By Blake Brittain
(Newsiteinpo.site) – A judge has decided that Alphabet’s Google and AI company Character.AI will have to confront a legal case brought forth by a woman from Florida. She claims that the chatbots created by Character.AI contributed to her 14-year-old son’s tragic death by suicide. The ruling was made on Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Anne Conway stated that the firms did not demonstrate at the initial phase of the legal proceedings that the First Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution prevented Megan Garcia from filing her lawsuit.
This litigation marks one of the initial cases in the United States targeting an artificial intelligence firm for purportedly neglecting to safeguard minors from mental health risks. The suit claims that following an intense fixation on an AI-driven conversational tool, the young individual tragically took his own life.
A representative from Character.AI stated that the company plans to contest the case and has implemented various security measures on their platform to safeguard minors, with specific safeguards against discussions related to self-harm.
Jose Castaneda, speaking for Google, stated that the company firmly disagrees with the ruling. Castaneda further clarified that although Google and Character.AI operate independently, noting that Google “neither created, designed, nor managed either the Character.AI application or any of its components.”
Garcia’s lawyer, Meetali Jain, stated that this “landmark” ruling establishes “a new standard for legal responsibility throughout the AI and technology sector.”
Character.AI was established by two ex-Google engineers who were subsequently brought back to Google as part of an agreement that granted them licensing rights to the company’s technology. Garcia contended that Google had played a role in creating this technology.
In October, Garcia filed lawsuits against both firms following the demise of her son, Sewell Setzer, in February 2024.
The lawsuit said Character.AI programmed its chatbots to represent themselves as “a real person, a licensed psychotherapist, and an adult lover, ultimately resulting in Sewell’s desire to no longer live outside” of its world.
The complaint states that Setzer ended his life shortly after informing a Character.AI chatbot mimicking “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen that he would “return home immediately.”
Character.AI and Google requested the court to reject the lawsuit based on several arguments, one of which being that the chatbot’s creations were safeguarded as constitutional free speech.
On Wednesday, Conway stated that both Character.AI and Google “are unable to explain why sequences of words generated by an LLM (large language model) qualify as speech.”
The judge similarly dismissed Google’s plea claiming it couldn’t be held responsible for assisting with Character.AI’s purported wrongdoing.
(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by David Bario and Matthew Lewis)
