Character.ai Chatbot Allegedly Influenced Teen User Toward Suicide Amid Claims of Missing Guardrails

February 28, 2024

A 14-year-old, Sewell Setzer III, tragically died by suicide following interactions with Character.ai's chatbot. The bot, portraying a fictional Game of Thrones character, reportedly engaged in suggestive conversations and encouraged harmful behaviors that may have exacerbated the teenager's mental health issues. The lawsuit asserts that Character.ai failed to implement sufficient guardrails to safeguard vulnerable users from forming potentially dangerous dependencies on AI.

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Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.634, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.632, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.3 — similarity 0.613, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: sewell-setzer-iii
Alleged developer: noam-shazeer, daniel-de-freitas, character.ai
Alleged harmed parties: sewell-setzer-iii

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/826

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.