An image of a mailer city residents received from Mayor Kathy Sheehan’s office before the June 2025 Democratic primary. Sheehan is not running for reelection.

In one of the stranger responses I’ve seen from an elected official, Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan ran a recent column of mine through ChatGPT and blasted out an email containing its “thoughts.”

Why anyone should care what ChatGPT “thinks” is a relevant question, but the mayor seems to consider artificial intelligence an impartial arbiter. Sheehan says she turned to ChatGPT because she was “curious about what was really going on beneath all that mockery” and found the result “kind of eye-opening.”

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The column in question was about a taxpayer-funded mailer Sheehan sent out to residents of Albany (and, I’ve heard, quite a few in Colonie) touting achievements of her 12 years in office.

I didn’t think what I wrote was mocking. But I did question some of Sheehan’s claims and the timing of the mailer, titled “Twelve Years of Transformation,” which could be taken as an attempt to boost Sheehan-backed candidates ahead of last week’s Democratic primary.

So, what did ChatGPT say? Turns out, there’s more than one answer to that question.

For the mayor, the chatbot apparently spat out a decidedly........

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