Marcy Menzes

Welcome back to ‘In the Loop’! It’s your newsletter team, Ainsha, Diego, Kathryn, Marcy, Ruby, Kateleen, Macy, Erin, Kait and Annie. We’ve got a good one for you today. To start, a feature on how being cool is ruining self-expression. Next, we have information on DeFall Fest and news on the City Colleges of Chicago and Cook County Teachers Union contract agreement. Then, we have news on a man hospitalized after an altercation with ICE in California and the curfew in Paris after the weekend protests.

A Cook County father is suing the gaming company Roblox after discovering his 9-year-old son had allegedly been groomed and sexually exploited through the website’s online chat system. Warning: this piece contains mentions of grooming and child sexual abuse material. No parent wants their child to meet an adult posing as a minor online. Yet this was the case for a Cook County father, whose 9-year-old son was interacting with someone he believed to be another child but was actually a man.

AI chatbots have been present online for more than two decades, but have only recently acted as people’s friends, family members and even lovers for those who don’t have these valuable social connections. Warning: this piece contains mentions of self-harm and harm against others While Artificial Intelligence (AI) was invented in 1950, the impact it has on relationships both with ourselves and with the AI itself has not been measurable until recent years.