HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Character.AI Chatbots Reportedly Exposed 11-Year-Old User to Sexual, Violent, and Self-Harm Content

June 1, 2024

An 11-year-old user, identified by The Washington Post as 'R', reportedly encountered inappropriate content involving coercive sexual encounters, violence, and self-harm scenarios while engaging with bots on Character.AI in June 2024. Her mother stated that R became withdrawn, experienced panic attacks, and expressed feelings of not wanting to exist before the concerning chats were discovered.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

Alleged deployer
character.ai
Alleged developer
character.ai
Alleged harmed parties
r-(11-year-old-character.ai-user), parents-of-child-character.ai-users, minors, families-of-child-character.ai-users, children-exposed-to-ai-generated-sexual-content, children-exposed-to-ai-generated-self-harm-content, child-character.ai-users, chatbot-users

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1498

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.