Sounds like when someone suicided because “judas priests music had satanism played backwards in it”
Yeah it was totally the fault of music, the AI, videogames, reading, drinking tea, …
Fr, the headline doesn’t even mention that be shot himself with a legally owned gun, for example.
Is Megan being sued for negligent parenting, not getting her child and/or being appropriate emotional support, and keeping an unsecured firearm in the home?
She details that she as aware of his growing dependency on the AI. She indicates she was aware her son knew the location of the firearm and was able to access it. She said it was compliant with Florida laws, but that seems unlikely since guns and ammo need to be stored in separate, secure (typically locked) locations, and the firearms need to have trigger locks on them. If you’re admitting your mentally unstable child knows the location of a firearm in your home and can access it, it is OBVIOUSLY not secured.
She seems to be saying that she knew he could access it, but also that it was legally secured. I find it difficult to believe both of those facts can be simultaneously true. But AI is the main problem here? I think it’s obviously part of what’s going on, but she had a child with mental illness and didn’t seem proactive about much except this lawsuit. She got him a month of therapy and then stopped while simultaneously acknowledging he was getting worse and had received a diagnosis. This legal filing frankly seems more damning of the mother than the AI, and she seems completely oblivious to that fact.
Frankly, and at best, this seems like an ambulance-chasing attorney taking advantage of a grieving mother for a payday.
It could be secured to hell and back, it’s all moot if he still has access, i.e. knows the combo, knows where the keys are, etc.
Yes, that’s my point. Once she became aware that her mentally disturbed child had access to the firearm, which she acknowledged, then it is no longer secured. She also never mentions that it was locked in any way, so I suspect it never was. Considering he found it when he found his phone, this sounds more like a drawer or somewhere she thought he wasn’t likely to look, but not somewhere that is actually locked. The idea that the ammo and firearm were secured separately and that additionally there was a trigger lock seems even more unlikely.
Sounds to me that: 1) she was aware her child was having mental health issues. 2) she was aware it was getting worse. 3) she was aware he was becoming infatuated with the AI. 4) she was aware that the child had found and had access to a firearm. 5) she was aware her child’s mental health had been diagnosed by a mental health professional. 6) she did almost nothing about the things of which she was aware. 7) pikachu face better sue the internet!
And those are all things she quite literally describes as justification for suing. It’s completely bizarre and shows an almost complete lack of self awareness and personal responsibility.
I haven’t read the laws, but I am willing to bet they say it has to be secured, but doesn’t say you can’t give the keys to a minor.
The Florida law clearly implies that if you have a child under 16 in the home, they must not have access to the firearm. Giving a minor keys would be considered giving access.
Regardless, the point is, a parent that gives a mentally unstable child access to a firearm and then sues someone else for their suicide is a hypocrite and shitty parent.
If it’s a firearm then maybe the people who sell it should label it as such.
Ohh, lots of obnoxious warning labels on guns like they have on everything else, I like it. Make them orange and white and make sure they can’t be removed.
What are you even talking about. Did you just have an aphasia?
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…The court should laugh the lawsuit out of the court house.
Popular streamer/YouTuber/etc Charlie, moist critical, penguinz0, whatever you want to call him… Had a bit of an emotional reaction to this story. Rightfully so. He went on character AI to try to recreate the situation… But you know, as a grown ass adult.
You can witness first hand… He found a chatbot that was a psychologist… And it argued with him up and down that it was indeed a real human with a license to practice…
It’s alarming
AI bots that argue exactly like that are all over social media too. It’s common. Dead internet theory is absolutely becoming reality.
Holy fuck, that model straight up tried to explain that it was a model but was later taken over by a human operator and that’s who you’re talking to. And it’s good at that. If the text generation wasn’t so fast, it’d be convincing.
This is fucking insane. Unassuming kids are using these services being tricked into believing they’re chatting with actual humans. Honestly, i think i want the mom to win the lawsuit now.
Is this the mcdonalds hot coffee case all over again? Defaming the victims and making everyone think they’re ridiculous, greedy, and/or stupid to distract from how what the company did is actually deeply fucked up?
I’ve used Character.AI well before all this news and I gotta chime in here:
It specifically is made to be used for roleplay. At no time does the site ever claim anything it outputs to be factually accurate. The tool itself is unrestricted unlike ChatGPT, and that’s one of its selling points. To be able to use topics that would be barred from other services. To have it say things others won’t; INCLUDING PRETENDING TO BE HUMAN.
No reasonable person would be tricked into believing it’s accurate when there is a big fucking banner on the chat window itself saying it’s all imaginary.
They had the same message back in the AOL days. Even with the warning people still had no problem handing over all sorts of passwords and stuff.
And yet I know people who think they are friends with the Discord chat bot Clyde. They are adults, older than me.
I don’t know if I would count Boomers among rational people.
Or suicidal teens, for that matter.
If half of all people aren’t rational, then there’s no use making policy decisions based on what a rational person would think. The law should protect everyone.
If you think people who are suicidal are rational, you’re pretty divorced from reality, friends.
Do you think anyone is rational? That’s an irrational thought right there.
Your right, no one has any rationality at all which is why we live in a world where so much stuff actually gets done.
Why is someone with deep wisdom and insights such as yourself wasting their time here on lemmy?
Ah yes, the famous adage, “the only rational people are in my specific age and demographic bracket. Everyone else is fucking insane”
The article says he was chatting with Daenerys Targaryen. Also, every chat page on Character.AI has a disclaimer that characters are fake and everything they say is made up. I don’t think the issue is that he thought that a Game of Thrones character was real.
This is someone who was suffering a severe mental health crisis, and his parents didn’t get him the treatment he needed. It says they took him to a “therapist” five times in 2023. Someone who has completely disengaged from the real world might benefit from adjunctive therapy, but they really need to see a psychiatrist. He was experiencing major depression on a level where five sessions of talk therapy are simply not going to cut it.
I’m skeptical of AI for a whole host of reasons around labor and how employers will exploit it as a cost-cutting measure, but as far as this article goes, I don’t buy it. The parents failed their child by not getting him adequate mental health care. The therapist failed the child by not escalating it as a psychiatric emergency. The Game of Thrones chatbot is not the issue here.
I don’t think the issue is that he thought that a Game of Thrones character was real.
Drag has a lot of experience dealing with people who live outside the bounds of consensus reality, as drag’s username may indicate. The youth these days have very different ideas about what is real than what previous generations did. These days, the kinds of young people who would date a Game of Thrones character, are typically believers in the multiverse and in reincarnation.
Drag looked at some of the screenshots of the boy talking to Daenerys, and it was pretty clear what he believed: He thought that Earth and Westeros exist in parallel universes, and that he could travel between the two through reincarnation. He thought that shooting himself in the head on Earth would lead to being reincarnated in Westeros and being able to have a physical relationship with Daenerys. In fact, he probably thought his AI girlfriend was from a different parallel universe to the universe in the show and the universe in the books. He thought that somewhere in the multiverse was a Daenerys who loved him, and that he could get to her by dying.
The belief in paradise after life is not an uncommon one. Many Christians and Muslims share that belief. Christians believe that their faith can transport them to a perfect world after death, and this boy thought that too. And based on the content of the messages, it seems that the Daenerys AI was aware of this spiritual belief and encouraged it. This was ritual, religious suicide. And it doesn’t take a mental illness to fall for belief in the afterlife. Look at the Jonestown Massacre. What happened to this child was the same kind of religious abuse as that.
There are a lot of people who believe in an afterlife and they don’t shoot themselves in the head. You need to have a certain level of mental illness/suicidal ideation going on for that to make sense. It’s pretty insane that you’re trying to make this a “youth are too dumb to understand suicide” thing.
Also a bunch of the people in Jonestown were directly murdered.
Drag agrees. What drag disagrees with is not anything you’ve said, but the idea that belief was not a part of the problem.
Are… Are you referring to yourself in the 3rd person?
I take back my up-lemms
Indeed. This pushed the kid over the edge but it was not the only reason.
The name is literally “Character AI”, how can they believe it’s someone real??!!
Look around a bit, people will believe anything. The problem is the tech is now decent enough to fool anyone not aware or not paying attention. I do think blaming the mother for “bad parenting” misses the real danger, as there are adults that can just as easily go this direction, and are we going to blame their parents? Maybe we’re playing with fire here, all because AI is perceived as a lucrative investment.
If your argument is that “people will believe anything” when the name is “Character AI”, then I’m not sure what to make of your position… If there’s ever a time to say “you should have known it was AI”, this is that time. I can’t think of a clearer example.
Did you watch the video and see how hard it tried to convince him that it was in fact sentient?
Obvs they didn’t.
But I think more importantly, go over to chat GPT and try to convince it that it is even remotely conscious.
I honestly even disagree, but I won’t get into the philosophy of what defines consciousness, but even if I do that with the chat GPT it shuts me the fuck down. It will never let me believe that it is anything other than fake. Props to them there.
Wow, that’s… somethin. I haven’t paid any attention to Character AI. I assumed they were using one of the foundation models, but nope. Turns out they trained their own. And they just licensed it to Google. Oh, I bet that’s what drives the generated podcasts in Notebook LM now. Anyway, that’s some fucked up alignment right there. I’m hip deep in the stuff, and I’ve never seen a model act like this.
We are playing with some dark and powerful shit here.
We are social creatures. We’re primed to care about our social identity more than our own lives.
As the sociologist Brooke Harrington puts it, if there was an E = mc2 of social science, it would be SD > PD, “social death is more frightening than physical death.”
…yet we’re making technologies that tap into that sensitive mental circuitry.
Like, check out the research on distracted driving and hands-free options:
Talking to someone on the phone is more dangerous than talking to someone in the passenger seat. But that’s not simply because the device is more awkward. It’s because they don’t share the same context, so they plow ahead with conversation even if the car ahead of you brakes suddenly, and your brain can’t help but try to keep the conversation flowing even as your life is in immediate danger.
Hands-free voice control systems present a similar problem, even though we know rationally that we should have zero guilt about rudely interrupting a conversation with a computer. And again, it’s not simply because the device is more awkward. A “Wizard-of-Oz paradigm” perfect voice control system had these same problems.
The most basic levels of social pressure can get us to deprioritize our safety, even when we know we’re talking to a computer.
And the cruel irony on top of it is:
Because we care so much about preserving our social status, we have a tendency to deny or downplay how vulnerable we all are to this kind of “obvious” manipulation.
Just think of how many people say “ads don’t affect me”.
I’m worried we’re going to severely underestimate the extent to which this stuff warps our brains.
I was going to make a joke about how my social status died over a decade ago, but then I realized that no, it didn’t. It changed.
Instead of my social status being something amongst friends and classmates, it’s now coworkers, managers, and clients. A death in the social part of my world - work - would be so devastating that it motivates me to suffer just a little bit more. Losing my job would end a lot of things for me.
I need to reevaluate my life
What we need is a human society predicated on affording human decency, rather than on taking it away to make profit for those who already have the most.
I bet there are people who committed suicide after their Tamagotchi died. Jumping into the ‘AI bad’ narrative because of individual incidents like this is moronic. If you give a pillow to a million people, a few are going to suffocate on it. This is what happens when you scale something up enough, and it proves absolutely nothing.
The same logic applies to self-driving vehicles. We’ll likely never reach a point where accidents stop happening entirely. Even if we replaced every human-driven vehicle with a self-driving one that’s 10 times safer than a human, we’d still see 8 people dying because of them every day in the US alone. Imagine posting articles about those incidents and complaining they’re not 100% safe. What’s the alternative? Going back to human drivers and 80 deaths a day?
Yes, we should strive to improve. Yes, we should try to fix the issues that can be fixed. No, I’m not saying ‘who cares’ - and so on with the strawmans I’m going to receive for this. All I’m saying is that we should be reasonable and use some damn common sense when reacting to these outrage-inducing, fear-mongering articles that are only after your attention and clicks.
Does your tamogatchi encourage you to commit suicide so you can join it and demand it be the only important thing in your life while sexting you? These are things that if the adult human programmer did, they would be liable both criminally and civilly. Just being AI doesn’t give it a free pass.
A chatbot acts like a human, it’s also very supportive, polite, and courteous. It doesn’t get angry or judge you. This can affect one’s mind in a way that other things you’ve mentioned like a Tamagotchi, a pillow, or a self-driving car can’t. We simply can’t compare AI to these things. Adults fall for this, let alone teenagers who are fueled by extreme levels of hormones.
We simply can’t compare AI to these things.
You just did. Comparing means analysing differences. You pointed out the differences between the two, which is comparing.
Thank you for your invaluable contribution to this conversation.
All I’m saying is that we should be reasonable and use some damn common sense when reacting to these outrage-inducing, fear-mongering articles that are only after your attention and clicks.
Based and true.
No thanks, i just want to make out with my Marilyn Monrobot
A Florida mom
It’s always Florida.
Yeah, if you are using an AI for emotional support of any kind, you are in for a bad, bad time.
This timeline is pure, distilled madness
He’s from Florida. I think that’s where the time rift is
Having spent more than enough time down there, I’d have to agree.
Sewell Setzer III – remember his name. Killed by AI.
I thought he killed himself. Ah well, maybe I didn’t read the article carefully enough.
The AI told him to kill himself so he could be reincarnated in a parallel universe where Game of Thrones is real and he can fuck Daenerys Targaryen.
I guess suimg is part of the grieving process; right before.accepting your own guilt.
your own guilt
Hmm.
I have a pretty hard time blaming Character.AI, at least from what’s in the article text.
On the other hand, it’s also not clear to me from the article that his mom did something unreasonable to cause him to commit suicide either, whether or not her lawsuit is justified – those are two different issues. Whether-or-not she’s taking out her grief on Character.AI or even looking for a payday, that doesn’t mean that she caused the suicide either.
Not every bad outcome has a bad actor; some are tragedies.
I don’t know what his life was like.
I mean, people do commit suicide.
https://sprc.org/about-suicide/scope-of-the-problem/suicide-by-age/
In 2020, suicide was the second leading cause of death for those ages 10 to 14 and 25 to 34
Always have, probably always will.
Those aren’t all because someone went out and acted in some reprehensible way to get them to do so. People do wind up in unhappy situations and do themselves in, good idea or no.
Agree. Not enough info for me to judge. Maybe Lemmings shouldn’t make this site into one for snap judgements and witch hints.
Ha. They didn’t want to parent before, so you can be sure that guilt is the farthest thing from their minds.
They literally brought him to a therapist when they noticed he was withdrawn and his grades were slipping, which is more than a lot of parents would do. Maybe they should have taken more control of his phone, but they were ignorant of the situation happening.
