AI Reform & Democracy
AI accused of wrongful death in 4 teen suicides, more claim harm
When the public sees a powerful system causing real harm, legislators act and markets reprice. In August 2025, Matthew and Maria Raine filed Raine v. OpenAI in California. They allege that in April 2025 their 16-year-old son Adam used ChatGPT, was encouraged in his plan and later died by suicide. See the actual messages exchanged between Adam and ChatGPT here, in a story by Kashmir Hill, of The New York Times. See story
Journalism is dead. That’s why I am building a new one.
Over the past week, I reached out to 83 journalists. I shared reporting about AI-linked teen suicides, wrongful-death lawsuits, hallucination risks, mispricing of AI-related tech stocks, regulatory compliance failures under FTC/HIPAA/COPPA, and the 13 AI-governance patents I currently have pending before the United States Patent and Trademark Office. I sent everything a responsible journalist would need to evaluate whether a major story was unfolding.I received two replies. See story
I'm Winston Wolf. I solve problems
I have seen how fast something important can get fucked up when the public gets scared and the wrong people start steering the story. I am talking about artificial intelligence. Before we go any further I want to say this out loud. If you are afraid of AI right now you are not crazy. You are not naïve. You are not “anti tech.” You are right. See story
How we can use AI to reclaim the Fourth Estate — and democracy
Thirty-three years ago, when I worked at The Virginian-Pilot, I walked past these words, every day, carved in marble, written by Thomas Jefferson: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” See story
AI needs guardrails — just like capitalism did
When people say “AI is dangerous,” they’re not wrong. But they’re missing the bigger truth. AI without guardrails is a shit show. So was unregulated capitalism. See story
How much it would cost to rebuild local news to pre-collapse levels? Not much.
One of the richest companies on Earth could buy back American journalism, fund it forever and still walk away richer at the closing bell. We have the skill. All we need is the will. See story
How to Make America Great Again
I’m an engineer. I like to fix things. How do we fix this? Is it even fixable? Yes, it is.All we need to do is RTFM – as a friend (also an engineer) says: “Read The Fuckin’ Manual.” The good news is the instruction manual already exists. It was written nearly two hundred years ago, by a young Frenchman who came to the United States to figure out how the hell this democracy thing actually worked. See story
Worst. Generation. Ever?
In 1989, NBC’s Tom Brokaw called the people born between 1900 and 1930 “The Greatest Generation.” These were the young men and women who won WWII. This generation faced economic hardship early on, learning values like frugality and perseverance. They served bravely on battlefields and home fronts, securing victory and rebuilding America post war. See story
The Doomsayers Are The Danger
All the AI doomsayers worry that is the “recursive learning” that will be the undoing of the world. But I see that recursive learning as a feature, not a bug. I have always assumed that the recursive learning is the most powerful aspect of AI, not the CPU cycles. So why didn’t anyone think that a user, would use AI to make it more effective when recursive learning is its most powerful feature? See story
Why AI could have made the world a better place, but hasn’t — Yet
Imagine hiring a brilliant researcher who wakes up every morning with amnesia.They can write beautifully, argue persuasively, and synthesize data at light speed — but by lunchtime, they’ve forgotten everything you discussed at breakfast. That’s the state of modern AI. See story
AI ain’t perfect. But neither are we.
We’ve built a system capable of astonishing things — writing, designing, diagnosing, analyzing — and yet we demand that it never stumble. We expect precision without patience, brilliance without bias, wisdom without error. But perfection has never been the hallmark of progress. Iteration is. See story
Precedents
Siri started as a spin-out from SRI International, funded by DARPA grants and venture capital. It was a voice assistant app on the iPhone App Store — a curiosity, not a business. No ecosystem, no monetization, no moat. Apple saw what others didn’t: that the interface of the future wasn’t touch, it was conversation See story
An Open Letter to Sandy Rowe
AI is not a mere task rabbit, enhanced Goole results or deepfakes. AI is cognition and synthesis itself, on an order of magnitude never seen in human history. We can’t grasp it because we’ve never seen it. And it defies our imagination. The closest I can come is this: imagine a roomful of Da Vincis – on steroids – moving at the speed of electrons. This could deliver Nirvana, or in the hands of a Professor Moriarty, it could lead to our destruction. And no, I am not being melodramatic. Because this has happened before. See complete letter