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

submitted 1 month 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] 11 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.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's just a matter of degrees. There could be a song or a book that is so impactful, it changes your whole life.

Further, it feels like a Pandora's box issue. If media is responsible for the actions of the user, then it won't stop with ai bots.

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

A song or book isn't directly interacting with you and responding to your input.

Even interactive media like a video game gives you specific choices to make that it is programmed to respond to, they do not generate a unique response to a unique input made by you.

AI chatbots aren't like those forms of media, at all, and trying to bundle them together for convenience is ridiculously short-sighted.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Well I guess we disagree. Blaming content for human actions is ignoring the real problem, imo. It shoves off responsibility to the "artist"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

More we disagree that AI chatbots and what they generate should be considered content in the first place.

It's content in the sense that a person is viewing the output, but what is effectively just an advanced predictive text system it is not the same as an AI generating a picture based on a prompt. There is no "artist" with an AI chatbot, even less of an "artist" than AI generated imagery.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 month ago

That's... Not how llms work. Ai generating a picture from a prompt is the exact same mechanics as an interactive chat. They are fundamentallly the same thing . The image and the text ai response are both created via a prompt, and many image ai tools already have an ongoing multi part prompt history just like a chat. (Additive prompt)

It's just a difference of degrees: the chat just consumes more frequent prompts and generates different, "quicker" outputs.