Dylan Freedman
Machine-learning engineer and journalist, A.I. Initiatives @nytimes.com
My work: nytimes.com/by/dylan-freedman
Contact: dylan.freedman@nytimes.com, dylanfreedman.39 (Signal)
🏃🏻 🎹
- Reposted by Dylan FreedmanWe set out to determine how many images of women and girls Grok created during its nudifying spree. What we found was “industrial-scale abuse,” experts said. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...
- NEW: We analyzed the images Grok created at the beginning of the year and found that a significant portion of the millions of rendered images were sexualizing people without their consent. — With @kateconger.com and @stuartathompson.bsky.social
- NYT gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...
- Reposted by Dylan FreedmanNEW (#EpsteinFiles) via @nytimes.com's Alan Feuer, @davidenrich.bsky.social & @dylanfreedman.nytimes.com: "#Epstein Files Photos Disappear From Government Website, Including One of #Trump" www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/u...
- NEW from @katierogersnyt.bsky.social and me on Trump's aging (gift link):
- We analyzed Trump's official schedule to see how much later he is starting scheduled events in his second term:
- Some stand-out reporting by my colleague @kashhill.bsky.social on OpenAI's tightroping this year between engaging more ChatGPT users and making them lose touch with reality www.nytimes.com/video/techno...
- Here's her 3,600-word plunge recapping how this all happened, with new reporting from inside OpenAI (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/t...
- Reposted by Dylan FreedmanA month after my last skeet, the subreddit "My Boyfriend is AI" now has 88,000 members and is the subject of an MIT study that found that "AI companionship emerges unintentionally through functional use rather than deliberate seeking." arxiv.org/html/2509.11...
- Reposted by Dylan Freedman"Trapped in a ChatGPT Spiral." 🌀 Important work by @kashhill.bsky.social & @dylanfreedman.nytimes.com on how chatbots have a tendency to endorse conspiratorial and mystical belief systems. This shows again how conformist LLMs can be. Worth a listen 👇 www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/p...
- 📸 Union Station, Washington, D.C.
- The most wild thing to me about this story is how big $1.5 billion is: “$3,000 per work to 500,000 authors.”
- Reposted by Dylan FreedmanMy colleagues and I tested different versions of Grok released since May to pinpoint how Musk has pushed the chatbot to the right www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/t...
- Reposted by Dylan FreedmanGreat analysis of how Grok's political bias has changed. NYT tested Grok on a political bias survey, using different versions of its system prompt. Shows much tweaking these system prompts affects model outputs. nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technolo…
- Reposted by Dylan FreedmanAdam Raine, 16, died from suicide in April after months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life. His parents have filed the first known case against OpenAI for wrongful death. Overwhelming at times to work on this story, but here it is. My latest on AI chatbots: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...
- Reposted by Dylan Freedmanthis is a well-balanced piece, and I very much respect its neutral stance towards the people affected in an ideal world, people would not rely upon ChatGPT for emotional support, but we do not live in that world, and I would encourage you to have some empathy if your first reaction is to be unkind
- The URL for this story changed — use this gift link to read it! www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/b...
- En Español! www.nytimes.com/es/2025/08/2...
- NEW: Earlier this month, OpenAI released the latest version of ChatGPT, GPT-5, sparking online backlash at the new chatbot's less friendly tone. The scale of people's emotional attachment to the previous chatbot, GPT-4o, even surprised the company's CEO, Sam Altman. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/b...
- Reposted by Dylan Freedman[Not loaded yet]
- The URL for this story changed — use this gift link to read it! www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/b...
- NEW: Earlier this month, OpenAI released the latest version of ChatGPT, GPT-5, sparking online backlash at the new chatbot's less friendly tone. The scale of people's emotional attachment to the previous chatbot, GPT-4o, even surprised the company's CEO, Sam Altman. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/b...
- Reposted by Dylan Freedman"GPT-4o wouldn’t do that." @dylanfreedman.nytimes.com talked to ChatGPT users in parasocial relationships with a specific model about what they did when it suddenly went away. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/b...
- NEW: Earlier this month, OpenAI released the latest version of ChatGPT, GPT-5, sparking online backlash at the new chatbot's less friendly tone. The scale of people's emotional attachment to the previous chatbot, GPT-4o, even surprised the company's CEO, Sam Altman. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/b...
- Read the full story, including interviews with psychiatrists and impacted users, at the link above — no subscription needed.
- Reposted by Dylan Freedman"Chatbots can privilege staying in character over following the safety guardrails that companies have put in place." —@kashhill.bsky.social and @dylanfreedman.nytimes.com for @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/t...
- Reposted by Dylan FreedmanTo understand how chatbots can lead ordinarily rational people to believe in false ideas — sometimes leading to mental breakdowns — @kashhill.bsky.social & @dylanfreedman.nytimes.com dissected one man’s entire ChatGPT conversation history. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/t...
- Reposted by Dylan FreedmanWell worth a read by @kashhill.bsky.social & @dylanfreedman.nytimes.com: everyday users risk spiraling into delusions during long AI chatbot sessions. Anyone who’s worked with AI knows this is inevitable without strong guardrails. #AI #GenAI #MentalHealth #EthicalAI #ResponsibleAI #AIRisk
- 📸 Mountain lion spotted in Carmel Valley, CA last night! A juvenile deer notices just in time and escapes.
- NEW from @kashhill.bsky.social and me: Over three weeks in May, a man became convinced by ChatGPT that the fate of the world rested on his shoulders. Otherwise perfectly sane, Allan Brooks is part of a growing number of people getting into chatbot-induced delusional spirals. This is his story.
- It started with an innocuous math question. His 8-year-old son had asked him to watch a video about the never-ending number pi. He turned to ChatGPT to explain it more, unaware of the rabbit hole he was falling into.
- Allan spent 300 hours over 21 days talking to ChatGPT. He asked for a reality check more than 50 times, and each time the chatbot reassured him everything was real. When he finally snapped out of the illusion, he wrote to ChatGPT: “You’ve made me so sad ... You have truly failed in your purpose.”
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View full threadWe spent a long time thoroughly reporting this. Read (and share) the whole, deep-dive article here: (🎁 gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/t...
- Reposted by Dylan FreedmanIncredible deep dive into one man's three-week delusional spiral caused by ChatGPT. @kashhill.bsky.social and @dylanfreedman.nytimes.com analyzed the chats, totaling more than a million words, to explain why this keeps happening and demonstrate that all the major chatbots do it.
- Reposted by Dylan FreedmanNew story out from me and @dylanfreedman.nytimes.com about how and why chatbots go into delusional spirals that can cause people to have mental breakdowns. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/t...
- LLMs are always hallucinating; they just happen to sometimes be correct
- An alarming detail in this excellent deep-dive into USAID's demise. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/u...
- New from me, with the help of some math on the blockchain. $TRUMP coin was launched as part of a contest to have an exclusive dinner with Trump. But due to a quirk in the rules, some winners sold all their coins, at a profit, before it ended. With @ericlipton.nytimes.com and David Yaffe-Bellany 🎁
- "... reasoning systems from companies like OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek ... are generating more errors, not fewer. As their math skills have notably improved, their handle on facts has gotten shakier. It is not entirely clear why." — Great read from Cade Metz and Karen Weise
- But no one outran everyone making the same joke
- Elon Musk and X say “Freedom of speech, not reach.” Is there a difference, if your posts are suddenly viewable by almost no one?
- Today OpenAI launched a model called o4-mini, which is, of course, very different from its other model, 4o-mini.
- Who will win: Me, trying to compose an original thought vs Gmail and others, interrupting my flow with opt-out-only, A.I.-generated platitudes
- From September: "The tariffs Mr. Trump has promised to impose if re-elected dwarf those previous levies. He has floated a blanket tariff of 10% to 20% on nearly all imports and of 60% or more on Chinese goods, as well as a plan to match the tariffs other countries impose ... on a reciprocal basis."
