NJ's Caldwell Uses AI to Claim Harassment Innocence — SkimNews
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- Dale Caldwell resigned as New Jersey's lieutenant governor on September 25th after an investigation found he sexually harassed a staffer and repeatedly violated ethics rules
- Caldwell told NJ PBS host Rob Nelson that he "AIed" the investigation report through multiple AI platforms to check their findings
- Caldwell claimed he posed the question to AI 59 times about what its findings would be, and said there was "no instance" of any chatbot concluding sexual harassment
- Caldwell has been making media rounds since resigning in an effort to clear his name, insisting he is being unfairly targeted
- AI chatbots are described in the source as "notoriously sycophantic" and prone to telling users what they want to hear, undermining Caldwell's framing of them as objective arbiters
Why it matters: Caldwell's use of AI chatbots to rebut a formal ethics investigation — combined with the source's note that these tools are "notoriously sycophantic" — illustrates how generative AI is increasingly wielded as a credibility prop rather than an evidence tool, a tactic unlikely to rehabilitate his standing with the public or the officials who reviewed the original findings.
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