2025-12-03 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The Trump administration has renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, now calling it the National Laboratory of the Rockies, marking an identity shift for the Colorado institution that has been a global leader in wind, solar, and other renewable energy research.
“The new name reflects the Trump administration’s broader vision for the lab’s applied energy research, which historically emphasized alternative and renewable sources of generation, and honors the natural splendor of the lab’s surroundings in Golden, Colorado,” said Jud Virden, laboratory director, in a statement.
He did not specify what this “broader vision” would mean for the lab’s programs or its staff of about 4,000.
The renaming is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to deemphasize or cut the parts of the federal government that support renewable energy, while also expanding federal support for fossil fuels.
Asked for details, the Department of Energy said in an email that the renaming “reflects the Department’s renewed focus on ‘energy addition,’ rather than the prioritization of specific energy resources.”
If the name change heralds a shift in the lab’s direction, it would be “like losing several major land grant research universities all at once.”
A lab spokesman had no additional information about whether there will be changes to programs or headcount at the lab.
Bill Ritter, a Democrat who was governor of Colorado from 2007 to 2011, said it’s reasonable to worry that the name change signals that the federal government is abandoning the lab’s status as a world leader in renewable energy research. “It’s an iconic research facility,” he said.
Underscoring this point, he recalled a trip to Israel while he was governor. “The head of their renewable energy laboratory said, ‘I have nothing to tell you, because you come from the place that has the best renewable energy laboratory in the world,’” Ritter said.
After leaving office, Ritter founded the Center for the New Energy Economy at Colorado State University, which specializes in energy policy research, and is now a consultant on energy business and policy.
Based on this experience, he thinks that anything the Trump administration does to divert from the lab’s mission is harmful to the United States’ ability to remain a major player in the energy economy of the near future.
“We’ll no longer be competitive in renewables research with China or India or other countries that are still heading toward the renewable energy transition at a very fast pace,” he said.
People with close ties to the lab were not surprised by the name change, given the administration’s broader goals.
“In the early days of DOGE people there were whispering about a name change to avoid the ire of MAGAs,” said Matt Henry, a Montana-based social scientist who worked at the lab from February 2024 to August 2025, in a post on Bluesky. “It pissed me off—prioritizing the preservation of the institution at the expense of its [stated] mission? So disappointing.”
He was referring to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which sought to cut federal spending in the early months of the Trump administration. The term MAGA refers to President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan and movement.
Dustin Mulvaney, a San Jose State University environmental studies professor, said if the name change is a sign of a significant change in the lab’s work, it would be “like losing several major land grant research universities all at once.”
Mulvaney has done projects in partnership with people at the lab. An important part of the institution’s work, he said, is that its research is free and accessible to the public, helping businesses and universities that may not be able to afford the work of private research firms.
The lab’s mission has included consulting to help communities benefit from new energy technologies, and ensure smooth transitions away from fossil fuels.
This work meant that the lab was out of step with an administration that has said it disagrees with the idea of a transition away from fossil fuels and has sought to impede funding and development of renewable energy.
The lab was established in 1974 as the Solar Energy Research Institute, part of a law signed by President Gerald Ford to facilitate alternatives to importing oil from the Middle East, according to a history on the lab’s website. The US was suffering through high gasoline prices amid tensions with oil-producing nations such as Saudi Arabia.
“The energy crisis we face today is unlike the crisis that gave rise to NREL,” said Audrey Robertson, assistant secretary of energy, in a statement. “We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources. Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand.”
In 1977, the federal government selected Golden, Colorado, as the location for the lab. In 1991, the Solar Energy Research Institute became the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, part of a change by the administration of President George H. W. Bush that also elevated the institution to become part of the country’s national lab system.
But the lab’s history has also included budget cuts and periods when its work fell out of favor with presidential administrations, including layoffs and funding cuts under President Ronald Reagan. Trump proposed substantial cuts during his first term, but Congress retained much of the funding.
The Trump administration’s budget proposal, issued in May, calls for cuts across non-defense discretionary spending, including on energy research, but the budget process is still underway.
2025-12-03 20:15:00
As secretary of Health and Human Services in the second Trump administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pushed an array of pseudo-science and misinformation, foremost about vaccines. His approach has been to promote claims that are unsupported by evidence or have been disproven by scientific research, and to announce that HHS is pouring resources into studying those baseless claims. He also tends to imply that questions he raises have not yet been studied, when in fact they have been. Research has shown definitively, for example, that vaccines do not cause autism, despite Kennedy’s long-running efforts to stir that fear.
In similar fashion, Kennedy is now using his post as the highest-ranking US health official to spread the claim that psychiatric drugs are a key cause of mass shootings at the nation’s schools and beyond. The idea, essentially, is that antidepressants and other meds may inadvertently turn people into killers. There is no scientific evidence to support that theory—and extensive research indicates it is untrue. Nonetheless, Kennedy announced at a recent Turning Point USA event that “massive studies” of the theory are now underway at HHS. The HHS press secretary, however, declined to answer any of my specific questions about this purported research effort, and threat assessment and mental health leaders I spoke with voiced sharp skepticism.
“This theory has been examined for decades. There is no credible evidence that antidepressants cause or contribute to mass violence.”
Large research of this kind would require longterm planning, dedicated teams and substantial funding and typically would be outlined to the public, says psychologist Sarah DeGue, a violence prevention expert who served for the past decade as a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been gutting violence prevention programs and research since January.
“Everything we know suggests that these ‘massive studies’ do not exist—and there would be no scientific rationale for them even if they did,” DeGue, whose role at the CDC ended in June, told me. “This theory has been examined for decades. There is no credible evidence that antidepressants cause or contribute to mass violence.”
The generalized claim that commonly used pharmaceuticals known as SSRIs can make people violent—and that they supposedly gave rise to the shootings epidemic—has been around for a long time. It traces in part to an unscientific anti-Prozac campaign in the 1990s from the Church of Scientology, and gained some traction in online forums after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. Disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who helped create a miasma of lies claiming that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was faked, has also peddled the theory.
Proponents of the SSRI theory use anecdotal, often unconfirmed details about shooters’ health histories to argue causation. But multiple studies from experts in psychiatry, law enforcement, and public health show that the theory has no merit. Data on shooters spanning more than a decade from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit has been used specifically to examine the claim that psychiatric drugs are at the root of school shootings; independent researchers concluded from the FBI data that “most school shooters were not previously treated with psychotropic medications—and even when they were, no direct or causal association was found.”
My inbox has been peppered with questions about the alleged role of SSRIs ever since I began doing deep research on mass shootings and how to prevent them more than 12 years ago. The persistence no doubt owes in part to the fact that the circumstances and behaviors of mass shooters are complex, and that the role of mental illness has long been widely misunderstood. But despite the SSRI theory failing under scientific scrutiny (additional details on that below), some commentators still use it to steer debate away from the regulation of firearms—including Kennedy, who has used that approach repeatedly in media and public appearances.
He did so again on Fox & Friends in late August, after the mass shooting of school children at a Catholic church in Minneapolis. And in mid-November, Kennedy highlighted the same arguments during a Turning Point USA “fireside” chat at George Washington University.
A close look at Kennedy’s rhetoric on the subject is telling. Here next are his roughly two minutes of remarks at the TPUSA event, intercut with my analysis showing how he offered a barrage of misleading and false statements about guns, mass shootings, and psychiatric drugs.
When a young audience member commented that gun violence is the leading cause of death “for people our age” and asked why Republicans have not passed any legislation in response, Kennedy first insinuated that guns cannot be the source of the crisis:
Kennedy: “Is it really to do with the proliferation of guns? Because when I was a kid, we had roughly the same amount of guns per capita. And in fact, in some of the schools that I went to, there were gun clubs, and kids would come to school with their guns and nobody worried that they were going to start shooting people.”
That met with some applause from the young, conservative-leaning crowd, but for starters, Kennedy’s “per capita” preamble is flat-out wrong: In 1970, when he was 16 years old, there were an estimated 104 million civilian firearms in the United States, amid a population of just over 203 million. Today, there are more than 400 million firearms in circulation—a four-fold increase—amid a population of roughly 341 million. In other words, when Kennedy was a kid, there were enough guns to arm about half the population; now there is a gun for every single person in the country, and then some.
Moreover, Kennedy ignored the factthat the kinds of firearms widely available have changed dramatically. When gunmakers first began producing a civilian version of a military-style semiautomatic rifle in the 1960s, known as an AR-15, those new models were a bust with gun buyers. They are wildly popular today, though, with more than 20 million now in circulation—and these highly lethal rifles have become a top weapon of choice for mass shooters, as I reported in this investigation. Kennedy also glossed over another key change: The culture of responsible gun ownership that he seemed to wax nostalgic about was supplanted decades ago—thanks in no small part to a lucrative business model built by the gun industry and the National Rifle Association that markets aggression and militarism to young and middle-age men.
Kennedy: “In all of human history, there’s never been a time when a stranger would walk into a school room, or into a movie theater, and start shooting strangers. Why did that start happening in the 1970s and only in this country?”
Answer: It didn’t start happening in the 1970s, and it hasn’t only happened in this country.
As I documented in my book Trigger Points, a young man carried out a suicidal gun murder on the campus of Smith College in Massachusetts more than a century ago, in 1909. A school principal went on a deadly gun rampage at a Los Angeles middle school in 1940. The infamous clocktower massacre at the University of Texas, Austin, happened in 1966. There were school and mass shootings in the 1970s, too. Incidentally, Prozac, the first SSRI to go on the market in America, did so after being approved by the FDA—in late 1987.
In the current era, mass shootings in the US have increased (even when defining the phenomenon conservatively, as we do at Mother Jones), and they occur a lot more often here than in other countries. But despite the common assertion that these attacks are unique to America (often repeated as a way to lament the recurring tragedies), many such attacks have happened elsewhere: in Canada, Australia, France, Norway, Germany, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, and beyond.
Kennedy: “One of the things that we’re looking at is SSRIs and other psychiatric drugs that have these black box warnings on them, and that began proliferating in lockstep with the school shootings and mass shootings. I’m trying to look at this in a rational, objective way and say, what changed? It wasn’t the proliferation of guns. We’ve always had guns. Something changed about human behavior. And it happened here, where we’ve got 20 percent of the population now taking these drugs. And the drugs, in their clinical trials, they saw suicidal, homicidal effects. There’s black box warnings on them saying, ‘may cause suicidal or homicidal ideation.’”
Kennedy’s premise is hardly subtle: The change is the drugs, ergo the drugs are likely the cause of the shootings crisis. But research 101 on any college campus would suggest the obvious first thing to ask here: Has this premise been amply tested?
Research has only continued to debunk the SSRI theory, as psychiatry experts Dr. James Knoll and Dr. Ronald Pies reaffirmed in an article in Psychiatric Times shortly after the mass shooting at the Minneapolis church. “Our focused review of several recent studies,” they wrote, “finds no credible evidence for this claim.” (Emphasis theirs.)
They note that Kennedy’s version of the premise itself is even half wrong. While labeling on some of these drugs cautions about possible suicidal ideation, “We can dismiss at once the false claim that any currently available antidepressants in the US have black box warnings regarding ‘homicidal ideation.'” Potential murder, in other words, is not a known risk factor.
They further observed that an analysis of the Columbia University Mass Murder Database shows that the lifetime prevalence of antidepressant use among mass shooters over the past 30 years is 4 percent—which is much lower than the estimated 11.4 percent of US adults who took antidepressants in 2023. (Moreover, in studying hundreds of mass shootings and threat cases over the years, including interviews with dozens of top experts, I know of no mental health or threat assessment practitioner who ever concluded that antidepressant treatment was a causal factor in a case.)
Kennedy: “We’re now doing massive studies on this issue to try to figure out why it is that all these shootings are happening here and never happened before.”
Kennedy promising improbable new projects also fits a pattern. Last April, referring to vaccines and other possible factors, he announced that at President Trump’s direction he had launched “a massive testing and research effort” on autism that would involve hundreds of scientists from around the world. “In September,” he said, “we will know what has caused the autism epidemic.” But by late fall, the only substantive updates were dubious claims from the administration regarding Tylenol and a set of highly provocative, unscientific changes to language about vaccine safety on a CDC website.
HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard declined to answer the specific questions I emailed about the scope, funding, and timeline for the research that Kennedy has now promised on meds and mass shootings. She instead referred me to a social media post by Kennedy from early November in which he emphasized, falsely, that the issue has not been studied: “Drawing on the nation’s most comprehensive data, the @CDCgov is finally confronting the long-taboo question of whether SSRIs and other psychoactive drugs contribute to mass violence.”
Kennedy is certainly correct to highlight mass shootings as a major public health problem and to raise questions around the crucial factor of suicidality. A majority of mass shooters end their own lives, according to findings from our pioneering mass shootings database at Mother Jones and subsequent research elsewhere. (This also should be put in relative perspective: Those shooters are a tiny fraction of the roughly 27,000 people per year who die by gun suicide.)
It is not clear, though, whether the health secretary is at all serious about prioritizing research on solving gun violence. A leading threat assessment practitioner who works with the federal government was blunt about Kennedy’s rhetoric: “Obviously he couldn’t be more backwards on this,” the practitioner told me. “Under proper care, antidepressants help countless people who suffer from mental health struggles, and specifically with individuals where we are concerned about potential planning of violence, there are many cases where the threat management process benefits from the use of these and other medications.”
“Secretary Kennedy likes to talk about ‘gold standard science,’ but continuing to focus on a research question that has already been answered is not the practice of gold standard science,” says DeGue, who has also long taught on public health and violence prevention at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “In this case, it is a distraction from the factors that truly drive mass shootings, like access to firearms, social and mental health crises, hate and racism, and violent extremism.”
2025-12-03 19:00:00
Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell is one of the most prominent Black conservatives in President Donald Trump’s orbit. It all started last summer when the president visited Sewell’s 180 Church while campaigning in Detroit. A month later, Sewell spoke at the Republican National Convention. And in January, he prayed for the new president during his inauguration inside the US Capitol. As Sewell’s voice echoed around the domed rotunda, the prayer sounded familiar to many. That’s because Sewell adapted Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
As Trump dismantles DEI policies around the country and pushes efforts to erase Black history from schools and museums, Sewell remains one of the president’s most prominent Black defenders and argues that the Trump presidency is actually improving Black Americans’ lives.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.“I believe that racism is when you close the door of opportunity to people because of their skin color, intentionally or unintentionally,” Sewell says. “And I believe President Trump is a anti-racist because he opened the door of opportunity to somebody like me, in a context where nobody would vote for him.”
On this week’s More To The Story, Sewell sits down with host Al Letson to talk about his upbringing as a drug dealer in Detroit, his conversion to Christianity, and his inauguration prayer. Letson challenges Sewell’s ideas about racism, his support of Charlie Kirk, and his defense of the Trump administration’s rollback of DEI policies.
2025-12-03 02:23:26
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remains under intense scrutiny following reports that he gave a spoken order to kill survivors of a boat strike, an allegation that has since labeled Hegseth the “Secretary of War Crimes.” But it appears that amid the fallout, Hegseth has found a potential fall guy: Admiral Frank Bradley, the Special Operations commander who oversaw the September 2 strikes.
Here is Hegseth on Monday referring to the September 2 strikes as “the combat decisions [Bradley] has made,” a line many viewed as attempting to directly place blame on a subordinate.
Then again, on Tuesday: “All these strikes, they’re making judgment calls, ensuring they defend the American people,” Hegseth told reporters, saying nothing of his own role in the strikes, which have more generally been likened to extrajudicial killings.
A similar framing came from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who said on Monday that Bradley “worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed.”
The apparent, coordinated effort to distance Hegseth from the September 2 boat strikes stems from an exclusive report from the Washington Post last week alleging that Hegseth ordered a follow-up strike on two people who had survived the initial bombing of their boat on September 2. The attack kicked off what has since exploded into an extended campaign of lethal hits on suspected drug boats from Venezuela, despite mounting evidence that casts doubt on the assertion that those killed were even trafficking drugs into the United States. According to tracking work from the New York Times, at least 80 people have been killed in 21 strikes.
Hegseth has since blasted the allegations as “fake news.” He also responded with his version of an apparent joke: a fake image of a Franklin the Turtle children’s book titled Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists, with the titular character shown in military gear, firing at targets in the sea from a helicopter.
Kids Can Press, which has published many of the Franklin the Turtle books, condemned Hegseth’s post on Monday night, saying it contradicted its values of “kindness, empathy, and inclusivity.”
Lawmakers, including at least one top Republican, have indicated targeting shipwrecked survivors may constitute a war crime. (The Department of Defense’s own “Law of War Manual” prohibits “no quarter” declarations, which includes “conduct[ing] hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors.”) Republican-led committees in the House and Senate have since announced investigations into the report.
“If [the order] occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act,” Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) and a former chair of the Intelligence Committee, said on CBS’s Face the Nation.
“Pete Hegseth is a war criminal and should be fired immediately,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) posted on X.
The timing of Hegseth’s latest scandal hits at a larger irony, as it follows a November social media video featuring six Democratic lawmakers that sought to remind military officers that they “must refuse illegal orders” and “stand up for our laws and our Constitution.” The video enraged both Hegseth and President Donald Trump, who promptly accused the Democrats, many of whom are former military or intelligence, of “seditious behavior, punishable by death.”
2025-12-03 01:25:56
The Trump administration has axed another group of judges from immigration courts. On Monday, the New York Times reported, eight judges serving on the bench at New York City’s 26 Federal Plaza—ground zero for courthouse arrests—were terminated. Among them was Amiena A. Khan, the court’s supervising assistant chief immigration judge.
Trump is trying to reshape immigration courts to fit his mass deportation agenda.
The latest firings, which were confirmed by the National Association of Immigration Judges and a Department of Justice official, add to an estimated 90 judges who have been terminated so far this year without stated cause. (Immigration judges are employed by the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR.) Federal Plaza, one of the city’s three immigration courts, now lists the names of just 25 sitting immigration judges and one temporary judge.
As I’ve previously reported (here and here), the sweeping purge of dozens of immigration judges across the country is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to hollow out the already overburdened courts—charged with making decisions on deportation and life-or-death asylum cases—and reshape them as a tool for the mass deportation agenda. Since President Donald Trump took back the White House, more than 130 adjudicators have been terminated or transferred, or have voluntarily left the workforce.
A recent NPR analysis of the professional backgrounds of 70 immigration judges fired between February and October found that judges with deportation defense experience and who hadn’t previously worked for the Department of Homeland Security accounted for 44 percent of the dismissals. That rate was “more than double the share of those who had only prior work history at DHS.” (In a statement to NPR, a DOJ spokesperson said it didn’t target or prioritize immigration judges based on past experience.)
David S. Kim was in the middle of a hearing in September when a termination email landed in his inbox. Kim had been an immigration judge for almost three years and had the highest asylum grant rate among the judges at 26 Federal Plaza.
“I know they will try their best to comport with due process and at the same time try to be efficient,” Kim told me in October of the judges who remained on the bench, “but it’s going to make their job that more difficult, especially knowing that their colleagues have been terminated for an unknown reason.”
As it removes seasoned judges with diverse backgrounds, the Trump White House is also working to replace them with adjudicators it expects will be more aligned with its anti-immigration push. Earlier this year, the administration eased the requirements to hire temporary judges with limited immigration law experience and started recruiting military lawyers for temporary assignments, a move legal experts have warned could undermine due process.
More recently, the official DHS account on X started calling on candidates to apply to join the bench to work under a new title: “Deportation Judge.”
2025-12-02 21:00:00
In the summer of 2019, a group of Dutch scientists conducted an experiment to collect “digital confessions.” At a music festival near Amsterdam, the researchers asked attendees to share a secret anonymously by chatting online with either a priest or a relatively basic chatbot, assigned at random. To their surprise, some of the nearly 300 participants offered deeply personal confessions, including of infidelity and experiences with sexual abuse. While what they shared with the priests (in reality, incognito scientists) and the chatbots was “equally intimate,” participants reported feeling more “trust” in the humans, but less fear of judgment with the chatbots.
This was a novel finding, explains Emmelyn Croes, an assistant professor of communication science at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. Chatbots were then primarily used for customer service or online shopping, not personal conversations, let alone confessions. “Many people couldn’t imagine they would ever share anything intimate to a chatbot,” she says.
Enter ChatGPT. In 2022, three years after Croes’ experiment, OpenAI launched its artificial intelligence–powered chatbot, now used by 700 million people globally, the company says. Today, people aren’t just sharing their deepest secrets with virtual companions, they’re engaging in regular, extended discussions that can shape beliefs and influence behavior, with some users reportedly cultivating friendships and romantic relationships with AIs. In chatbot research, Croes says, “there are two domains: There’s before and after ChatGPT.”
Take r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, a Reddit community where people “ask, share, and post experiences about AI relationships.” As MIT Technology Review reported in September, many of its roughly 30,000 members formed bonds with AI chatbots unintentionally, through organic conversations. Elon Musk’s Grok offers anime “companion” avatars designed to flirt with users. And “Friend,” a new, wearable AI product, advertises constant companionship, claiming that it will “binge the entire [TV] series with you” and “never bail on our dinner plans”—unlike flaky humans.
The chatbots are hardly flawless. Research shows they are capable of talking people out of conspiracy theories and may offer an outlet for some psychological support, but virtual companions also have reportedly fueled delusional and harmful thinking, particularly in children. At least three US teenagers have killed themselves after confiding in chatbots, including ChatGPT and Character.AI, according to lawsuits filed by their families. Both companies have since announced new safety features, with Character.AI telling me in an email that it intends to block children from engaging in “open-ended chat with AI” on the platform starting in late November. (The Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones, is suing OpenAI for copyright violations.)
As the technology barrels ahead—and lawmakers grapple with how to regulate it—it’s become increasingly clear just how much a humanlike string of words can captivate, entertain, and influence us. While most people don’t initially seek out deep engagement with an AI, argues Vaile Wright, a psychologist and spokesperson for the American Psychological Association, many AIs are designed to keep us engaged for as long as possible to maximize the data we provide to their makers. For instance, OpenAI trains ChatGPT on user conversations (though there is an option to opt out), while Meta intends to run personalized ads based on what people share with Meta AI, its virtual assistant. “Your data is the profit,” Wright says.
Some advanced AI chatbots are also “unconditionally validating” or sycophantic, Wright notes. ChatGPT may praise a user’s input as “insightful” or “profound,” and use phrases like, I’m here for you—an approach she argues helps keep us hooked. (This behavior may stem from AI user testing, where a chatbot’s complimentary responses often receive higher marks than neutral ones, leading it to play into our biases.) Worse, the longer someone spends with an AI chatbot, some research shows, the less accurate the bot becomes.
People also tend to overtrust AI. Casey Fiesler, a professor who studies technology ethics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, highlights a 2016 Georgia Tech study in which participants consistently followed an error-prone “emergency guide robot” while fleeing a building during a fake fire. “People perceive AI as not having the same kinds of problems that humans do,” she says.
At the same time, explains Nat Rabb, a technical associate at MIT’s Human Cooperation Lab who studies trust, the way we develop trust in other humans—perception of honesty, competence, and whether someone shares an in-group—can also dictate our trust in AI, unlike other technologies. “Those are weird categories to apply to a thermostat,” he says, “But they’re not that weird when it comes to generative AI.” For instance, he says, research from his colleagues at MIT indicates that Republicans on X are more likely to use Grok to fact-check information, while Democrats are more likely to go with Perplexity, an alternative chatbot.
Not to say AI chatbots can’t be used for good. For example, Wright suggests they could serve as a temporary stand-in for mental health support when human help isn’t readily accessible—say, a midnight panic attack—or to help people practice conversations and build social skills before trying them out in the real world. But, she cautions, “it’s a tool, and it’s how you use the tool that matters most.” Eugene Santos Jr., an engineering professor at Dartmouth College who studies AI and human behavior, would like to see developers better define how their chatbots ought to be used and set guidelines, rather than leaving it open-ended. “We need to be able to lay down, ‘Did I have a particular goal? What is the real use for this?'”
Some say rules could help, too. At a congressional hearing in September, Wright implored lawmakers to consider “guardrails,” which she told me could include things like stronger age verification, time limits, and bans on chatbots posing as therapists. The Biden administration introduced dozens of AI regulations in 2024, but President Donald Trump has committed to “removing red tape” he claims is hindering AI innovation. Silicon Valley leaders, meanwhile, are funding a new PAC to advocate for AI industry interests, the Wall Street Journal reports, to the tune of more than $100 million.
In short, we’re worlds away from the “digital confessions” experiment. When I asked Croes what a repeat of her study might yield, she noted that the basic parameters aren’t so different: “You are still anonymous. There’s still no fear of judgment,” she says. But today’s AI would likely come across as more “understanding,” and “empathetic”—more human—and evoke even deeper confessions. That aspect has changed. And, you might say, so have we.
