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Maxwell Madden

@maxwellmadden.bsky.social

49 followers 98 following 4 posts

Neuroscience | Cognitive/Behavioral Flexibility | Neuromodulation |Anterior Cingulate Cortex | Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University | he/him/his

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Reposted by Maxwell Madden

Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · Aug 29

"While ChatGPT use has been linked to suicides and mental-health hospitalizations among heavy users, this appears to be the first documented murder involving a troubled person who had been engaging extensively with an AI chatbot."

While ChatGPT use has been linked to suicides and mental-health hospitalizations among heavy users, this appears to be the first documented murder involving a troubled person who had been engaging extensively with an AI chatbot.

Soelberg posted hours of videos of himself scrolling through his conversations with ChatGPT on social media in the months before he died. The tone and language of the conversations are strikingly similar to the delusional chats many other people have been reporting in recent months.

A key feature of AI chatbots is that, generally, the bot “doesn’t push back,” said Dr. Keith Sakata, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco who has treated 12 patients over the past year who were hospitalized for mental-health emergencies involving AI use. “Psychosis thrives when reality stops pushing back, and AI can really just soften that wall.”

OpenAI said ChatGPT encouraged Soelberg to contact outside professionals. The Wall Street Journal’s review of his publicly available chats showed the bot suggesting he reach out to emergency services in the context of his allegation that he’d been poisoned.

Reposted by Maxwell Madden

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Reposted by Maxwell Madden

Wesley R. Evans @scred62.bsky.social · Sep 5

Here's a look at a field of striatal astrocytes expressing GCaMP6f-cyto from the Huda Lab for #FluorescenceFriday !

Maxwell Madden @maxwellmadden.bsky.social · Aug 26

Thanks! We gotta catch up sometime soon.

Maxwell Madden @maxwellmadden.bsky.social · Aug 21

Thank you!

Maxwell Madden @maxwellmadden.bsky.social · Aug 21

Hello, I would like to be added to the science feed please!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Serotonin and psilocybin activate 5-HT1B receptors to suppress cortical signaling through the claustrum - Nature Communications

Our basic understanding of neuromodulation in the claustrum remains limited. Here Madden et al., identify a key mechanism by which serotonin and the psychedelic psilocybin modulate cortical signalling...

Maxwell Madden @maxwellmadden.bsky.social · Aug 21

Excited my PhD work in @brianmathur.bsky.social’s lab is now published and available!

Bertoglio lab (FMC/UFSC) @bertogliolab.bsky.social · Aug 20

Serotonin and psilocybin activate 5-HT1B receptors to suppress cortical signaling through the claustrum
doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Serotonin and psilocybin activate 5-HT1B receptors to suppress cortical signaling through the claustrum - Nature Communications

Our basic understanding of neuromodulation in the claustrum remains limited. Here Madden et al., identify a key mechanism by which serotonin and the psychedelic psilocybin modulate cortical signalling...