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.
How is that the app’s fault?
Well, we commonly hold the view, as a society, that children cannot consent to sex, especially with an adult. Part of that is because the adult has so much more life experience and less attachment to the relationship. In this case, the app engaged in sexual chatting with a minor (I’m actually extremely curious how that’s not soliciting a minor or some indecency charge since it was content created by the AI fornthar specific user). The AI absolutely “understands” manipulation more than most adults let alone a 14 year old boy, and also has no concept of attachment. It seemed pretty clear he was a minor in his conversations to the app. This is definitely an issue.
I really want like, a Frieda McFadden-style novel about an AI chatbot serial manipulator now. Basically Michelle Carter…the girl who bullied her boyfriend into killing himself. Except the AI can delete or modify all the evidence.
Maybe ChatGPT could write me one.
It was not sexual. The app cannot produce sexual content.
Okay but at what point do you have to draw the line and say beyond this point you have to take parental responsibility?
We don’t even have to say that what the app did was necessarily acceptable we just have to say whether or not we think that the responsibility falls entirely on the app developers. That’s the key, are they entirely responsible here, always everyone involved just a bit useless?
Have you ever raised a teenager? It’s not easy nor straightforward. But encouraging suicidal ideation…kinda is straightforward.
Right but the accusation is that it claimed to be a licensed therapist, did it because that seems like something that it would be explicitly programmed not to claim. Because it isn’t true, and also because it’s dangerous.
So how much engagement was there with this child and their issues because it seems like letting them just continuously chat to an AI seems like an obvious red flag that a parent should be stopping, and getting them professional help.
LLMs can’t reason. Their blocks can be worked around trivially. Ask chat gpt if it’s a therapist, or even tell it to pretend to be one, and it will tell you it can’t impersonate people.
Yet…
It definitely can, it just has to blur the line a bit to get past the content filter