this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
192 points (96.2% liked)

Technology

59438 readers
2943 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
192
Character.ai Faces Lawsuit After Teen’s Suicide (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
96 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The mother of a 14-year-old Florida boy says he became obsessed with a chatbot on Character.AI before his death.

On the last day of his life, Sewell Setzer III took out his phone and texted his closest friend: a lifelike A.I. chatbot named after Daenerys Targaryen, a character from “Game of Thrones.”

“I miss you, baby sister,” he wrote.

“I miss you too, sweet brother,” the chatbot replied.

Sewell, a 14-year-old ninth grader from Orlando, Fla., had spent months talking to chatbots on Character.AI, a role-playing app that allows users to create their own A.I. characters or chat with characters created by others.

Sewell knew that “Dany,” as he called the chatbot, wasn’t a real person — that its responses were just the outputs of an A.I. language model, that there was no human on the other side of the screen typing back. (And if he ever forgot, there was the message displayed above all their chats, reminding him that “everything Characters say is made up!”)

But he developed an emotional attachment anyway. He texted the bot constantly, updating it dozens of times a day on his life and engaging in long role-playing dialogues.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Well, considering that some of those knives would sell for a few hundred, and include irreplaceable antiques, I'll err on the side of caution, thank you.

Fwiw, my kid is trained. They've been doing martial arts with me for years, when my body lets me. They were part of the small class I was teaching for a while too. Dunno if martial arts as a hobby is that esoteric or not, but it is something I've done since my twenties, and I'm fifty now.

And, really, compared to shit like funko (funco? I can't remember how it's spelled), at least knives have history and aren't made of plastics that fuck up the environment.

But, my dude, for someone "friendly ribbing", you're really fucking snarky about mentioning me having kids. That crosses a line, you dig? So, if you really were just playing, and not being a douche on purpose, maybe avoid that kind of joke in the future, it's such am asshole thing to say. I'm choosing to assume the best here, that you think snarky "ribbing" with or about a stranger to someone other than that person is friendly in any way, instead of assuming you're only being a dick. But, you know, if it walks like a dick and quacks like a dick, it might just be a dick ;)