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.
RunningInRVA@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
A tragic story for sure, but there are questions about the teen’s access to the gun he used to kill himself.
wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 4 weeks ago
The lawsuit smacks of misplaced family grief and regret.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 4 weeks ago
That sentence also stood out to me. Somehow the article is lots of pages about what he did on his phone. And then half a sentence about the gun, and he's dead. No further questions about that.
RunningInRVA@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
The mother was on CBS this morning and while the story is sad my wife and I looked at each other with the same question when the mom stated the teen shot himself. Gayle King would have been terrible to start questioning the mother on the gun question but you kind of wish she would have.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
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.
dirthawker0@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Safe? Clearly no. Trigger lock? Cable lock? If one were there, there should be a mention of picking it or cutting it. Unloaded? Also clearly no.
There are so many ways, any of which take a whole 20 seconds, the parents could have used to prevent this from happening.
echodot@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
I don’t know a whole lot about gun safety because in my country gun safety amounts to, your are not allowed to have one. Seems like the best gun safety possible.
But I was always under the impression that there was a requirement to have the gun in some kind of lock box, preferably without ammo stored with the gun. I thought that was a requirement of owning a gun license.
femtech@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
Yeah, like he just picked it up? Mine is locked and was he in therapy?
RunningInRVA@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Sounds like he received some therapy, but this can be an expensive and difficult to access form of healthcare for many.
j4k3@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
What kind of monster family had a kid with mental health issues, in therapy, and has an accessible gun around unsupervised?
RunningInRVA@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Too many families in America, sadly.
Nuke_the_whales@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I also question the parents lack of intervention if they really thought the chat bot was an issue
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 3 weeks ago
I posted this article earlier with this exact we context.