This reminds me, for his short story "Dolan's Cadillac", Stephen King claims -- perhaps exaggerating a bit -- he did the real research on how to murder a person as described in the story. How to dig the hole, what measures, what the falling rate of a car that size would be, etc, etc. He claims he fuzzied the details a bit because he didn't want to teach readers how to actually do it (again, maybe he's exaggerating a bit to promote his story).

Imagine if, instead of a friend, he had asked an AI chatbot. Would he have been reported to the police?

Aren't our private thoughts just that, private?

I get that a cloud-hosted AI chatbot is, to tech-savvy people, immediately "not private", but a lot of people don't understand this. What if Stephen King was talking to his friend about planning the murder, and his phone was listening? What if he was typing it up in MS Word and the program decided to phone home and report him to the police?