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What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - Her Daughter Killed Herself. Then She Saw the ChatGPT logs.

Slate Daily Feed

Slate

Business, News, Society & Culture

3.91.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

After their daughter committed suicide, they found her ChatGPT log—and where artificial intelligence helped her write her suicide note.


Guest:  Laura Reiley, writer for the Cornell Chronicle. 


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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey, Anna, I've got a new secret weapon for print.

0:02.2

Print?

0:02.9

Vista print, right?

0:04.0

That's not a secret.

0:05.6

Print everything for your business with Vistaprint.

0:08.0

Business cards, stickers, t-shirt, signage, even photo books from your last holiday.

0:12.0

If you need it, we print it at vistoprint.co.uk.

0:16.1

A heads up before we start the show, this episode talks in depth about suicide. Please listen with care.

0:23.2

Okay, here's the show.

0:29.5

I understand that I am asking Laura Riley something brutal when I ask her to describe her daughter, Sophie.

0:37.4

Sophie was our only child because when you when you get it right, you don't necessarily

0:43.3

want to do it over again. Very people oriented. No separation anxiety when she went to

0:49.7

preschool. You know, I think a lot of only children tend to be good around adults, but she had kind of a

0:56.9

preternatural ability with people of all kinds. Laura is a longtime journalist and food critic,

1:04.0

and Sophie traveled with her parents all over the world. We lived abroad when she was in ninth grade and a couple summers before that.

1:14.6

And she got the travel bug pretty hard and did a lot of solo travel.

1:20.6

This past summer, she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with a buddy of hers, and she did a month of yoga-intensive training

1:29.4

in Thailand, and then came back. She and her best friend, their intention was to visit all of

1:37.5

the national parks in the U.S. And she is fairly far along on that goal.

1:43.5

A goal that Sophie will never finish because she died by suicide in February.

1:49.6

She was 29.

1:51.3

She had a master's degree in public health, and she wanted to make health care systems better.

...

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