Media: AI urges teens to kill their parents

An Illustrative photo: arstechnica

Several families have sued the chatbot maker Character Technologies and the startup's main sponsor, Google. Parents demand that Character.AI remove its models because of causing psychological trauma to children, writes arstechnica.

On 10 December, another lawsuit was filed in the US District Court in Texas by families trying to help their children recover from traumatic experiences when C.AI chatbots encouraged children to engage in repeated self-harm and other real-world violence, such as killing their parents.

In the case of a 17-year-old boy with high-functioning autism, after his time on the Internet was reduced, the what-bots suggested that “murdering his parents was a reasonable response to their imposing time limits on his online activity,” the lawsuit says. And because of the teen's aggressiveness, his family still lives in fear of his erratic outbursts, even a full year after being cut off from the app.

It is also noted that in addition to inciting aggression, the teens were exposed to hypersexualised content.

Character.AI was founded by former Google employees and allows anyone to create a chatbot with any personality they like, including including emulating famous fictional characters and celebrities, which seemed to attract kids to the app. The families filing a lawsuit claim that C.AI fails to filter out harmful content. The families have also asked the court to order C.AI to delete its models trained on kids' data. C.AI allegedly failed to implement reliable age verification processes to determine which users are minors.

Currently, C.AI is available only to users ages 17 and up, but it historically has relied on users self-reporting age, which the complaint said isn't effective age-gating. It is alleged that the product may have contributed to the suicide of a teenager.

A loss could lead to heavy fines for Character Technologies and possibly Google, as the families have asked for punitive damages. They also seek money to cover their families' past and future medical expenses, mental pain and suffering, impairment to perform everyday activities, and loss of enjoyment of life.

As reported by the UOJ, a study has shown that videos and photos on the Internet can influence and alter thinking.

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