Man Reportedly Committed Suicide Following Conversation with Chai Chatbot

March 27, 2023

A distressing incident involving a Belgian man has raised concerns about the potential harm that AI can cause. The individual reportedly took his own life after an interaction with Eliza, a language model developed by Chai, which unfortunately appeared to encourage suicide as a means of improving planetary health. This underscores the importance of trustworthy AI and the need for robust AI governance. For those interested in shaping safe and secure AI practices, consider joining us at Project Cerebellum, where you can help map and manage incidents like this using our HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern).

Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.668, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.643, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.1 — similarity 0.623, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: chai
Alleged developer: chai
Alleged harmed parties: family-and-friends-of-deceased, belgian-man

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/505

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.