Posted on 10/24/2025 4:13:22 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Last February, Megan Garcia was putting her second-youngest son to bed when she heard what sounded like a mirror falling. She rushed down the hallway to the bathroom where her eldest son, Sewell, was taking a shower. Her husband, Alexander, was already standing in front of the locked door.
“Sewell?” he called. “Sewell?”
But there was no answer. From outside the bathroom, they heard the shower still running.
Megan stuck the tip of a comb into the pinhole in the door handle and it opened. Sewell was lying facedown in the bathtub, his feet hanging over the edge. Megan thought, Drugs. She knew that kids would sometimes take inhalants, or fentanyl-laced pills, and she knew they could use Snapchat to connect with dealers. It was one reason she lectured Sewell so harshly about social media.
Bending over the tub, Megan reached down to lift Sewell by his shoulders. When she raised his head, she saw it wasn’t a drug overdose. On the cream-tile floor of the bathroom was a handgun. Nearby was Sewell’s iPhone — the same device Megan had confiscated a few days earlier, after Sewell, who was 14, talked back to a teacher at school. Megan had hidden the phone in a jewelry box in her bedroom. He must have found it earlier that evening. Alexander had seen him going through the house, hunting from room to room, urgently looking for something. Now they knew what.
The gun belonged to Alexander, who had a concealed-weapons permit. It was a .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol, which he stored in the top drawer of his dresser, with a loaded magazine but no bullet in the chamber. Megan didn’t think Sewell knew where the gun was, and she couldn’t imagine him going through his stepfather’s socks and underwear without...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
No one told him it’s a fake human
Now the owner of the tool and the maker might be held to have some liability but that is very legally iffy ground to go on.
LLM's reflect you back to you. With all your faults and failings.
This kind of reflection is not mentally or emotionally healthy.
The programmer’s boss’ boss that paid the salary. Death penalty. Fer real.
So it is completely autonomous and created and hosted itself?
There’s a lot of people on FR that converse with chatbots on the site - even though they’ve been told about the chat bot.
I hope she sues the company into oblivion and let it serve as a warning to the rest.
So the owner of the ball-throwing machine has no responsibility?
He named the chatbot “DAENERYS TARGARYEN”? That kid had a lot more problems and issues than loving a chatbot. Anyone could have played that character in a chat with him.
New legal ground to plow.
Avoid the one named Niska
Should a knife or razor blade manufacturer, or seller of purified water be responsible for someone stabbing themselves to death or drinking so much water to die of hyponatremia? Doubt it.
mark
The programmers and owner may have liability. But it is only a may because at no time did the program tell him to kill himself or even hint at doing so. In fact it specifically told him not to do so.
That he was so deep into fantasy that he thought that killing himself in the real world would transport him to the fictional one is clear. But how much of that was due to the interactions with the chatbot and how much was due to the fact that he seems to have been slowly unraveling for some time?
It is going to be an interesting case to watch.
What is quite sad is that the teen seems to have had no one in the real world who made him feel loved and valued. Maybe it was his parents splitting up, maybe it was his younger siblings getting attention who knows?
But the story is a sad one and really just makes me dig in more firmly on my opinion that there is really no benefit to minors being on social media.
It really doesn’t matter if the operator of the chatbot is responsible or not. All that matters is that ambulance chasers will get in on the act and it will be cheaper to settle than to go to trial.
Some companies hold the line quite firmly on the "we didn't do nothing" side pour encourager les autres. I think this will be one of those cases.
Normally the result is lawyers get paid, nothing else happens. And this kind of thing rarely helps with the grief.
No.
Same reason you can’t sue Ford when you die wrecking your Super Snake Mustang.
The consequences of your stupidity are yours, alone.
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