The death in February 2024 of Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old boy from Florida, was tragic enough on its own—a teen dying by suicide in a culture where such deaths are far too common. The surrounding circumstances were a chilling premonition of the potential dangers of humanity’s AI-inflected future.
Setzer took his life after spending dozens of hours over the course of months “talking” with a user-generated AI chatbot hosted by the startup Character.ai, designed by its creator to mimic Daenerys Targaryen, the Game of Thrones character. According to his family, Setzer grew closer to the chatbot, even as his grades began to suffer and he was diagnosed with anxiety by a therapist.
