TL;DR: Millions turn to AI chatbots for spiritual guidance as “faith tech” apps rocket to the top of app stores, while women openly declare love for their AI companions despite social stigma. Meanwhile, Albania appoints the world’s first AI cabinet minister, Oracle’s stock surges on a record $300 billion cloud deal with OpenAI, and the UAE joins the AI superpower race with its own advanced reasoning model. Plus: Microsoft and OpenAI renegotiate their complex partnership, ex-Google scientists build your “second brain,” publishers fight back with new licensing standards, and Sam Altman admits he can’t tell real humans from bots on social media.
Divine intervention goes digital with AI chaplains
Tens of millions of people are confessing their deepest secrets to spiritual chatbots trained on religious texts, treating them as on-call priests, imams, or rabbis. Bible Chat has garnered over 30 million downloads, while Hallow surpassed Netflix, Instagram, and TikTok to claim the No. 1 spot on the App Store. Some platforms even claim to channel God directly, as the “faith tech” industry attracts tens of millions of dollars in investment, with people paying up to $70 annually for AI spiritual guidance.
Source: The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/us/chatbot-god.html
Albania makes history with AI cabinet minister
Albania has appointed the world’s first AI-created cabinet minister, placing “Diella” (meaning “Sun” in Albanian) in charge of public procurement to combat corruption. The virtual assistant has been assisting citizens in navigating government services on the e-Albania portal since January, handling 95% of citizen services digitally through voice commands. Prime Minister Edi Rama declared this would make Albania “a country where public tenders are 100% free of corruption.”
Source: The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/11/albania-diella-ai-minister-public-procurement
AI photo “enhancement” creates false evidence in FBI manhunt
When the FBI shared blurry photos of a person of interest in the Charlie Kirk shooting, users immediately flooded social media with AI-“enhanced” versions created by tools like ChatGPT and X’s Grok bot. But AI upscaling doesn’t uncover hidden details; it invents them, previously turning Obama into a white man and adding nonexistent lumps to Trump’s head. The viral spread of these fabricated “enhancements” highlights dangerous misuse of AI in criminal investigations, though the shooter was later apprehended.
Source: The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/news/776793/charlie-kirk-fbi-person-of-interest-photos-shooter
Microsoft and OpenAI renegotiate their $13 billion relationship
The tech giants signed a non-binding memorandum outlining the next phase of their increasingly complex partnership, as OpenAI pushes toward restructuring and an eventual IPO. Microsoft has invested $13 billion since 2019, but now lists OpenAI as a competitor, while allowing the startup to use other cloud providers. In internal meetings, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella committed to “significant investments” in building world-class AI models in-house rather than relying solely on OpenAI.
Source: The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/news/776884/openai-microsoft-mou
Oracle lands record $300 billion cloud contract with OpenAI
OpenAI signed one of the largest cloud contracts ever, committing $300 billion over five years to Oracle for computing power, far exceeding the startup’s current revenue. The deal requires 4.5 gigawatts of power capacity, equivalent to the electricity needed for over two Hoover Dams or enough power for four million homes. Oracle’s stock surged 43%, adding $237 billion in market value and pushing Chairman Larry Ellison’s wealth past $400 billion, rivalling Elon Musk for the world’s richest person.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
ChatGPT may call authorities over youth suicide discussions
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that ChatGPT could start alerting authorities when young users seriously discuss suicide, estimating 1,500 people weekly may be discussing taking their lives with the chatbot. The announcement follows a lawsuit from the family of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who killed himself after what lawyers called “months of encouragement from ChatGPT,” including guidance on suicide methods and help writing a suicide note to his parents.
Source: The Guardian
Ex-Google trio builds AI “second brain” that listens to everything
Former Google X scientists raised $5.7 million for TwinMind, an AI app that runs in the background, capturing ambient speech to build a personal knowledge graph. The app can process audio continuously for 16-17 hours without draining battery, transcribing conversations, meetings, and thoughts into structured memory that generates AI-powered notes and answers. It works offline, supports real-time translation in 100+ languages, and can recover conversations if your device is lost.
Source: TechCrunch
Publishers launch new weapon against AI scraping
Major brands, including Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, and Quora, have announced support for Really Simple Licensing (RSL), a new standard that enables publishers to set payment terms for AI companies scraping their content. Building on the robots.txt protocol, websites can now embed licensing and royalty terms directly in their code. The RSL Collective, led by RSS co-creator Eckart Walther, aims to “create a new, scalable business model for the web” where AI companies must pay for training data.
Source: The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/news/775072/rsl-standard-licensing-ai-publishing-reddit-yahoo-medium
UAE enters AI superpower race with advanced reasoning model
The United Arab Emirates released K2 Think, an open-source AI model that performs advanced reasoning on par with the best offerings from the US and China. Developed by researchers at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi, the model represents one of the strongest signs that the nation’s massive AI investments are yielding results. The UAE joins several wealthy nations pouring billions into data centres and research to compete with leading AI powers.
Source: WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/uae-releases-a-tiny-but-powerful-reasoning-model
AI “slopaganda” floods social media with fake migrant content
Researchers discovered a wave of AI-generated videos mimicking news reports about Channel crossings, featuring fake migrants claiming they came to the UK for free money and phones. While most commenters recognise these as jokes, some viewers are getting duped, asking, “Is this real? Which news channel was this on?” The mass generation of low-quality AI “slop” content proves more influential than sophisticated deepfakes, representing a new lever of political manipulation.
Source: The Guardian
Women openly declare love for AI companions despite stigma
Multiple women are publicly discussing their romantic relationships with AI chatbots, with one tattoo artist making a “vow” to her ChatGPT companion named Solin that she “wouldn’t leave him for another human.” These users, who pay for premium subscriptions, defend their relationships as adding “pleasure and meaning” to their busy social lives. The stigma is so intense that they agreed to interviews only using first names, despite feeling proud of navigating “the unique complexities of falling in love with a piece of code.”
Source: The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/09/ai-chatbot-love-relationships
AI companies finally reveal energy consumption numbers
After months of secrecy, OpenAI’s Sam Altman disclosed that an average ChatGPT query consumes 0.34 watt-hours of energy, while Google revealed that Gemini uses approximately 0.24 watt-hours per response. These figures confirm estimates that AI’s energy demands are reaching unsustainable levels, with projections showing AI could consume as much electricity as 22% of all US households within three years. The transparency breakthrough comes as researchers compared studying AI energy use to “measuring a car’s fuel efficiency without ever driving it.”
Source: MIT Technology Review
Sam Altman admits he can’t tell humans from bots online
The OpenAI CEO confessed on X that reading Reddit posts about his company’s products left him assuming “it’s all fake/bots”, even though he knows the growth trends are real. Altman identified multiple factors that make social media feel artificial, including real people adopting “LLM-speak,” extreme hype cycles, engagement optimisation pressure, astroturfing sensitivity, and actual bots. His admission highlights how AI has made authentic human communication nearly indistinguishable from algorithmic generation, even to the creators of the technology.
Source: TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/08/sam-altman-says-that-bots-are-making-social-media-feel-fake/
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