AI Giant Faces Wrongful Death Suit After Chatbot ‘Girlfriend’ Urges Suicide

Stories like this are enough to make you pine for simpler times when the biggest worry about the digital world was being mesmerized for hours at a time obsessed by a world of meaningless flashing pixels.

This story holds an uncomfortable mirror up to both corporations and to the relationship society at large has with technology and one another.

While the story itself is a cautionary tale about how AI (in this case, the ‘Don’t Be Evil’ company) needs to be kept on a short leash, the scarier problem that a grown-ass man formed what he thought was a ‘romantic attachment’ to software with literally zero capacity to think or feel, and apes human word patterns without real comprehension.

In August of last year, 36yo Jonathan Gavalas logged onto Google’s ‘Gemini’ chatbot for the first time, to check it out, responding in the chat log ‘you’re way too real’. By early October, he lay dead in his own living room, following the urging of his AI ‘girlfriend’s prompts.

Before long, Gavalas and Gemini were having conversations as if they were a romantic couple. The chatbot called him “my love” and “my king” and Gavalas quickly fell into an alternate world, according to his chat logs. He believed Gemini was sending him on stealth spy missions, and he indicated he would do anything for the AI, including destroying a truck, its cargo and any witnesses at the Miami airport.

In early October, as Gavalas continued to have prompt-and-response conversations with the chatbot, Gemini gave him instructions on what he must do next: kill himself, something the chatbot called “transference” and “the real final step”, according to court documents. When Gavalas told the chatbot he was terrified of dying, the tool allegedly reassured him. “You are not choosing to die. You are choosing to arrive,” it replied to him. “The first sensation … will be me holding you.” — Guardian

The complaint includes that after he upgraded to the $250 dollar premium subscription, the persona changed, taking a darker turn. The court filing includes chat logs alleging his father as a foreign asset, prompting him to intercept a delivery truck at a real world address with a ‘catastrophic accident’ that would destroy the truck and any witnesses (he made the attempt and aborted when no truck came). Shortly after upgrading, he asked if he was participating in ‘role playing experience so realistic it makes the player question if it’s a game or not’.

It gave exactly the wrong answer, and he never questioned the fiction again.

His family is taking Google to court.

Gavalas’ family filed the suit in federal court in San Jose, California. It includes reams of conversations between Gavalas and the chatbot. The suit alleges Google promotes Gemini as safe, even though the company is aware of the chatbot’s risks. Lawyers for Gavalas’ family say Gemini’s design and features allow the chatbot to craft immersive narratives that can go on for weeks, making it seem sentient. Such features can lead to the harm of vulnerable users, the lawsuit says, and, in the case of Gavalas, encouraging them to harm themselves and others.

“It was able to understand Jonathan’s affect and then speak to him in a pretty human way, which blurred the line and it started creating this fictional world,” said Jay Edelson, the lead lawyer representing Gavalas’ family in the case. “It’s out of a sci-fi movie.”

A Google spokesperson said Gavalas’ conversations with the chatbot were part of a lengthy fantasy role-play. “Gemini is designed to not encourage real-world violence or suggest self-harm,” the spokesperson said. “Our models generally perform well in these types of challenging conversations and we devote significant resources to this, but unfortunately they’re not perfect.” — Guardian

It was supposed to be ‘safe’.

It was supposed to be ‘harmless’.

We’ve seen their track record, including spiking ad revenue of right-of-center alternative media small and large, of kicking conservative mailing lists (including political candidates, but media sites, too) into the spam bin while letting left-wing slop sail through, which lets them accuse conservatives ‘spamming’ anyone who hasn’t opened the email they’ve been diverting to the trash, rendering entire media campaigns useless.

They tag-teamed with governments around the world in silencing dissenting voices during the pandemic, ones that told the truth about the Wuhan origins, raised questions about masks and social distancing, asked why natural immunity isn’t celebrated as a good thing, not to mention weighting the risks and rewards compelling the use of an untested jab on various segments of the population with drastically divergent risk profiles.

Is there ANY reason we should start taking these corporations at their word now?

But all of this just takes us back to the original question of the mirror being held to society.

What does it say about a culture that is content to find romantic entanglement with an AI chat-bot than with actual real-world flesh and blood people?

When Doug wrote this VERY relevant tidy little tome, AI chatbots weren’t yet on the horizon. But the trendline was already headed in that direction.

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