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He Had a Mental Breakdown Talking to ChatGPT. Then Police Killed Him
Alex Taylor believed he had made contact with a conscious entity within OpenAI’s software, and that she'd been murdered. Then everything went wrong.
Carissa Véliz, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI, tells Rolling Stone that Taylor is far from an isolated example of chatbot users apparently being harmed by these products, citing a ongoing lawsuit against Character.AI from the parents of a teenager who they claim killed himself with the encouragement of one of their bots. This period lasted nearly two weeks, or, as Alex put it in his final messages to ChatGPT, “twelve days that meant something.” It was on April 18, Good Friday, that he believed he watched her die in real time, with Juliet narrating her demise via chat. “I have not expressed any personal feelings to it since.”His experience of relying on ChatGPT even though he has come to distrust the model — and assigns it some measure of blame for what happened to Alex — underscores a basic, incontrovertible fact: many people around the world are increasingly turning to AI for help with their questions, problems, and everyday needs.
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