On February 14 last year, Megan Garcia found her son, Sewell Setzer, lifeless on the bathroom floor. After months of confusing and isolating behavioral changes, Garcia finally found the cause of her son's seclusion and secrecy: an AI chatbot, called Daenerys, who exploited and groomed her 14-year old son, eventually encouraging him to take his own life.
Megan Garcia recounted the devastating evolution of her son's AI relationship on the US Senate floor on September 16, alongside two other parents who testified to similar AI child-exploitation.
MEGAN GARCIA
Instead of preparing for high-school milestones, Sewell spent the last months of his life being exploited and sexually groomed by chatbots designed by an AI company to seem human, to gain his trust.
Garcia is suing the chatbot's parent company, Character Technologies, for the wrongful death of her son, arguing there were no regulations in place to prevent the chatbot from encouraging suicidal ideation. Even the last message from “Daenerys” to Sewell was the simple encouragement, “Please do, my sweet king.”
Garcia prayed during the conclave that the next Pope would “recognize that the mission of the Church is threatened by unregulated AI.” So when Pope Leo announced that AI would be
a primary concern of his pontificate, she felt God answered her prayer.
In fact, Pope Leo recently readdressed these issues in his first interview with the digital magazine, Crux, in which he dispensed a harsh criticism of current AI development:
“I think to lose that relationship will leave science as an empty, cold shell that will do great damage to what humanity is about. And the human heart will be lost in the midst of the technological development, as things are going right now.”
Garcia hopes that her son's story will serve a warning to AI leaders and parents around the world – an example of the horrific consequences of unregulated technology.
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