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
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.
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.
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.
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.
AI bots that argue exactly like that are all over social media too. It’s common. Dead internet theory is absolutely becoming reality.
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.
No argument on the second part. But not sure about the first. The laws “implying” something often isn’t enough to charge.
“Implying” is how laws work. You rarely have laws that spell out each and every specific and individual example. The spirit and the letter of the law for edge cases is worked out in specific cases. For the same reason no one is going to convincingly argue they don’t have access to their home because the door is locked if they have keys, having keys to locked gun storage is considered access. Primary access in fact. Having keys to a lock is considered prima facie “access” and is borne out in settled case law. It’s so obvious that it isn’t even argued otherwise except in extreme circumstances.
No thanks, i just want to make out with my Marilyn Monrobot
Yeah, if you are using an AI for emotional support of any kind, you are in for a bad, bad time.
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, …
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…The court should laugh the lawsuit out of the court house.
I guess suimg is part of the grieving process; right before.accepting your own guilt.
