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.
You can come up with an idea, and you can write the first draft. Then, you need to specify what kind of processing you expect the LLM to do. Could be punctuation polishing, refining the structure, expanding, suggesting improvements etc. If you’re really lazy, you’ll write a 5 line summary, and let the LLM improvise an entire scene based on that alone.
It’s up to you how you want to use this tool. If you let an LLM write entire sections, you’ll begin to notice a familiar tone emerge. Better keep it on a very short leash.
Again, you lost me here. It's like saying "I made this pizza, my recipe is I ordered it via Uber. I had to specify my ingredients!"
The difference is that you can adjust your involvement to your liking. The role of an LLM in your writing process is what you want it to be. It could be as large or small as you consider appropriate.
Think of it like writing by hand vs. using a computer with good writing software. You can’t really reorganise your manuscript if it’s written on paper, now can you? That would require rewriting the whole thing. Also, spell checking takes a lot of time, and you probably won’t even notice your grammar quirks. Computers make writing easier and faster. An LLM is another tool, just like the simple editing features we’ve taken for granted for the past 30 years. Ask again in 20 years and people won’t even think of writing without an LLM, just like writing a report by hand is completely absurd today.