What just happened? Another incident has taken place that illustrates the need to be careful what you tell AI. A Florida woman is facing felony charges after she used Claude as a diary and allegedly wrote that she planned to "shoot up" the Sheriff's office. After a human reviewer examined the statements, they were reported to police.
According to the arrest report, Carli Michelle Heller, of Bonita Springs, Florida, wrote on September 26 that she would attack the Sheriff's office. She later said that she uses Anthropic's chatbot like a "diary."
Claude's safety systems flagged the entry and it was escalated to a human reviewer. After deciding it was a credible threat, the reviewer reported it to law enforcement.
The company says it may share user information in limited emergencies if it believes disclosure is necessary to prevent death or serious physical injury.
Deputies identified Heller and visited her home. She was detained without incident before an LCSO intelligence detective took over the investigation.
Heller faces a charge of making a written threat of violence under Florida law. Florida Statute 836.10 makes it a second-degree felony to send, post, or transmit a written or electronic record threatening to kill or injure someone, carry out a mass shooting, or commit an act of terrorism. The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.
Anthropic isn't going to be taking any chances when it comes to anything it deems a potential threat. Last month, it was reported that OpenAI and Sam Altman are being sued by British Columbia over claims that the company could have prevented a mass shooting in the Canadian province.
The shooter, eighteen-year-old former pupil Jesse Van Rootselaar, had previously been flagged by OpenAI's safety team for her conversations about gun violence, but OpenAI never alerted police because the conversations did not meet the threshold for legal referral.
In June, Florida also sued OpenAI and Altman, alleging that ChatGPT had contributed to real-world harms, including the 2025 Florida State University shooting.
The latest incident is another reminder to think before you enter something into a chatbot that could get you into trouble. It's certainly not a private diary whose contents are for your eyes only.
Reports last month revealed that human contractors reviewing Microsoft Copilot's image editor can see users' prompts, uploaded photos and AI-generated edits. Documents show that some of those assignments contain sexual, disturbing or potentially illegal material, though the reviewers are not there to flag the content – only to assess whether the output is accurate.
Self host if you're gonna use AI, in fact, self host whenever possible. There are numerous examples of companies using centralized data to sell, report to police, or even having it fall into the hands of hackers.
I really think people think that all data input to a website is actually stored locally, nope, don't be dumb.
or, you know, Don't fucking use AI period cause its fucking stupid, and you don't need to be consuming the power of the fucking sun to make a journal.
Fully this.
In my day to day life it improves nothing. I certainly could write a complicated harness over a local model to get it to automate a ton of my day to day tasks but... Why?
Why would I do that? Regular deterministic tools and regular programming languages already give me the ability to automate the stuff that is truly tedious. Aside from that most of the tasks that people seem to use it for are tasks were the friction of doing them is were all the benefit lies.
People using this shit for journaling or taking notes is INSANE.
How much power do you think local inference actually consumes?
Local AI solves the power/water problem but it doesn’t solve the main “fucking stupid waste of time” problem.
Can someone actually self host a reasonable model on a standard PC?
Yes. Chinese labs keep improving small, open-weight models. IIRC, Qwen3.8-27B benchmarks are comparable to frontier models that were released less than a year ago.
I run that model on my RTX 5060 Ti 16GB using ExLlamaV3. Though, I'm not sure if that qualifies as "standard PC" hardware as it now costs more than 2x the price I paid a year ago :/
Well if you temper your expectations sure. Can't expect frontier performance from a average gaming pc, but it is enough to do a lot more than you think probably. This video on the topic I found really informative: https://youtu.be/ydFikMBJG1g EDIT: Also I've been using gemma4:31b from duck.ai lately that I've found is excellent for almost everything I use AI for. Except maybe long context.
Depends on what you need. You can get away with hosting QWEN 27B on a laptop with about 64 GB or RAM and a dedicated GPU. You'll be using mostly system RAM, not VRAM, so generation would be slow, but not unbearable.
Good for creating short stories and other creative work when paired with a front end that can handle character profiles, world building, and has memory recall.
It's better to build your own server and set it up so you, and only you, can remotely access it.
Meanwhile, my luddite ass is still writing short stories on my typewriter
That cost me $150 in 2020
Better yet… just don’t us AI
I mean, first, don't try to shoot up anything
AI is good. It's just that the people behind it suck.
Fuck AI there is nothing good about anything going on with AI right now. And please don’t go into the whole “bUt ThErEs DiFfErEnT kInDs So ThEy’Re NoT aLl BaD” because we know. We fucking know.
But the mass majority of AI use is fucking bullshit so please don’t cape for this insanity because 1% of AI isn’t bad.