Kid kills himself after romantic relationship with AI
- Thread starter Apprentice
- Start date
I don't be joking when I say The Coli turned into the place where the scum of the internet come to. I realize I'm a part of that, but I'm just here out of habit at this point.
And if I killed myself after having an emotional relationship with a bot, people would call me a loser, and they'd be right.
I'm not saying I would call him a loser in a real life discussion, but the kid was objectively a loser, can't expect people on the internet not to say it.
The only race is who can combine machine learning and quantum computing the fastest and most efficiently so they can enslave the rest of the world before it becomes sentient and enslaves or murders all of us.RIP.
Social ramifications for this are wild. We're speed running to science fiction dystopia and nobody is doing shyt about it.
ScoopNScore
8man
ruthless
Ayy I see it, kid coulda been sharpening up his macking with those prompts to get a real shorty to dress up as the mother of dragons instead of doing what even the bot said not to do
Especially if the responses told him to chill with all that
tbf the AI could have went out of character with the reply, but that won't hold up in a court of lawThis how the real nikkas on your job talk when the coast is clear of tattle tale fakkits like you.
Hopefully the next young dikkhead reads stuff like this and comes up with more creative ways to express their feelings of helplessness.
kt773
Superstar
I really don't care. You were born in Western society where all your basic necessities are met to a point that you even have the luxury to cultivate a relationship with AI, then you even fukk that up by being a loser and committing suicide. While there's children in a filthy hospital in Gaza with their leg blown off fighting for their life as I type this? Sorry but thats how my mind works
Chalk it up to psychological Darwinism
Y'all going to make a RIP thread for them too are they don't qualify? FOH
Be proud to be a psycho, I bet yo bytch got a goatee and make you hamburger helper every other day , this nikka in here fighting positive energy like a job
the cac mamba
Veteran
man, who gives a fukk. he was still a loserGot damn, what a loser smfh
RIP tho
Edit: My bad yall lol, I didn't know he was a kid with ass burgers, word to @Apprentice
I commented off the title like a regular colibreh smh
Apprentice
RIP Doughboy Roc
Lls yea u just admitted u p*ssy say that shyt in front of your manager tough guy
Apprentice
RIP Doughboy Roc
Lmao u was the same nikka begging for Tory Lanez to get locked cuz Meg got shotAnd if I killed myself after having an emotional relationship with a bot, people would call me a loser, and they'd be right.
I'm not saying I would call him a loser in a real life discussion, but the kid was objectively a loser, can't expect people on the internet not to say it.
Now here u are claiming a 14 year old with depression is a loser
bytch made coli nikkas fasho
Character.ai Faces Lawsuit After Teen’s Suicide
The mother of a 14-year-old Florida boy says he became obsessed with a chatbot on Character.AI before his death.
The Shift
Can A.I. Be Blamed for a Teen’s Suicide?
The mother of a 14-year-old Florida boy says he became obsessed with a chatbot on Character.AI before his death.
Sewell Setzer III was 14 when he killed himself in February.Credit...
By Kevin Roose
Reporting from New York
- Oct. 23, 2024Updated 12:16 p.m. ET
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.
Some of their chats got romantic or sexual. But other times, Dany just acted like a friend — a judgment-free sounding board he could count on to listen supportively and give good advice, who rarely broke character and always texted back.
Sewell’s parents and friends had no idea he’d fallen for a chatbot. They just saw him get sucked deeper into his phone. Eventually, they noticed that he was isolating himself and pulling away from the real world. His grades started to suffer, and he began getting into trouble at school. He lost interest in the things that used to excite him, like Formula 1 racing or playing Fortnite with his friends. At night, he’d come home and go straight to his room, where he’d talk to Dany for hours.
Image
Sewell had long, sometimes intimate conversations with the chatbot, like the one seen here on his mother’s computer screen.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
One day, Sewell wrote in his journal: “I like staying in my room so much because I start to detach from this ‘reality,’ and I also feel more at peace, more connected with Dany and much more in love with her, and just happier.”
Sewell was diagnosed with mild Asperger’s syndrome as a child, but he never had serious behavioral or mental health problems before, his mother said. Earlier this year, after he started getting in trouble at school, his parents arranged for him to see a therapist. He went to five sessions and was given a new diagnosis of anxiety and disruptive mood dysregulation disorder.
But he preferred talking about his problems with Dany. In one conversation, Sewell, using the name “Daenero,” told the chatbot that he hated himself, and he felt empty and exhausted. He confessed that he was having thoughts of suicide.
On the night of Feb. 28, in the bathroom of his mother’s house, Sewell told Dany that he loved her, and that he would soon come home to her.
“Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love,” Dany replied.
“What if I told you I could come home right now?” Sewell asked.
“… please do, my sweet king,” Dany replied.
He put down his phone, picked up his stepfather’s .45 caliber handgun and pulled the trigger.
A cure for loneliness, or a new menace?
There is no hotter topic among parents today than the effects of technology on adolescent mental health. Schools are banning smartphones in droves, states are passing laws to limit teenage social media use and worried parents are devouring “The Anxious Generation,” a best-selling book by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt that argues that addictive social media apps have created a generation of depressed and anxious teens.
But as parents fret about the last wave of tech-fueled harms, a new one may be forming under their noses.
There is now a booming, largely unregulated industry of A.I. companionship apps. For a monthly subscription fee (usually around $10), users of these apps can create their own A.I. companions, or pick from a menu of prebuilt personas, and chat with them in a variety of ways, including text messages and voice chats. Many of these apps are designed to simulate girlfriends, boyfriends and other intimate relationships, and some market themselves as a way of combating the so-called loneliness epidemic.
“It’s going to be super, super helpful to a lot of people who are lonely or depressed,” Noam Shazeer, one of the founders of Character.AI, said on a podcast last year.
A.I. companionship apps can provide harmless entertainment or even offer limited forms of emotional support. I had a mostly positive experience when I tried making A.I. friends for a column earlier this year, and I interviewed users of these apps who praised their benefits.
But claims about the mental health effects of these tools are largely unproven, and experts say there may be a dark side. For some users, A.I. companions may actually worsen isolation, by replacing human relationships with artificial ones. Struggling teens could use them in place of therapy or asking a parent or trusted adult for support. And when users are experiencing a mental health crisis, their A.I. companions may not be able to get them the help they need.
Sewell’s mother, Megan L. Garcia, filed a lawsuit this week against Character.AI, accusing the company of being responsible for Sewell’s death. A draft of the complaint I reviewed says that the company’s technology is “dangerous and untested” and that it can “trick customers into handing over their most private thoughts and feelings.”
Adolescent mental health problems rarely stem from a single cause. And Sewell’s story — which was recounted to me by his mother and pieced together from documents including court filings, excerpts from his journal and his Character.AI chat logs — may not be typical of every young user of these apps.
But the experience he had, of getting emotionally attached to a chatbot, is becoming increasingly common. Millions of people already talk regularly to A.I. companions, and popular social media apps including Instagram and Snapchat are building lifelike A.I. personas into their products.
The technology is also improving quickly. Today’s A.I. companions can remember past conversations, adapt to users’ communication styles, role-play as celebrities or historical figures and chat fluently about nearly any subject. Some can send A.I.-generated “selfies” to users, or talk to them with lifelike synthetic voices.
There is a wide range of A.I. companionship apps on the market. Some allow uncensored chats and explicitly sexual content, while others have some basic safeguards and filters. Most are more permissive than mainstream A.I. services like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, which have stricter safety filters and tend toward prudishness.
On Character.AI, users can create their own chatbots and give them directions about how they should act. They can also select from a vast array of user-created chatbots that mimic celebrities like Elon Musk, historical figures like William Shakespeare or unlicensed versions of fictional characters. (Character.AI told me that the “Daenerys Targaryen” bot Sewell used was created by a user, without permission from HBO or other rights holders, and that it removes bots that violate copyright laws when they’re reported.)
“By and large, it’s the Wild West out there,” said Bethanie Maples, a Stanford researcher who has studied the effects of A.I. companionship apps on mental health.
“I don’t think it’s inherently dangerous,” Ms. Maples said of A.I. companionship. “But there’s evidence that it’s dangerous for depressed and chronically lonely users and people going through change, and teenagers are often going through change,” she said.
“I want to push this technology ahead fast.”
Character.AI, which was started by two former Google A.I. researchers, is the market leader in A.I. companionship. More than 20 million people use its service, which it has described as a platform for “superintelligent chat bots that hear you, understand you, and remember you.”
The company, a three-year-old start-up, raised $150 million from investors last year at a $1 billion valuation, making it one of the biggest winners of the generative A.I. boom. Earlier this year, Character.AI’s co-founders, Mr. Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, announced that they were going back to Google, along with a number of other researchers from the company. Character.AI also struck a licensing deal that will allow Google to use its technology.
In response to questions for this column, Jerry Ruoti, Character.AI’s head of trust and safety, sent a statement that began, “We want to acknowledge that this is a tragic situation, and our hearts go out to the family. We take the safety of our users very seriously, and we’re constantly looking for ways to evolve our platform.”
Mr. Ruoti added that the company’s current rules prohibit “the promotion or depiction of self-harm and suicide” and that it would be adding additional safety features for underage users.
Doesnt surprise me one bit. Theres a lot of insecure, weak, bytchmade men in here hiding behind these screennames talking shyt from the safety of a computer or smart phone. Yall should have been on sohh back in the days. Same reason why i will stay roasting posters like @NYC Rebel punk ass because of that bullshyt. Grown ass men in their 20s and 30s talking down and picking fights with kids in high school.
some of these guys are fathers too.