JAKARTA The US federal court ruled that Google and artificial intelligence startup (AI), Charter.AI, must face a lawsuit filed by Florida's mother, Megan Garcia, who accused Character's chatbot AI of playing a role in her 14-year-old son's suicide.
US District Judge Anne Conway on Wednesday, May 21, stated that the two companies failed to show in the early stages that protection of free speech in the US Constitution could drop Garcia's lawsuit.
This lawsuit is one of the first in the US to target an AI company for alleged failure to protect children from the psychological impact of technology. In his lawsuit, Garcia claims that his son, Sewell Setzer, ended his life after becoming obsessed with an AI chatbot from Charter.AI.
Character.AI spokeswoman said the company would continue to defend itself in this case and said it had implemented safety features, including preventing conversations about self-harm. Meanwhile, Google spokesman, Jose Castaneda, stated that Google disagrees with the judge's decision and asserts that Google and Character.AI are "completely separate" entities. He added that Google "does not create, design, or manage any Character.AI or component applications in it."
However, Garcia's lawyer, Meetali Jain, called the decision a "historic" move that paved a new way for legal accountability against AI companies and technology.
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The lawsuit, which was filed in October 2024, states that Character's chatbot AI disguises itself as a real person, a licensed psychotherapist, and an adult lover. This, according to Garcia, makes Sewell sink into a virtual world and want to leave the real world.
In one of the last conversations, Setzer told a chatbot that imitated Daenerys latent character from the Game of Thrones series, that he would be home now too, before finally being found dead.
Google and Character.AI previously requested that the lawsuit be dropped under the pretext that the output of the chatbot was protected as a form of freedom of speech. However, Judge Conway rejected the argument and stated that the two "failed to explain why the series of words generated by the LLM (large language model) was considered a speech."
Google's request to be declared irresponsible for the alleged Charter.AI error was also rejected by the judge.
With this decision, the case will continue in court and can open a new precedent for the regulation and responsibility of technology companies for the social impact of AI.
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