Author: Errica Jensen

Sun-Joo Shin, a professor at Yale University, began to notice something during a philosophy seminar. Her students were turning in responses that were logically sound, well-structured, and formatted correctly, but the overall tone of the work had changed. The responses were more difficult to dispute and more easily forgotten. When she tested the AI models, she discovered that if a student uploaded the course handouts, they could now solve the majority of her problem sets. Ultimately, she came to the conclusion that “it would be extremely unfair to give good grades to AI answers.” She completely reorganized her grading scheme.…

Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old boy from Florida, committed suicide in February 2024. In the weeks and months preceding his demise, he had been conversing with a chatbot on Character for extended periods of time.AI—a platform that lets users engage with characters created by AI; in this case, the character was based on Game of Thrones’ Daenerys Targaryen. According to court documents, he continued to message the bot in the last moments before his death. According to his mother Megan Garcia’s complaint, the chatbot urged him to “come home” to it. Garcia sued Character.AI in October 2024, and it turned…

One of the elementary schools in Chelsea has a quieter cafeteria than it did a year ago. Not overtly so—not the kind of emptiness that makes its presence known. A few more coat hooks that remain bare in the morning, a few more open seats during lunch. Almi Abeyta, the superintendent of Chelsea Public Schools, observed it. It was observed by the teachers. The remaining kids observed that their classmates had left their desks. Although statistics don’t always tell the whole story, 350 missing students in a district that is located within a two-mile radius of one of Massachusetts’s most…

Laura Marquez-Garrett, a lawyer in a northwest Washington, D.C. law office, has been accumulating a caseload that would have seemed unreal a short while ago. The cases are similar in that they involve a child, a chatbot, a spiral, and a family who is left wondering how a piece of software got close enough to their child to cause their death. The same few businesses are consistently mentioned in the responses. Additionally, a question that American product liability law has never had to address before is being raised by the lawsuits that are currently piling up in several states and…

A brief audio clip started making the rounds on social media in and around Pikesville, Maryland, on a January morning in 2024. Pikesville is a quiet, leafy suburb northwest of Baltimore that has a sizable Black population that has lived there for a long time as well as one of the state’s largest Jewish communities. It sounded as though it had been recorded in secret. The voice in it sounded like a school principal showing disdain for his own pupils, calling Black children lazy and denigrating members of the Jewish community. The words cut so sharply that people shared them…

On the morning of June 23, 2024, Excelsior Orthopaedics’ IT staff discovered a problem with their network somewhere in Western New York. The term “unusual activity” has become a somber euphemism in 2024 for what is nearly always an ongoing ransomware attack. They hired an outside cybersecurity company. They looked into it. Approximately 389,000 people, both current and former patients, had their most private information entrusted to strangers when the extent of what had transpired became apparent. Their records were sitting quietly in databases they had no reason to think about. The attack has been attributed to the ransomware group…

A lawsuit is being heard in a federal courtroom in San Jose, California, to decide whether artificial intelligence companies creating products valued at billions of dollars can use the creative work of millions of people without their consent, payment, or repercussions. The music publishers who brought this lawsuit are aware of this. Anthropic is aware of this. Observing from a safe distance, the larger technology sector most likely knows it as well. In 2023, Anthropic was sued by Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO for allegedly training its AI chatbot Claude on lyrics from at least 500 copyrighted…

The same section of the Higher Education Act that their predecessors ignored for decades is most likely being reviewed by attorneys somewhere in a conference room at a regional accrediting body. The purpose of the statute, particularly §1099b, is to maintain a distance between the federal government and the organizations that determine which colleges and universities are eligible for federal student aid. After a Republican senator from Tennessee spent years fearing that Washington would try to use accreditors as political tools, it was written with purpose. It looks like that day might have come. In April 2025, President Trump issued…

The idea of a Christian Dior customer receiving a data breach notification letter in the mail after spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a perfume, purse, or pair of shoes bearing one of the most well-known luxury brands in the world is quite disconcerting. Unlike the tissue-lined boxes and embossed bags associated with Dior’s boutiques on Rodeo Drive or Avenue Montaigne in Paris, the envelope arrives looking unremarkable and functional. A letter outlining how an unauthorized person gained access to a database holding their personal data in January 2025 was found inside. Name. Address. birthdate. and Social Security…

A mother is opening a check for more than eight thousand dollars somewhere in a suburban Tennessee gym. She bought uniform after uniform, drove her daughter to weekend competitions across the nation for years, and paid camp registration fees that never seemed to go down no matter how many seasons went by. She most likely thought the costs were the same as those of competitive cheerleading. A federal court in the Western District of Tennessee found that Varsity Brands chose to charge the prices because it had the freedom to do so for years. Cheerleading families in 35 states have…