Technology

59982 readers

3936 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

191

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

submitted 1 month ago by Stopthatgirl7 to c/technology

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month 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