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191

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

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

96 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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] 136 points 2 weeks ago (30 children)

He put down his phone, picked up his stepfather’s .45 caliber handgun and pulled the trigger.

A tragic story for sure, but there are questions about the teen’s access to the gun he used to kill himself.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

Yeah, that's not on the app/service.

Could the kid have found another way? Absolutely. But there's a fucking reason guns stay locked up and out of access for minors, even if that means the adults can't access them quickly. Kids literally can't exert full self inhibition of urges, so you make damn sure that anything as easy to make horrible impulse decisions with is out of their hands.

Shit, my kitchen knives stay in a locked case. Same with dangerous chemicals. There's a limit to how much you can realistically compartmentalize and keep locked up, but that limit isn't hard to achieve to the degree that nobody can reach things on impulse. Even a toolbox with a padlock on it is enough to slow someone down and give their brain a chance to inhibit the impulse.

My policy? If the gun isn't on my person, it's locked up in a way that can only be accessed by the people I want to access it. Shit, even my pellet guns stay in the main safe. The two that are available for the other adults are behind fingerprint locks. Even my displayed collection of knives is locked up enough to prevent casual impulses.

I'm not trying to shit on the parents here, but it isn't hard to keep a firearm locked up and still accessible to the owner rapidly. Fingerprint safes and locks have been around long enough that the bugs are worked out. They're not cheap, but if you can afford a firearm in the first place, you can damn well afford keeping it out of someone else's hands without your permission or a lot of hassle.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

Something is really wrong if you need to lock up your kitchen knives.

[+] [email protected] -6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

And the locked "knife display"? Here are my knives, I really like knives, I like to display that I really like knives, would you like to talk about knives? Can I talk at you for 30 minutes about sharpening techniques? Perhaps you'd like to visit my katana collection in the other room? Lol. All kept near his fedora collection no doubt.

All in the name of friendly ribbing though, hobbies are cool and often niche. I'm often a little bemused by people's esoteric or nerdy hobbies.

But I'm scared to ask if this dude even has kids, or if he's just storing his kitchen knives in a locked box out of sheer paranoia. There's safe and then there's... whatever this is.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Well, considering that some of those knives would sell for a few hundred, and include irreplaceable antiques, I'll err on the side of caution, thank you.

Fwiw, my kid is trained. They've been doing martial arts with me for years, when my body lets me. They were part of the small class I was teaching for a while too. Dunno if martial arts as a hobby is that esoteric or not, but it is something I've done since my twenties, and I'm fifty now.

And, really, compared to shit like funko (funco? I can't remember how it's spelled), at least knives have history and aren't made of plastics that fuck up the environment.

But, my dude, for someone "friendly ribbing", you're really fucking snarky about mentioning me having kids. That crosses a line, you dig? So, if you really were just playing, and not being a douche on purpose, maybe avoid that kind of joke in the future, it's such am asshole thing to say. I'm choosing to assume the best here, that you think snarky "ribbing" with or about a stranger to someone other than that person is friendly in any way, instead of assuming you're only being a dick. But, you know, if it walks like a dick and quacks like a dick, it might just be a dick ;)

[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 weeks ago

🤣

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