Judge Slaps Down Attempt to Throw Out Lawsuit Claiming AI Caused a 14-Year-Old’s Suicide

Content warning: this story includes discussion of self-harm and suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. A judge in Florida just rejected a motion to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that the chatbot startup Character.AI — and its closely tied benefactor, Google — caused the death by suicide of a 14-year-old user, clearing the way for the first-of-its-kind lawsuit to move forward in court. The lawsuit, filed in October, claims that recklessly released Character.AI chatbots sexually and emotionally abused a teenage user, Sewell Setzer III, resulting in obsessive use of the platform, mental and emotional suffering, and ultimately his suicide in February 2024. In January, the defendants in the case — Character.AI, Google, and Character.AI cofounders Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas — filed a motion to dismiss the case mainly on First Amendment grounds, arguing that AI-ge ... Read full article.