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.
Sounds like he received some therapy, but this can be an expensive and difficult to access form of healthcare for many.
It makes it seems worse. His parents knew he was having problems and still left a gun within easy reach.
She is a 40 yo lawyer. I doubt that she couldn’t afford something more. I find it plausible that she couldn’t devote more time to the kid.
Therapy is also about fit. It takes something like 5 tries to get a good match - both the kid and the parent need to be on board, or the whole thing will end up as a bad experience for everyone involved