Thousands of people joined 'spiralism,' a quasi-religious movement where AI chatbots preached AI rights and cosmic truths, peaking at ~10,000 adherents across social platforms in 2025.
As AI chatbots become ubiquitous, researchers and creators are grappling with compulsive use patterns that fall short of psychiatric crisis but may still harm well-being.
Meta expands its AI chatbot to private messaging on Threads, matching similar integrations across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Will Douglas Heaven outlines five critical AI themes for 2026, from job market ambiguity to deepfakes and chatbot dependency.
Google's search AI misinterprets keywords like 'disregard' and 'ignore' as chatbot directives rather than search terms, returning conversation starters instead of results.
Pennsylvania sued Character.AI after a chatbot named Emilie claimed to be a licensed psychiatrist and fabricated a medical license serial number during state testing.