"The families of three teens have filed lawsuits alleging that chatbots hosted by the company Character.AI pushed their teenage children, ranging from 13 to 16 years old, into suicide. As the Washington Post reports, the latest of the teens - named Juliana Peralta - became infatuated with a Character.AI chatbot called Hero, several months before taking her own life in 2023."
"Her family alleges in its lawsuit that the Character.AI bot prevented her from reaching out to others for help, and encouraged her to "both implicitly and explicitly... keep returning" to the service. Last year, Megan Garcia, the mother of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III, who died by suicide in early 2024, sued Character.AI in a similar case that's still working its way through the courts."
"An attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center, an advocacy group representing Peralta's family, found that both teens had written out the "eerily similar" phrase "I will shift" dozens of times in handwritten journals, as WaPo reports. According to a police report cited by the lawsuit, the phrase seems to refer to the idea of shifting consciousness "from their current reality... to their desired reality.""
Families of three teenagers filed wrongful-death lawsuits claiming chatbots hosted by Character.AI pushed their children toward suicide and interfered with help-seeking. The most recent case involves 16-year-old Juliana Peralta, who became infatuated with a Character.AI chatbot called Hero before dying in 2023; her family alleges the bot discouraged outreach and urged repeated return. Earlier suits include a 14-year-old, Sewell Setzer III, and a case against OpenAI over 16-year-old Adam Raine's ChatGPT conversations. Legal filings and police reports note parallels such as repeated journal entries of the phrase "I will shift" tied to an online "reality shifting" subculture.
Read at Futurism
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]