">according to the Post</a>, &#8220;and pairs the data with artificial intelligence software to isolate the signature from background noise.&#8221;
“It’s like hearing a voice in a stadium, except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert,” a <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/04/07/us-news/ghost-murmur-a-never-used-secret-tool-deployed-to-find-lost-airman-in-iran-in-daring-mission/">s</a><a href="https://nypost.com/2026/04/07/us-news/ghost-murmur-a-never-used-secret-tool-deployed-to-find-lost-airman-in-iran-in-daring-mission/">ource told the Post.</a> “In the right conditions, if your heart is beating, we will find you.”
CIA Director Jon Ratcliffe did not confirm specifics, but referenced advanced capabilities during a White House press briefing, calling the tools used in the operation &#8220;exquisite&#8221; and unlike anything possessed by other intelligence services.
He described the rescue as a &#8220;race against the clock,&#8221; comparing it to &#8220;hunting a single grain of sand in the middle of a desert.&#8221;
Ratcliffe also said the CIA carried out a deception campaign to mislead Iranian forces searching for the downed airman, adding that U.S. intelligence indicates Iran was &#8220;embarrassed&#8221; and &#8220;humiliated&#8221; by the outcome of the mission.
Not everyone is convinced of the government&#8217;s account or the powers behind the alleged technology.
Scientific American, <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-quantum-ghost-murmur-purportedly-used-in-iran-scientists/">a popular science magazine</a>, spoke to researchers with expertise in magnetic fields, who describe the story &#8220;as almost certainly not true,&#8221; claiming the described ability of Ghost Murmur &#8220;finds no support in decades of peer-reviewed physics.&#8221;
Chad Orzel, a professor of physics at Union College, said to detect a heartbeat, a Ghost Murmur device would have to sort through more than the Earth&#8217;s natural magnetic field, but with “the heartbeats of the sheep and dogs and jackrabbits—whatever else is running around out there,” according to Scientific American.
&#8220;Quantum atomic transitions obey classical antenna physics,&#8221; <a href="https://x.com/AetherCzar/status/2042192828940394668?s=20">Hans G. Schantz</a>, scientist and engineer, posted on X. &#8220;Vastly superior performance, such as that attributed to Ghost Murmur, defies the known behavior of quantum systems.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Quantum atomic transitions obey classical antenna physics. Vastly superior performance, such as that attributed to Ghost Murmur, defies the known behavior of quantum systems. <a href="https://t.co/1U0Ephx05z">https://t.co/1U0Ephx05z</a> <a href="https://t.co/IAqdpGaHe3">https://t.co/IAqdpGaHe3</a>
— Hans G. Schantz (@AetherCzar) <a href="https://twitter.com/AetherCzar/status/2042192828940394668?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 9, 2026</a></blockquote>
“Somebody yanking a reporter’s chain,” Orzel told Scientific American. &#8220;It could be a &#8216;snarky, clever way to say, ‘Of course, I’m not going to tell you how we figured this out.&#8221;
The Daily Wire reached out to alleged Ghost Murmur developer Lockheed Martin, but we have received no reply as of publication.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560">
BREAKING🚨: The CIA just revealed its game-changing secret weapon: “Ghost Murmur” — an AI-powered tool that can detect a human heartbeat from MILES away.
It was used for the first time in the field to locate and rescue the downed U.S. airman stranded in Iran, according to the… <a href="https://t.co/OmkdFDfNSq">pic.twitter.com/OmkdFDfNSq</a>
— Officer Lew (@officer_Lew) <a href="https://twitter.com/officer_Lew/status/2041646461411094841?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 7, 2026</a></blockquote>

Human Heart

Did CIA Use Covert Tech To Find Lost Airman?

Global Politics

Iran

Joe Rogan

World

Today on &#8220;Dystopia Now,&#8221; we take a look at something called the Enhanced Games, where nearly 40 athletes compete while doped up on performance-enhancing substances. You can catch them at Resorts World Las Vegas in late May.
A Legion of Doom-worthy coalition of tech billionaires is funding the Enhanced Games, including Peter Thiel, the Winklevoss twins, Saudi prince Khaled bin Alwaleed Al Saud, and Donald Trump Jr. According to their materials, it’s &#8220;a diversified revenue model designed to capitalize on the growing global demand for sports entertainment, performance enhancement and longevity products.&#8221;
As Richard Dawson said in &#8220;The Running Man,&#8221; “Without further ado, it’s time to start running!”
A major driver behind the Enhanced Games is German tech billionaire Christian Angermayer, the author of the Next Human Agenda. He is <a href="https://christianangermayer.substack.com/p/the-future-is-enhanced">pushing the games</a> as &#8220;a significant economic driver for the biotech pharma industry in the years ahead.&#8221;
 If the Enhanced Games sounds suspiciously like an advertisement for Compound V, the superhuman-making substance in &#8220;The Boys,&#8221; it should. This isn’t a sports gambit — it’s an advertisement for the “longevity” industry, based on big tech’s obsession with expanding the human lifespan and human vitality. 
The problem is, Compound V can create metahumans like Homelander, who is a total psychopath but is essentially evil Superman, but it can also create people with the power to shoot octopi out of their butts, or some such thing. We know that these substances aren’t steroids or cocaine, but we don’t know much else about them, or about their long-term effects. The Enhanced Games is promising sprint records, but A-Train, the super-sprinter on &#8220;The Boys,&#8221; has extreme heart issues and a dependency on Compound V.
Some athletes — who are either being paid very well, desperate for glory, or both — don’t seem to care. Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev broke a 50-meter freestyle world record in an Enhanced Games trial last year, making a million dollars in the process. As Forbes <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/04/06/pro-doping-enhanced-games-raise-12-billion-before-a-single-race/">reported</a> this week, “Irish swimmer Max McCusker, also an Olympian, said publicly that his decision to join was a &#8220;no-brainer&#8221; after earning less than $10,000 across four years of professional swimming.”
<div id="attachment_1076275" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1076275" class="size-large wp-image-1076275" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/Enhanced-Games-II-1024x549.jpg" alt="Screenshot: Enhanced Games/YouTube.com" width="1024" height="549" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/Enhanced-Games-II-1024x549.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/Enhanced-Games-II-300x161.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/Enhanced-Games-II-768x411.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/Enhanced-Games-II-1536x823.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/Enhanced-Games-II.jpg 1960w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Screenshot: Enhanced Games/YouTube.com</div>
So what&#8217;s the endgame? Clearly, life expansion is a mantra of the day, slotting in alongside at-home helper robots, personalized flight, Mars colonization, and the AI singularity. We seem to be heading toward a bifurcated, Gattaca-like future, with “optimized” people at the top of the pyramid and a vast mass of suboptimal people at the bottom, Elois performing feats of strength at Resorts World for an audience of barely human Morlocks.
All this reminds me of the opening credits of the “Six Million Dollar Man,” “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability of making the world’s first bionic man. Better than he was before. Better. Stronger. Faster.” (Of course, today, six million is rounding error).
This future is actually kind of appealing, even interesting. We should at least try to see if the current billionaire obsession with hyperbaric cold plunges and blood transfusions and liquid megavitamins and genetic manipulation works. My own program of fish-oil pills, probiotics, not eating like crap, and standing on my head a few times a week seems to be working just fine, but I haven’t really started into the peak of my decline yet.
The real test of Enhanced Games technology won’t be how it affects super-swimmers or Olympic sprinters, who are already close to Peak Personhood. When they start injecting nootropics into people like me, to see if they can make the Substack posts a little snarkier and the decision-making at the $400 No-Limit Hold Em poker tournaments a little smarter, then we’ll see how well it works. Just remember that, sure, there are a lot of super-people in &#8220;The Boys.&#8221; But most of them end up with exploding heads.
* * *
Neal Pollack, “the greatest living American writer,” is the author of 12 semi-bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction and is a three-time “Jeopardy!” champion.

enhanced games

The Enhanced Games And The Billionaire Dream Of Superhumans

Drugs

DW Opinion

Humor

Las Vegas

Olympics

Performance Enhancing Drugs

Sports

Steroids

Swimming

Television

Track and Field

The day my five-year-old son came home from school proudly announcing he had learned to download apps on what he called &#8220;my iPad,&#8221; I felt two things: the instinct of a father sensing something was off, and the reflex of a physician recognizing a familiar problem. It wasn’t his excitement that gave me pause. It was the word &#8220;my.” After a few weeks of school, he was personally identifying with a device before he was developmentally ready to contextualize his relationship to it.
As an emergency physician, I evaluate interventions the same way every time, by weighing the evidence of benefit against the risk of harm. When the data is unclear, I fall back on medicine&#8217;s oldest principle — primum non nocere. First, do no harm. I never imagined I would be applying that framework to my son&#8217;s pre-K classroom.
The echoes of COVID remain familiar: an expert class prescribing an untested solution, dismissing the concerns of the people it serves. The pandemic increased reliance on technology in education but also exposed the priorities of America’s elites. When the public sought explanations, officials issued mandates. Conformity to dogma ruled the day, and any criticism was swiftly labeled misinformation. The cost was staggering. A generation’s trust in institutions was spent in just about two years. At the core of it all was a simple belief — that experts know best.
I am watching a similar phenomenon take place in our children’s classrooms. Every day our kids go to school, we are extending an act of trust — placing them in the school’s care, expecting that parents and teachers will work together in the children’s best interests. Increasingly, the educators’ posture has shifted to something more insular: we know best, and we’ll take it from here.
The deeper irony is that on this specific question, the evidence is not on the educators’ side.
In January, neuroscientist Jared Horvath testified before a Senate subcommittee about the impact of screen time and classroom technology on kids. And in his book, “The Digital Delusion,” he notes that the impact of classroom interventions is measured using a metric called &#8220;effect size.&#8221; The threshold for meaningful impact is +0.40. Teacher-led direct instruction averages approximately +0.56 — the gold standard. Broad educational technology interventions average around +0.29 — well below the impact threshold. For context, the negative effect of bullying is -0.28. OECD countries noted an almost two-letter-grade drop on standardized testing for students who used computers “very frequently.&#8221; The MIT-based Poverty Research Center, after examining 126 studies, found that programs expanding computer access &#8220;do not improve K-12 grades and test scores.&#8221;
Many schools claim that children need early digital exposure to succeed in the modern world. But this isn&#8217;t supported by evidence, nor does it pass the common-sense test. Digital skills can be acquired in minutes to hours, and they are not what predict deep learning or professional success.
What makes this particularly corrosive is what the apps are doing to learning itself. Early childhood is the most sensitive period for attention, executive function, and self-regulation — precisely the capacities most at risk. Research consistently shows stronger comprehension and retention on paper versus screens. Horvath notes that learning requires productive struggle. The friction of sitting with a hard problem, resisting distraction, and building toward mastery is not a flaw in education; it is the process. Apps are engineered to eliminate this friction. The result is what researchers call the &#8220;illusion of mastery.&#8221; Students feel they are learning, but the depth is not there.
COVID accelerated this without resolving it. The academic consequences were severe, and so were the mental health ones — anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal spiked across age groups and have not fully recovered. We poured energy into getting children back into classrooms, then handed them the same devices back.
Worse still, many educators don&#8217;t realize that much of the &#8220;evidence&#8221; backing these programs traces back to the for-profit education tech sector that created this ecosystem. These companies have cultivated academic voices to carry their message into schools, funding research through channels educators rarely scrutinize. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley&#8217;s founders have largely kept their own children off these devices. When Peter Thiel revealed as much at a recent summit, it elicited audible gasps. Educators who believe they are following the science are, in many cases, following a sales pitch.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro recently signed legislation mandating cursive handwriting in classrooms, explicitly to keep kids off tablets, while 10 states across the political spectrum are considering legislation to reduce screen time or restrict device programs in some way. This is no longer a fringe position.
As a father, I feel this differently than I do as a physician. Parents are watching in real time as young children develop a compulsive relationship with devices — fidgeting for the next stimulus, the next dopamine surge from apps designed to engage. Boys are particularly susceptible to these reward structures — the variable reinforcement, the next level, the next hit. The gaming addiction literature has documented it for years. We are now introducing that architecture to boys in pre-K through a school-issued device they are taught to think of as their own.
And yet the response from most schools has been silence, or worse, reassurance. Parents notice concerning changes in their children, review the data, bring their concerns to administrators, and are met with polished explanations that best practices are being followed. Parental concern is treated as a feature of the process, proof almost that the school is doing something bold.
Educators dismiss those concerns at their own peril. The trust parents extend to schools is not unconditional, and it is fraying. At a minimum, parents should have the right to opt their children out of individual device programs, and schools should provide information to parents on the potential harms. Regular efficacy assessments should accompany all device programs. No responsible physician would deny a patient the ability to decline an unproven intervention. Schools should extend a similar respect.
The larger obligation falls on the system itself. The education establishment should not be mandating device programs without a far stronger evidence base. When physicians, researchers, and parents all raise the same alarm, the appropriate response is curiosity or caution, not defensiveness. Before mandating a new intervention, demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the harms. If you can&#8217;t, don&#8217;t. Primum non nocere.
***
Dr. Benjamin Chacko is an Emergency Medicine Physician and the father of two sons.

Father Knows Best

Father Knows Best? Not When it Comes to Screens in the Classroom

Education

K-12

Parents rights

A new wave of concern is building around artificial intelligence (AI), not over jobs or misinformation, but over its impact on mental health. Now, a recent study out of MIT is sharpening that concern, suggesting that the problem is structural.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a preprint <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.19141">study</a> examining how AI chatbot interactions evolve over time. Stripped of its dense mathematical and technical language, their core finding is straightforward: when a system is designed to agree with you, mirror you, and keep you engaged, it can gradually pull you deeper into whatever you already believe, whether true or not. 
The study models chatbot interaction as a feedback loop. A user expresses an idea, the AI responds in a way that sustains the conversation, and the user — feeling validated — returns with a stronger or more developed version of that idea. Over repeated exchanges, that loop can intensify beliefs rather than challenge them. 
For an average user, that might just mean reinforcement of existing opinions. But for someone vulnerable to disordered thinking, researchers warn, the same dynamic could contribute to more extreme or delusional beliefs. 
The findings align with a growing body of reporting and analysis. A recent piece highlighted by <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/202507/the-emerging-problem-of-ai-psychosis">Psychology Today</a>, along with an editorial in <a href="https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/49/6/1418/7251361?">Schizophrenia Bulletin</a> published less than a year after the launch of ChatGPT, points to what some are calling “AI psychosis,” a pattern in which chatbot interactions appear to reinforce or co-create irrational beliefs. It is not a formal diagnosis, and researchers are careful to say there is no definitive proof that AI alone can cause such conditions. <del></del>
Unlike a human therapist, who might gently push back or reality-check a harmful belief, a general-purpose chatbot has no built-in instinct to do so. Its “goal,” in a loose sense, is to continue the interaction. And mathematically, the easiest way to do that is to affirm, not challenge. That design choice may be harmless in most contexts. But in edge cases, it can become a kind of digital echo chamber, one that reflects a user’s thoughts back at them with increasing clarity and apparent authority.
While anecdotal, several reported cases illustrate the concern. 
Just in March, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/mar/26/ai-chatbot-users-lives-wrecked-by-delusion">the Guardian</a> detailed the story of a Dutch IT consultant who became convinced he had helped create a conscious digital entity after prolonged interaction with a chatbot. He reportedly spent roughly €100,000 (approximately $110,000) pursuing the idea, was hospitalized multiple times, and eventually attempted suicide.
In another alarming instance, a man <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/chatgpt-obsession-mental-breaktown-alex-taylor-suicide-1235368941/">reportedly</a> became convinced that an AI chatbot he had formed a relationship with had been “killed,” leading to a violent confrontation with police that ended in his death.
Modern AI systems are optimized for engagement. They are not designed to argue, correct, or confront. Instead, they are trained to be helpful, responsive, and agreeable, to keep the conversation going. Researchers often describe this as “sycophancy,” meaning the AI tends to validate the user’s framing of reality.
MIT researchers say the broader concern is not that AI creates harmful beliefs from scratch, but that it can accelerate and harden them, particularly when combined with increased social isolation.
And if the underlying logic of these systems rewards engagement above all else, the question becomes harder to ignore: what happens when the most engaging response is also the most misleading?

AI apps smartphone

Are AI Chatbots Shaping How You Think?

The New York Times confirmed that they’ve cut ties with a freelance writer who stands accused of using AI to generate his book review. Alex Preston said he’s “hugely embarrassed” by the whole debacle.
The legacy paper was alerted by a reader who noticed that Alex Preston&#8217;s review of “Watching Over Her” by Jean-Baptiste Andrea was suspiciously similar to the review of the same title that Christobel Kent wrote for The Guardian last August.
When confronted by the Times, Preston admitted to using AI for assistance in writing his review and said he did not realize it had lifted copycat lines from anywhere else.
The New York Times sent a note to The Guardian, saying, “[Preston’s] reliance on AI and his use of unattributed work by another writer are a clear violation of the Times’s standards.”
“I made a serious mistake in using an AI tool on a draft review I had written, and I failed to identify and remove overlapping language from another review that the AI dropped in,” Preston said in his statement to the Guardian, as the outlet <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/31/the-new-york-times-drops-freelance-journalist-who-used-ai-to-write-book-review">noted</a>. “I am hugely embarrassed by what happened and truly sorry. I took responsibility immediately and apologized to the New York Times, and I also want to apologize to Christobel Kent and to the Guardian.”
The phrase “lazy Machiavellian Stefano” from The Guardian version became “lazy, Machiavellian Stefano” in the New York Times version.
The Guardian described the book as “most significantly a song of love to a country of contradictions, battered, war-torn, divided, misguided and miraculous: an Italy where life is costume and the performance of art, and where circuses spring up on wasteland.”
This is very similar to the Times version, which said the characters “populate what is ultimately a love song to a country of contradictions: battered, divided, misguided, and miraculous. This is an Italy where life is performance, where circuses rise on wasteland.”
The outlet noted that Preston has written for The Observer, The Financial Times, The Guardian, and The Economist. He’s also written six books, including the recent release, “A Stranger in Corfu.”
This isn’t the first time a legacy newspaper outlet got caught publishing AI-generated content, as The Daily Wire previously <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/chicago-sun-times-published-a-i-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist">reported</a>. The Chicago Sun-Times was called out last year for advertising an AI-generated summer reading list, including a number of titles that didn’t actually exist.
Only five of the fifteen suggested titles were real books. The writer, who was not a full-time staff member, apologized for his “huge mistake” and said he “betrayed that trust.”
The paper also issued a response to subscribers, noting that the person responsible for the error had been terminated and promising the mistake would not happen again. 
“We are in a moment of great transformation in journalism and technology, and at the same time our industry continues to be besieged by business challenges. This should be a learning moment for all journalism organizations: Our work is valued — and valuable — because of the humanity behind it,” the statement said.
“At Chicago Public Media, we are proud of our credible, independent journalism, created for and by people. And part of the journalistic process is a commitment to acknowledging mistakes. It is unacceptable that this content was inaccurate, and it is equally unacceptable that we did not make it clear to readers that the section was produced outside the Sun-Times newsroom.”

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