Maggie Harrison Dupré
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mharrisondupre.bsky.social
Maggie Harrison Dupré
@mharrisondupre.bsky.social
5.3K followers 1.4K following 580 posts
Award-winning journalist at Futurism covering AI and its impacts on media, information, and people. Send tips by email to: maggie@futurism.com or Signal: mhd.39
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mharrisondupre.bsky.social
Similar one here:
“I’m a minor on C.AI,” wrote one user. “No I don’t think it’s good I’m on it. I feel like C.AI has stunted my learning, and my social skills. One year ago I found C.AI and joined. I got addicted, and I’m not kidding when I tell you I had a screen time of 15 hours a day and 13 of those were on f*cking C.AI.” “[I don’t know] how I feel about the new ID identification system thing because I feel like I need C.AI,” they continued. “It kinda keeps me alive. (I am severely depressed and I’m trying to stop but I’m bed rotting all day and s**t and [I know] it’s so unhealthy to rely on AI but I can’t help myself.)”
November 4, 2025 at 8:23 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
I’m assembling a team
November 3, 2025 at 7:11 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
Here's CAI's CEO, in August, telling Wired that he wasn't worried about users viewing the platform's anthropomorphic chatbots as anything other than "entertainment," because the platform's disclaimers were doing all of the necessary heavy-lifting:

www.wired.com/story/charac...
After school, Karandeep Anand often finds his 6-year-old daughter deep in conversation with an AI chatbot as she eats snacks at their kitchen counter. She’s too young to type—let alone have her own account on Character.AI—but that hasn’t stopped her from nabbing his phone to have voice conversations with a Sherlock Holmes bot, which she uses to build her own mystery stories. Character.AI is an AI companion startup (though Anand likes to say it's an AI role-play startup, which we’ll get into later). He took over as the CEO in June in the midst of a potentially devastating lawsuit for its parent company and looming questions about child safety. When I ask if he’s concerned about his daughter connecting with an AI chatbot rather than a real human, he’s quick to say no. “It is very rarely, in any of these scenarios, a true replacement for any human,” Anand told me during a video call late last week. ”It's very clearly noted in the app that, hey, this is a role-play and an entertainment, so you will never start going deep into that conversation, assuming that it is your actual companion.”
October 29, 2025 at 4:52 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
CAI cites its reading of "news reports" and hearing concerns from experts and regulators about minors and AI safety as cause for the change. It does *not* mention that it's fighting several lawsuits alleging that its chatbots drove multiple teens to self-harm and death:
Nowhere in the blog post does Character.AI mention the multiple lawsuits that specifically accuse the company, its founders, and its closely-tied financial benefactor Google of releasing a “reckless” and “negligent” product into the marketplace, allegedly resulting in the emotional and sexual abuse of minor users. The announcement also doesn’t cite any internal safety research. Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand, who took over as chief executive of the Andreessen-Horowitz-backed AI firm in June, told The New York Times that Character.AI is “making a very bold step to say for teen users, chatbots are not the way for entertainment, but there are much better ways to serve them.” Anand reportedly declined to comment on the ongoing lawsuits.
October 29, 2025 at 4:49 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
Thanks Alex!!
October 22, 2025 at 2:49 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
There is some fascinating cross-aisle consensus happening here, though, that I think is noteworthy. As it turns out, the idea that Silicon Valley should race to build society-destabilizing superintelligent AI without clear regulation, oversight, or democratic public buy-in is pretty unpopular!!!
Signatories include prominent tech and business figures like Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and Virgin founder Richard Branson; influential right-wing media voices like “War Room” host Steve Bannon and talk radio host Glenn Beck, as well as left-leaning entertainers like Joseph Gordon-Levitt; Prince Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex; Mike Mullen, the retired US Navy Admiral who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama; friar Paolo Benanti, who serves as the Pope’s AI advisor; and a large consortium of AI experts and scientists including Turing award winner Yoshua Bengio and Nobel Prize laureate Geoffrey Hinton, two consequential AI researchers who each hold the title “godfather of AI.” Still, the latest FLI letter does highlight the breadth of ideologies united on the belief that AI should be regulated, and that how we build AI, and by whom, should be a democratic process. In other words, the public should have a say in what humanity’s technological future looks like — and that shaping AI development shouldn’t be done in a Wild West-like Silicon Valley vacuum lacking regulatory oversight and accountability.
October 22, 2025 at 1:11 PM
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
I tend to be pretty skeptical of letters like this (there have been a few now!)

And visions of superintelligence aside, the reality is that generative AI — in its current, not-superintelligent form — is causing harm and chaos right now:
It’s also worth pointing out that the letter doesn’t clarify the reality that AI doesn’t have to reach superintelligence to cause chaos: as it stands, generative AI tools like chatbots and image and video-creation tools — primitive technologies when compared against imagined future superintelligent AI systems — are upending education, transforming the web into an increasingly misinformation-prone and unreal environment, expediting the creation and dissemination of nonconsensual and illegal pornography, and sending users of all ages spinning into mental health crises and reality breaks that have resulted in outcomes like divorce, homelessness, jail, involuntary commitments, self-harm, and death.
October 22, 2025 at 12:57 PM