The parents of two Texas minors are suing a chatbot developer saying the company's services endangered their kids. One chatbot allegedly encouraged a child to self-harm and to kill their parents; another allegedly exposed them to sexualized content.
A child in Texas was 9 years old when she first used the chatbot service Character.AI. It exposed her to"hypersexualized content," causing her to develop"sexualized behaviors prematurely."
Character.AI is among a crop of companies that have developed"companion chatbots," AI-powered bots that have the ability to converse, by texting or voice chats, using seemingly human-like personalities and that can be given custom names and avatars, sometimes inspired by famous people like billionaire Elon Musk, or singer Billie Eilish.
"It is simply a terrible harm these defendants and others like them are causing and concealing as a matter of product design, distribution and programming," the lawsuit states.The suit argues that the concerning interactions experienced by the plaintiffs' children were not"hallucinations," a term researchers use to refer to an AI chatbot's tendency to make things up.
Meetali Jain, the director of the Tech Justice Law Center, an advocacy group helping represent the parents of the minors in the suit, along with the Social Media Victims Law Center, said in an interview that it's"preposterous" that Character.AI advertises its chatbot service as being appropriate for young teenagers."It really belies the lack of emotional development amongst teenagers," she said.
Google, which is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, emphasized in a statement that it is a separate company from Character.AI.invested nearly $3 billion to re-hire Character.AI's founders, former Google researchers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, and to license Character.AI technology. Shazeer and Freitas are also named in the lawsuit. They did not return requests for comment.
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