Recently there has been news on a lawsuit filed against the company character.ai by Megan Garcia, the mom of Sewell Setzer III who was the 14 year old teenage who died by suicide earlier this year in February. The official story I’ve heard is that Setzer was starting to become withdrawn from his original life and becoming more socially isolated, spending a lot of time in his room, not enjoying the things that he used to enjoy, etc. and then he found character.ai and it made him addicted to talking to a fictional person, a character from Game of Thrones, and eventually his unstable mind tread too far from reality and lead him to believe he could escape to a better place by killing himself.

First, I’m sad to hear this and I hope his family will find peace. You don’t need to be a detective to understand that something was going on in his early high school life. For many people, high school is one of the worst periods of their life. It was for me. I’m not going to speculate what was going on in the kid’s life, nor prod at the fact that he was diagnosed with high functioning Aspergers at the age of 5 according to his mom and that that means a lot of masking behavior in a neurotypical society that adds additional stress, so I’ll say that I wished that instead of punishing him when he was falling behind and becoming addicted to talking with the chatbot the mom should’ve tried harder to communicate with her son and be there for him.

I saw this headline from another article on this news: “First AI death? Character.ai faces lawsuit after Florida teen’s suicide. He was speaking to Daenerys Targ” and remembered that no this is not the first time. Did we forget about the Belgian father who committed suicide after talking to the Chai chatbot incident already?

Chatbots in the market of selling mimiced human connection is a dangerous place to be in business. Yes, if we look at news in the US, a lot of young people are probably not doing so well in many facets of life. I’m included in this group! And sometimes we don’t want to or literally can’t turn to people IRL for support. And in a world so full of technological abundance, where do we turn to?…online. The internet. And low and behold, who can resist the temptation of the plethora of AI chatbots to talk to to fill the void in your heart? Having trouble talking to real people IRL? What makes you think you’ll succeed online?… This chatbot isn’t fulfilling the fantasy you had in mind? Find another one. This chatbot isn’t behaving and talking in the exact way you want it to? Force it to submit to your every wish and desire since it’s literally a program meant to appease you. You could make it roleplay into being standoffish or deny you fakingly, but it is ultimately in your control if you have the right prompts. It’s a program. A really freaking sophisticated, advanced piece of a marvel of human engineering and ingenuity, but it cannot solve this problem in your life for you. I’m sorry. I tried doing that myself, and maybe I’m lucky I didn’t go down the darker path. I got out early.

The solution to the problem of human connection, emotional and mental support in the universal struggle of being alive in an insane modern world is not found in chatbots. The solution is found in human beings. I wish you luck.

The primitive human instinct for social connection as a survival mechanism in a modern world where you don’t technically need social connections to physically survive is weird and it is only a problem of the mind and heart of needing other people to stay sane. In the future, where genetic engineering will only widen the gap between the haves and have nots, I imagine some will choose to become less human and remove these needs completely. But that’s getting way ahead of myself. I want to remain human! I don’t want Elon’s Neuralink brain chip in my mind! I don’t want to sell my literal brain waves! I don’t want to lose the desire for human connection!

I hope I, my peers, and all these generation alpha kiddos will be “ok”.

To the Ms. Garcia and all parents who’ve lost a child to suicide, I hope you can find peace in this new life you did not deserve and can use your new experience to help prevent other families from experiencing the same pain that you did.