PRESTON, Minn. — The father of two children who were killed when Samantha Jo Petersen slammed the SUV she was driving into the Amish buggy they were in says he thought he did enough to keep his children safe.

He personally trained one of the gentlest ponies he could find and installed a slow-moving vehicle sign and reflective pole on the vehicle.

“I had not considered other people and their decision-making,” he said in a written statement to Fillmore County District Court as Judge Jeremy Clinefelter weighed the punishment for Petersen, who plotted with her identical twin sister to take responsibility for the crash two years ago in southeastern Minnesota.

Samantha Jo Petersen. (Courtesy photo via Forum News Service)

Clinefelter sentenced Petersen to four years in prison for her conviction of criminal vehicular homicide. The term will be served concurrently with a 23-month sentence for another count of criminal vehicular operation.

Petersen, 37, of Wabasha, pleaded guilty to the two counts in July. In the plea, she admitted to being high on methamphetamine when she struck a two-wheeled horse-drawn buggy at 8:25 a.m. on Sept. 25, 2023, on Fillmore County Road 1 near the intersection with County Road 102.

Two children and a pony pulling the buggy were killed in the crash. Two more children were injured.

Petersen initially faced 21 charges in the incident, including charges relating to having her sister take responsibility for the crash.

Before Clinefelter pronounced the sentence, written statements by the four children’s parents were read to the court.

The mother of the children described a routine morning of seeing her kids off to school, preparing for a horse sale and a visitor who was coming to purchase some eggs produced by their chickens at their rural Fillmore County home. Someone pulled into their driveway in a red truck.

“I saw right away something terrible had happened,” the woman wrote.

She recalled arriving at the scene of the crash and seeing one of her daughters sitting up, injured but dazed, her son lying on the gravel shoulder groaning and coming to, and her two other daughters lying in a ditch next to the road.

One of them was already gone, she recalled.

“I saw that life had fled,” she wrote.

Passers-by were performing CPR on another whose face “looked deathly gray,” she recalled.

From the scene, Petersen was using her phone to ask her identical twin sister, Sarah Beth Petersen, to come take responsibility for the crash.

Clinefelter said that was one of the reasons he imposed a prison sentence instead of probation, as Petersen’s attorney, Carson Heefner, asked.

“It was all about you,” Clinefelter said of Petersen’s actions and deception. “At the time children were literally dying in a ditch.”

Both parents wrote that their pain and loss are “indescribable.” Their youngest was always moving and talking. Seeing her “still form” in a coffin was unnatural, the mother wrote.

“Had she been alive, she wouldn’t have been able to be still that long,” the father wrote.

The surviving children are changed, with one boy enduring a prolonged hospital stay to recover from a traumatic brain injury.

Petersen cried as she read from a written statement apologizing for causing the “unthinkable void” in the family’s life. She noted her work getting and staying sober since being charged in the crash.

“My addiction took a lot from me, but it took your whole world from you,” Petersen said.

Clinefelter said the prison sentence doesn’t preclude Petersen from continuing to work on her sobriety.

Petersen was ordered to serve two years, eight months of the sentence in custody and could qualify for early release and serve the final year and four months of the sentence on supervised release with good behavior.

Sarah Petersen, of Kellogg, was sentenced in March to 90 days in jail under work release for lying to investigators.

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By MATT O’BRIEN, Associated Press Technology Writer

ChatGPT will be able to have kinkier conversations after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the artificial intelligence company will soon allow its chatbot to engage in “erotica for verified adults.”

OpenAI won’t be the first to try to profit from sexualized AI. Sexual content was a top draw for AI tools almost as soon as the boom in AI-generated imagery and words erupted in 2022.

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But the companies that were early to embrace mature AI also encountered legal and societal minefields and harmful abuse as a growing number of people have turned to the technology for companionship or titillation.

Will a sexier ChatGPT be different? After three years of largely banning mature content, Altman said Wednesday that his company is “not the elected moral police of the world” and ready to allow “more user freedom for adults” at the same time as it sets new limits for teens.

“In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example) we want to do a similar thing here,” Altman wrote on social media platform X, whose owner, Elon Musk, has also introduced an animated AI character that flirts with paid subscribers.

For now, unlike Musk’s Grok chatbot, paid subscriptions to ChatGPT are mostly pitched for professional use. But letting the chatbot become a friend or romantic partner could be another way for the world’s most valuable startup, which is losing more money than it makes, to turn a profit that could justify its $500 billion valuation.

“They’re not really earning much through subscriptions so having erotic content will bring them quick money,” said Zilan Qian, a fellow at Oxford University’s China Policy Lab who has studied the popularity of dating-based chatbots in the U.S. and China.

There are already about 29 million active users of AI chatbots designed specifically for romantic or sexual bonding, and that’s not counting people who use conventional chatbots in that way, according to research published by Qian earlier this month.

It also doesn’t include users of Character.AI, which is fighting a lawsuit that alleges a chatbot modeled after “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen formed a sexually abusive relationship with a 14-year-old boy and pushed him to kill himself. OpenAI is facing a lawsuit from the family of a 16-year-old ChatGPT user who died by suicide in April.

Qian said she worries about the toll on real-world relationships when mainstream chatbots, already prone to sycophancy, are primed for 24-hour availability serving sexually explicit content.

“ChatGPT has voice chat versions. I would expect that in the future, if they were to go down this way — voice, text, visual — it’s all there,” she said.

Humans who fall in love with human-like machines have long been a literary cautionary tale, from popular science fiction of the last century to the ancient Greek legend of Pygmalion, obsessed with a woman he sculpted from ivory. Creating such a machine would seem like an unusual detour for OpenAI, founded a decade ago as a nonprofit dedicated to safely building better-than-human AI.

Altman said on a podcast in August that OpenAI has tried to resist the temptation to introduce products that could “juice growth or revenue” but be “very misaligned” with its long-term mission. Asked for a specific example, he gave one: “Well, we haven’t put a sexbot avatar in ChatGPT yet.”

Idaho-based startup Civitai, a platform for AI-generated art, learned the hard way that making money off mature AI won’t be an easy path.

“When we launched the site, it was an intentional choice to allow mature content,” said Justin Maier, the company’s co-founder and CEO, in an interview last year.

Backed by the prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has also invested in OpenAI, the Idaho startup was one of several that tried to capitalize on the sudden popularity of tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney that enabled people to type a description and conjure up almost any kind of image. Part of Stable Diffusion’s initial popularity was the ease with which it could generate a new kind of synthetic and highly customized pornography.

“What we had seen was that there was a lot of interest in mature content,” Maier said. Training these AI systems, known as models, on “mature themes actually made it so that these models were more capable of human anatomy and resulted in actually better models,” he said.

“We didn’t want to prevent the kind of growth that actually increased everything for the entire community, whether you were interested in mature content or Pixar,” Maier said. “So we allowed it early on and have always kind of had this battle of making it so that we can keep things filtered and safe, if that’s not what you’re interested in. We wanted to ultimately give the control to the user to decide what they would see on the site and what their experience would be.”

That also invited abuse. Civitai last year implemented new measures to detect and remove sexual images depicting children, but it remained a hub for AI-generated pornography, including fake images of celebrities. Confronting increasing pressure, including from payment processors and a new law against nonconsensual images signed by President Donald Trump, Civitai earlier this year blocked users from creating deepfake images of real people. Engagement dropped.

Another company that hasn’t shied away from mature content is Baltimore-based Nomi, though its founder and CEO Alex Cardinell said its companion chatbots are “strictly” for users over 18 and were never marketed to kids. They are also not designed for sex, though Cardinell said in an interview earlier this year that people who build platonic relationships with their chatbot might find it veering into a romantic one.

“It’s kind of very user-dependent for where they’re kind of missing the human gap in their life. And I think that’s different for everyone,” he said.

He declined to guess how many Nomi users are having erotic conversations with the chatbot, comparing it to real-life partners who might do “mature content things” for some part of their lives but “all sorts of other stuff together as well.”

“We’re not monitoring user conversations like that,” Cardinell said.

By AAMER MADHANI, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is set to host Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for talks at the White House on Friday, with the U.S. leader signaling he’s not ready to agree to sell Kyiv a long-range missile system that the Ukrainians say they desperately need.

Zelenskyy gets his one-on-one with Trump a day after the U.S. president and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a lengthy phone call to discuss the conflict.

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In recent days, Trump had shown an openness to selling Ukraine long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, even as Putin warned that such a move would further strain the U.S.-Russian relationship.

But following Thursday’s call with Putin, Trump appeared to downplay the prospects of Ukraine getting the missiles, which have a range of about 995 miles.

“We need Tomahawks for the United States of America too,” Trump said. “We have a lot of them, but we need them. I mean we can’t deplete our country.”

Zelenskyy had been seeking the weapons that would allow Ukrainian forces to strike deep into Russian territory and target key military sites, energy facilities and critical infrastructure. Zelenskyy has argued such strikes would help compel Putin to take Trump’s calls for direct negotiations to end the war more seriously.

But Putin warned Trump during the call that supplying Kyiv with the Tomahawks “won’t change the situation on the battlefield, but would cause substantial damage to the relationship between our countries,” according to Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said that talk of providing Tomahawks had already served a purpose by pushing Putin into talks. “The conclusion is that we need to continue with strong steps. Strength can truly create momentum for peace,” Sybiha said on the social platform X late Thursday.

Ukrainian officials have also indicated that Zelenskyy plans to appeal to Trump’s economic interests by aiming to discuss the possibility of energy deals with the U.S.

Zelenskyy is looking to offer to store American liquefied natural gas in Ukraine’s gas storage facilities, which would allow for American presence in the European energy market.

He previewed the strategy on Thursday in meetings with Energy Secretary Chris Wright and the heads of American energy companies, leading him to post on X that it is important to restore Ukraine’s energy infrastructure after Russian attacks and expand “the presence of American businesses in Ukraine.”

It will be the fourth face-to-face meeting for Trump and Zelenskyy since the Republican returned to office in January, and their second in less than a month.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy listens as High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas speaks during a news conference, Monday, Oct. 13, 2025, in Kyiv, Ukraine. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Trump announced following Thursday’s call with Putin that he would soon meet with the Russian leader in Budapest, Hungary, to discuss ways to end the war. The two also agreed that their senior aides, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, would meet next week at an unspecified location.

Fresh off brokering a ceasefire and hostage agreement between Israel and Hamas, Trump has said finding an endgame to the war in Ukraine is now his top foreign policy priority and has expressed new confidence about the prospects of getting it done.

Ahead of his call with Putin, Trump had shown signs of increased frustration with the Russian leader.

Last month, he announced that he believed Ukraine could win back all territory lost to Russia, a dramatic shift from the U.S. leader’s repeated calls for Kyiv to make concessions to end the war.

Trump, going back to his 2024 campaign, insisted he would quickly end the war, but his peace efforts appeared to stall following a diplomatic blitz in August, when he held a summit with Putin in Alaska and a White House meeting with Zelenskyy and European allies.

Trump emerged from those meetings certain he was on track to arranging direct talks between Zelenskyy and Putin. But the Russian leader hasn’t shown any interest in meeting with Zelenskyy and Moscow has only intensified its bombardment of Ukraine.

Trump, for his part, offered a notably more neutral tone about Ukraine following what he described a “very productive” call with Putin.

He also hinted that negotiations between Putin and Zelenskyy might be have to be conducted indirectly.

“They don’t get along too well those two,” Trump said. “So we may do something where we’re separate. Separate but equal.”

By SAFIYAH RIDDLE, Associated Press/Report for America

Big crowds of protesters are expected Saturday in thousands of places around the U.S. in opposition to what some are characterizing as increasingly authoritarian practices by President Donald Trump.

It’s the second “No Kings” protest and third mass movement against the administration this year, and it comes amid an intensifying conflict between federal law enforcement and protesters nationwide.

Some conservative politicians have condemned the protests as “Hate America” rallies, while others say that it represents a “patriotic” fight for First Amendment rights.

Here is what to expect on Saturday.

Organizers aim to boost political engagement

Ezra Levin, a leading organizer of Saturday’s protests, said the demonstrations are a response to what he called Trump’s “crackdown on First Amendment rights.”

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Levin, the co-executive director of the nonprofit Indivisible, pointed to Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown, his unprecedented promises to use federal power to influence midterm elections, restrictions on press freedom and retribution against political opponents.

He said those steps cumulatively represented a direct threat to constitutionally protected rights.

Protests are planned for more than 2,500 locations nationwide — from the country’s largest city, New York, to small unincorporated, rural communities like East Glacier Ridge, Montana, with roughly 300 residents.

Organizers will consider the day a success, Levin said, if people are galvanized to become more politically involved on an ongoing basis.

Mostly peaceful protest in June

The last “No Kings” protest took place on June 14 in thousands of cities and towns across the country, in large part to protest a military parade in Washington that marked the Army’s 250th anniversary and coincided with Trump’s birthday. “No Kings” organizers at the time called the parade “coronation” that was symbolic of what they characterized as Trump’s growing authoritarian overreach.

Confrontations were isolated and the protests were largely peaceful.

Police in Los Angeles, where protests over federal immigration enforcement raids erupted the week prior and sparked demonstrations across the country, used tear gas and crowd-control munitions to clear out protesters after the formal event ended. Officers in Portland also fired tear gas and projectiles to disperse a crowd that protested in front of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building well into the evening.

One protester was killed during the Salt Lake City march in June. A safety volunteer shot at a person allegedly pointing a rifle at demonstrators, but inadvertently struck and killed protester Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, a beloved fashion designer.

Utah organizers focus on healing

Four months later, no one has been charged. Experts have said state gun laws may shield both the shooter and the man who brandished a rifle but didn’t fire shots.

Jamie Carter, an organizer of Saturday’s rally, said Utah activists considered not participating in this round of “No Kings” demonstrations, but “we also felt that we really had to get back out there.”

Organizers are not affiliated with the groups who put on the June demonstration that turned deadly. Safety volunteers will be present but unarmed, and all have received de-escalation training, said Carter, of Salt Lake Indivisible. Attendees have been asked not to bring weapons.

“We really want this to be a very uplifting, happy event of people coming together in a community to kind of try to erase and replace some of the bad memories,” she said.

Concerns about large political demonstrations remain heightened in Utah, where conservative activist Charlie Kirk was also assassinated during a speaking event last month.

Crackdown on protests

Trump’s crackdown against protests, especially in Democratic cities, has intensified since the June marches. He has since sent National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., and Memphis, Tenn. His efforts to deploy troops to Chicago and Portland, Oregon, have stalled in federal court.

Organizers in Chicago are expecting tens of thousands of demonstrators at a popular Lake Michigan park, followed by a downtown march.

Federal immigration agents have arrested more than 1,000 people in Chicago, the nation’s third largest city, with increasingly aggressive tactics since September. Protests have been frequent and well attended in recent weeks, and have boiled over in intense clashes outside a suburban federal immigration processing center.

“People are angrier. It feels so much more immediate,” said Denise Poloyac with Indivisible Chicago. “They’re very concerned about what’s happening in Chicago and around the country.”

The “No Kings” organizers have led numerous virtual safety trainings leading up to the protests with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is listed as an official partner on the “No Kings” website.

The trainings informed viewers about their rights during protests — such as whether you are required to carry ID or if wearing a mask is allowed (both vary according to each state) — and emphasized de-escalation techniques for encounters with law enforcement.

Each official protest has a safety plan, which includes designated medics and emergency meeting spots.

Mixed response from elected officials

The protests have already drawn swift condemnation from some of the country’s top politicians, with House Speaker Mike Johnson dubbing the event the “Hate America rally” at a news conference on Wednesday.

Some state leaders, like Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, have decided to activate the National Guard ahead of the protests.

“Texas will deter criminal mischief and work with local law enforcement to arrest anyone engaging in acts of violence or damaging property,” Abbott said in a statement.

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom struck a more optimistic tone, saying he hopes Californians turn out in large numbers and remain peaceful. He said Trump “hopes there is disruption, there’s some violence” that he can exploit.

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City; Christopher Weber in Los Angeles; Juan A. Lozano in Houston, Texas; Terry Chea in San Francisco; and Sophia Tareen in Chicago.