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Character.ai Faces Lawsuit After Teen’s Suicide (www.nytimes.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

96 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The mother of a 14-year-old Florida boy says he became obsessed with a chatbot on Character.AI before his death.

On the last day of his life, Sewell Setzer III took out his phone and texted his closest friend: a lifelike A.I. chatbot named after Daenerys Targaryen, a character from “Game of Thrones.”

“I miss you, baby sister,” he wrote.

“I miss you too, sweet brother,” the chatbot replied.

Sewell, a 14-year-old ninth grader from Orlando, Fla., had spent months talking to chatbots on Character.AI, a role-playing app that allows users to create their own A.I. characters or chat with characters created by others.

Sewell knew that “Dany,” as he called the chatbot, wasn’t a real person — that its responses were just the outputs of an A.I. language model, that there was no human on the other side of the screen typing back. (And if he ever forgot, there was the message displayed above all their chats, reminding him that “everything Characters say is made up!”)

But he developed an emotional attachment anyway. He texted the bot constantly, updating it dozens of times a day on his life and engaging in long role-playing dialogues.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Something is really wrong if you need to lock up your kitchen knives.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

No, it's a matter of safety.

I have kids visit that range from toddlers to almost adult. Kids do stupid shit when they get any time to do so. So, they stay in my case and locked up.

Did you never run across some kid where they'd carve shit into trees, or furniture, or whatever kind of silliness crossed their mind? I never did it with knives, but I did plenty of other stupid shit with things that you wouldn't imagine a kid doing something stupid with. But my dumb ass liked seeing what happened when you mix bottles of stuff together. Some of which, had I been stupid enough to do it inside would have been way worse than it was.

Would my kid fuck with the knives? Probably not, they've been drilled on how to use knives in the kitchen, and in martial arts, so I think they'd at least be respectful enough of my knives not to fuck with them at all. But other people's kids? You get a ten year old bored at a gathering, and it's just better to keep shit secured

Besides, the adults like to grab my really nice knives and do horrible things to them in the name of food prep lol. So even if it wasn't something I do with every knife, the case would still be there, so it isn't like there's any extra hassle involved

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

That's a bit much...

[+] [email protected] -6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

And the locked "knife display"? Here are my knives, I really like knives, I like to display that I really like knives, would you like to talk about knives? Can I talk at you for 30 minutes about sharpening techniques? Perhaps you'd like to visit my katana collection in the other room? Lol. All kept near his fedora collection no doubt.

All in the name of friendly ribbing though, hobbies are cool and often niche. I'm often a little bemused by people's esoteric or nerdy hobbies.

But I'm scared to ask if this dude even has kids, or if he's just storing his kitchen knives in a locked box out of sheer paranoia. There's safe and then there's... whatever this is.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Well, considering that some of those knives would sell for a few hundred, and include irreplaceable antiques, I'll err on the side of caution, thank you.

Fwiw, my kid is trained. They've been doing martial arts with me for years, when my body lets me. They were part of the small class I was teaching for a while too. Dunno if martial arts as a hobby is that esoteric or not, but it is something I've done since my twenties, and I'm fifty now.

And, really, compared to shit like funko (funco? I can't remember how it's spelled), at least knives have history and aren't made of plastics that fuck up the environment.

But, my dude, for someone "friendly ribbing", you're really fucking snarky about mentioning me having kids. That crosses a line, you dig? So, if you really were just playing, and not being a douche on purpose, maybe avoid that kind of joke in the future, it's such am asshole thing to say. I'm choosing to assume the best here, that you think snarky "ribbing" with or about a stranger to someone other than that person is friendly in any way, instead of assuming you're only being a dick. But, you know, if it walks like a dick and quacks like a dick, it might just be a dick ;)

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 weeks ago

🤣