this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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191
Character.ai Faces Lawsuit After Teen’s Suicide (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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

The chatbot was actually pretty irresponsible about a lot of things, looks like. As in, it doesn’t respond the right way to mentions of suicide and tries to convince the person using it that it’s a real person.

This guy made an account to try it out for himself, and yikes: https://youtu.be/FExnXCEAe6k?si=oxqoZ02uhsOKbbSF