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 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.

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[–] halcyoncmdr 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

When has other media been "grossly negligent" or generally responsible for the acts of the consumers?

Other forms of media don't act like a literal human and engage in back and forth conversation in an identical format as if you were texting a friend.

If the content of the AI messages would be an issue coming from another human, it should be an issue coming from the AI. We can't control what another person does, they are responsible for that, but we can and should control how an AI chatbot can respond and interact.