Flávio Bolsonaro Flees Brazil for the U.S., and How ChatGPT Laid Out a Dangerous Medical Plan

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracey Mumford. Today is Wednesday, October 28th. Here's what we're covering. We're starting with updates in two major elections abroad. In Israel, voters turned out in the largest numbers in a generation yesterday in what many saw as a make-or-break moment for the country. As of this morning, there is no clear winner. Both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Gadi Eizenkot, who leads a bloc of opposition parties, struck tones of victory overnight, with Netanyahu saying, we must form a strong right-wing government, and Eizenkot declaring, the public wants change. But a full-blown victory. A full vote tally could take days. And because of how Israel's parliamentary system works, it could take weeks to know who will actually lead the country. That's because it's very possible neither bloc will have enough seats to take power on its own, so there will need to be maneuvering and alliances. One surprise that came out of yesterday's voting that could factor into those calculations, the exit polls project that two Arab parties might have their strongest showing ever, with those voters coming out in record. to express their opposition to Netanyahu. Most Arab citizens in Israel live in separate towns from Jewish Israelis and face violence and discrimination. Their stronger-than-expected showing yesterday could potentially give them an important role in forming the next government. The Times has live coverage today as the results continue to come in. And a second update now from Brazil. Flavio Bolsonaro, who was defeated in Sunday's presidential election, has fled the country for the U.S., according to three U.S. officials. Bolsonaro initially rejected the results, which saw President Lula narrowly re-elected. He then accepted his loss, but has claimed Lula used unfair tactics to win. Bolsonaro had been ordered to hand over his passports because he was being investigated in a billion-dollar money-laundering case. Something he's claimed is political persecution. He said he would comply, but instead he disappeared. And the big question yesterday was, where is Bolsonaro? Now, a senior State Department official told the Times, it plans to issue visas to Bolsonaro and his family. And his allies in the U.S. have already been welcoming him on social media, claiming he'll lead Brazil's right-wing opposition while in exile. The whole situation has echoes of what's happened to Bolsonaro. What happened with his father, the Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro, who hid in the Hungarian embassy in Brazil for several days after he was charged with attempting a coup when he lost against Lula in the last election. The White House and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment. In Minnesota. Today we are here begging for the Department of Justice to do what is right. To hold the men who murdered our son accountable for what they did. The family of Alex Preddy, the Minneapolis nurse who was fatally shot by immigration agents in January, held a news conference yesterday in which they accused the federal government of keeping them in the dark about the investigation into Preddy's killing. Imagine learning that your child had been murdered by watching it on TV. No one from the government called us that day, nor the next 200. For more than 75 days, we have not heard anything from the federal government. Preddy's parents said the U.S. attorney for Minnesota had refused to share information and that the Justice Department had not answered a letter from the family seeking answers. A lawyer representing them said that amounts to a violation of the Federal Crime Victims Rights Act. Federal officials have yet to publicly disclose information as basic as the identity of the agents who fired on Preddy. Though their names have been reported by the Times and other outlets. Preddy's death, which came not even three weeks after an immigration agent shot and killed Rene Good in the city, set off nationwide outcry and ultimately forced President Trump to withdraw hundreds of immigration agents from Minnesota. But the investigations into Preddy and Good's killings have produced little visible action. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minnesota did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Yesterday, the family of a 31-year-old woman who died after she followed ChatGPT's advice to cut her epilepsy medication filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. It's one of a growing number of suits testing whether AI companies can be held responsible for the info their technology provides. Here's what we know about Bowen Wan's story from her family, and from her chat logs, which they shared with the Times. The messages show Bowen began talking with ChatGPT a lot during a lonely time in her life. She was on disability leave from her software engineering job in Seattle because she was getting hit with seizures, sometimes more than once a day. At some points, she was sending as many as 1,500 messages a week, chatting with the bot late into the night in her native Chinese. One thing weighing on her was her feeling that the dosage of her medication or her epilepsy drug was making her speaking stilted and her thinking slow. The chat bot told her that, quote, you can start micro-dosing as you see fit. When she asked if she could do that by cutting the pills into pieces and not telling her doctor, it told her, you can absolutely do that, and then provided directions for buying a tablet cutter. Eventually, it laid out a day-by-day plan for her to taper down to zero milligrams, giving her not just dangerous advice, but also coaching her on how to manipulate her doctors and encouraging her to push ahead despite clear signs of medical distress. At one point, Bowen asked the chat bot, my brain feels exhausted, but I don't need to worry. Maintain zero milligrams tomorrow, it instructed her. You must persevere. In February, Bowen was found dead in her Seattle apartment. In reporting Bowen's story, I've been trying to understand how exactly the chat bot's guardrails collapsed. My colleague Teddy Rosenbluth covers health and medical misinformation. Experts told me that implementing stricter guardrails around these kinds of medical questions would not be technically challenging for the top AI labs. But they said that these companies are hesitant to draw too many red lines around health questions for fear of frustrating users that have come to expect eager and helpful answers to all of their questions. In response to questions from the Times, a spokesman for OpenAI called Bowen's story, incredibly heartbreaking, but added that the version of chat GPT she was talking to is no longer available. It was pulled down the same month Bowen died after drawing criticism for its overly affirming responses, which had led some people to enter delusional spirals and in some extreme cases helped facilitate suicide. The spokesman said the company's newer models are better at recognizing when a situation may need urgent attention. A disclosure, the New York Times has its own lawsuit against OpenAI claiming copyright infringement. The company has denied those claims. And finally, so earlier this month, a friend of mine who lives in San Francisco sent me this video of a man walking aerobically, a robot dog down the street in his neighborhood. And I had so many questions and I wanted to find out why this was happening. It turned out that this guy that my friend had spotted was making $20 per hour to walk the robot dog. Kashmir Hill covers tech for the Times. She eventually found the job posting that kicked all of this off. A startup in the city was offering to pay people to walk robo-dogs. No experience necessary. Now, what on earth is happening is an obvious question here. And Kashmir says it turned out it wasn't about getting the canine machines enough exercise, or not really. Instead, the company behind it was trying to gather data on these walks with the goal that eventually robo-dogs will be better at navigating around cities on their own without a human helper. The friend that spotted this told me that San Francisco is a weird city that is only getting weirder. But this is actually something that is happening more often around the country. We're going to start seeing robots. You've got driverless cars, which are already all over San Francisco, also in other cities. Amazon is using drones to do deliveries in Texas. There's one company in Atlanta that is having robot dogs do security at apartment complexes. So we are really seeing, you know, AI starting to take physical form and be in our real world, not just on our computers. Those are the headlines today on The Daily. And the Trump presidency, both Trump 1 and 2, has been an absolute disaster for the country. I think the party is corrupt and self-dealing and honestly incompetent. But I'm not a Democrat. How some midterms races in closely divided states could come down to voters who are disillusioned with both parties. You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are not a Times subscriber yet, you can get a full month of free access to all of the journalism we publish when you download the Times app now. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.