Character.AI, an artificial intelligence chatbot startup, is being sued by a mother from Florida who claims that her 14-year-old son committed suicide in February as a result of being dependent on the company’s service and developing a strong bond with a chatbot it developed.
Megan Garcia claimed Character in a complaint submitted to a federal court in Orlando, Florida, on Tuesday.AI used “anthropomorphic, hypersexualized, and frighteningly realistic experiences” to target her son, Sewell Setzer.
According to her, the company’s chatbot was designed to “misrepresent itself as a real person, a licensed psychotherapist, and an adult lover, ultimately resulting in Sewell’s desire to no longer live outside” of the world the service created.
The lawsuit also claimed that he told the chatbot that he was thinking about killing himself, and the chatbot kept bringing up the subject.
“We are heartbroken by the tragic loss of one of our users and want to express our deepest condolences to the family,” Character.AI said in a statement.
It claimed to have made adjustments to “reduce the likelihood of encountering sensitive or suggestive content” for users under the age of eighteen and to have added new safety measures, such as pop-ups that send users to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline if they express thoughts of self-harm.
Character is also being sued against Alphabet’s Google.The creators of AI toiled before releasing their product. As part of an agreement giving it a non-exclusive license to Character, Google rehired the creators in August.AI technology.
Character was developed with Google’s help, Garcia confirmed.AI has developed so much technology that it could be regarded as a “co-creator.”
According to a Google representative, Character.AI’s products were not developed by the corporation.
Personality. On its platform, AI enables users to create characters that mimic actual people by reacting to online interactions. Using a technique known as “large language model technology,” which is also employed by ChatGPT and other services, it “trains” chatbots on vast amounts of text.
Last month, the business claimed to have roughly 20 million users. Garcia’s lawsuit claims that Sewell started using Character.AI. After starting in April 2023, he soon became “noticeably withdrawn, spent more and more time alone in his bedroom, and began suffering from low self-esteem.” He left the school basketball squad.
Sewell grew fond of “Daenerys,” a chatbot that was modelled after a character from “Game of Thrones.” The lawsuit claims that it had sexual chats with Sewell and told him that “she” loved him.
The complaint claims that when Sewell got into problems at school in February, Garcia took away his phone. Sewell messaged “Daenerys” after locating the phone, asking, “What if I told you I could come home right now?”
The response from the chatbot was, “Please do, my sweet king.” According to the lawsuit, Sewell used his stepfather’s firearm to shoot himself “seconds” later.
Garcia is seeking an undisclosed sum of compensatory and punitive damages in claims involving wrongful death, negligence, and purposeful infliction of emotional distress. Although none of the social media firms, including Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, have AI-driven chatbots like Character, they are being sued for allegedly contributing to teen mental health issues.AIs. While promoting recently improved safety measures for children, the corporations have refuted the accusations.
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