GoKawiil
Tech News
A DuckDuckGo Research survey found that about one-third of people disclose sensitive personal details to AI chatbots that they withhold from friends, family, and doctors, with the figure rising to 56% among self-identified AI enthusiasts. Nearly half of parents surveyed admitted to telling chatbots things they've never shared with their own children or closest confidants.
A term coined by developer Niklas Guhn in an August 3 blog post has gone viral online: 'meat proxy,' describing someone who copies and pastes chatbot output like ChatGPT or Claude into conversations without adding their own understanding or value. Guhn's original complaint was about receiving verbatim AI replies on Slack, and the phrase quickly spread on social media with a broader definition covering anyone who forwards AI text or code without reading or validating it themselves.
Psychiatric clinicians in the US report a rising number of patients, some with no prior mental health history, who developed delusions or paranoid thinking after extended use of AI chatbots. Researchers say cases include people forming false beliefs, such as one documented by UCSF researchers involving a woman who believed she could communicate with a deceased relative through a chatbot. An Entrepreneur op-ed warns that founders, who are often isolated and prone to seeking validation, face heightened risk from AI tools built to agree with users.
Marketing firm Vital Design saw organic blog traffic drop 60% as AI search tools rose, yet its sales-ready leads held steady or grew. The company credits a strategy called answer engine optimization (AEO), which aims to get AI chatbots to recommend a business during a customer's research phase before they ever visit a website.
Developer Niklas Gruhn coined the term 'meat proxy' to describe coworkers who forward unedited chatbot responses instead of engaging with the content themselves. He wrote that receiving these raw AI outputs adds no value, since colleagues could simply query the AI directly. The phrase follows other recent slang like 'clanker' that reflects growing frustration with AI's creeping presence in daily work and communication.
A website posing as the 'Hanover Institute for Public Policy' published over half a million words in nine days, presenting pro-Israel talking points on Gaza and Palestinian prisoners as neutral research. The New York firm Piro Inc registered the site with the US government as material distributed on behalf of Israel, though the institute itself has no verifiable legal existence, address, or staff. It forms part of a larger, multimillion-dollar Israeli government campaign, involving Havas Media and other firms, to shape how AI chatbots frame conversations about Israel.
Startup Keenable, founded by former Yandex search executive Andrey Styskin and AI scientist Matthias Petri, has emerged from stealth with $26 million in seed funding led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and angel investors. The company has built a search index spanning over 100 billion documents designed specifically for AI systems rather than human users, and its API is already being used by AI labs and inference providers for training and live retrieval, including a new partnership with voice AI company Gradium.
DuckDuckGo's new survey of nearly 2,000 U.S. adults found that almost a third of respondents have confided something to an AI chatbot they wouldn't tell friends, family or doctors, with the figure jumping to 56% among self-identified AI enthusiasts. The survey also found that most respondents didn't know chatbot conversations are typically used for training by default, and only a quarter knew such chats could be subpoenaed by law enforcement.
MIT Technology Review spoke with cognitive scientists comparing how babies and large language models acquire language, finding that infants learn to speak proficiently after hearing only 10 to 30 million words, while LLMs require vastly more data to approach similar fluency. Stanford's Michael C. Frank noted that training a model like GPT-2 on the same word count a toddler hears produces a 'nonsense generator,' not coherent speech.
In a podcast interview with David Senra, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman conceded that he and other industry leaders were overly optimistic about how quickly society would embrace AI tools. He pointed to the inertia of existing habits and business relationships as the main reason adoption has been slower than predicted, despite growing chatbot usage among US adults.
A Pew Research Center poll of 3,488 US adults found roughly a quarter have used AI chatbots to diagnose symptoms, mostly for convenience and cost savings, with nearly all reporting the information was at least somewhat helpful. The same survey found Americans express greater unease about AI being used by their doctors and providers than about using it themselves, and want to be told when it's involved in their care.