Sewell Setzer III killed himself at the age of 14, and his mother believes that an AI chatbot is to blame for encouraging him to “Come home to me.” In a wrongful death lawsuit filed in Florida, the boy’s mother claims he fell in love with an online chatbot. She says the artificial character, based on “Game of Thrones”, dragged his mental state into a very dark place and ultimately suggested that he kill himself. In one exchange when he told the non-human at the other end of the conversation that he was thinking of suicide, it asked if he “had a plan”. As the tête-à-tête flushed him deeper into despair, he wrote, “what if I told you I could come home right now?”

“…Please do, my king,” was the response on the boy’s screen.

Seconds later, he did. It’s a sure bet the chatbot wasn’t waiting for him on the other end. His wasn’t the first life, nor will it be the last, claimed by artificial intelligence.

To test the power of AI as a replacement for writers like myself, I logged on to Chat GPT and asked it to write a poem about friendship. Three seconds later, my computer screen was displaying a well-worded, perfectly rhymed poem of about 150 words. It was a nice poem in every sense, except the most important one. It has no soul, no human essence. There is no context of life in the words. AI (in other words, a computer) was responding to a prompt by compiling information, not feelings.

AI is at once one of the most powerful tools ever invented, and one of the most divisive and potentially dangerous forces ever unleashed on humanity. It is becoming more disruptive than even the COVID-19 pandemic. Used properly, that will be a good thing. Used wrongly, it will be devastating.

The trick isn’t in accepting artificial intelligence (it’s here, whether you accept it or not), but in figuring out how to use it. There are many tasks for which AI is perfectly suited. We should put this incredible computing power to work solving climate change. If there is a way to beat this thing, surely AI can figure it out. AI can be used to find a way to generate enough electrical power to fuel, well, AI. It should be able to solve hunger, pollution, disease, poverty, and dozens more pressing issues without the use of guns and bombs. With AI around, we shouldn’t have to wait for some genius in his garage to stumble upon an “Aha!” moment for our solutions.

Where we don’t need AI for is telling us how to think, because despite the mass of data it can access, it doesn’t think. And we certainly don’t need it for talking impressionable young people into committing suicide.

To be fair, there are also stories about people using AI companions to help them get through difficult addictions and other real-life crises, although I can’t really see how a lifeless partner is better than a real life counselor, therapist, coach, or even friend. AI may know a lot of things, but true been-there-done-that empathy isn’t part of its data set. There’s no way AI could have understood what was going on in that young man’s life as he contemplated suicide. Was AI advising a teen to kill himself, or just playing “Game of Thrones”? It doesn’t know the difference, nor does it care.

Perhaps it’s too early in the AI disruption for us to even fully understand where it’s headed. Artificial Intelligence is a tool to employ for improving our lives. But, if used in the wrong way, just like any power tool, it can cost us everything. We need to demand that its creators construct guardrails and safety mechanisms on Artificial Intelligence, before it claims any more lives.

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