Alphabet’s Google and the AI startup Character.AI have agreed to settle multiple lawsuits alleging that the controversial AI chatbot contributed to mental health issues and suicides among young people.
On Wednesday, both the tech start-up and the search giant agreed to settle a lawsuit by a Florida mother, Megan Garcia, who alleged the startup's chatbot led to the suicide of her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer.
The court filing in Garcia’s case shows that an agreement was reached with Character.AI, its founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, and Google, who were also named as defendants in the case.
Because Google has a license to Character.AI’s technology and its founders work for the tech giant, Garcia argued that Google was a co-creator of the technology.
The defendants have also settled four other cases in New York, Colorado, and Texas, whose children committed suicide or experienced sexual abuse from chatbots, court documents show.
Matthew Bergman, a lawyer with the Social Media Victims Law Center, represented the plaintiffs in all five cases.
The terms of all settlements were not immediately available.
Character.AI lawsuit sets new precedent
Garcia’s lawsuit was one of the first in the US against an artificial intelligence company for allegedly failing to protect children from psychological harm.
Character.AI is a generative AI chatbot that enables users to engage in conversations with customizable characters, which can be celebrities or fantasy characters of their own choosing.
Users can create "characters," craft their "personalities," set specific parameters, and then publish them to the community for others to chat with.
The Florida lawsuit, filed in October 2024, said that Character.AI programmed its chatbots to represent themselves as "a real person, a licensed psychotherapist, and an adult lover, ultimately resulting in Setzer’s desire to no longer live outside" of its world.
According to the complainant, Setzer took his life moments after telling a Character.AI chatbot imitating "Game of Thrones" character Daenerys Targaryen that he would "come home right now."
US district Judge Anne Conway rejected the companies' early bid to dismiss the case last May, rejecting their argument that the free-speech protections of the US Constitution barred Garcia's lawsuit.
OpenAI is facing a separate lawsuit filed in December over ChatGPT's alleged role in encouraging a mentally ill Connecticut man to kill his mother and himself.
In September, two nonprofits, ParentsTogether Action and Heat Initiative, tested Character.AI chatbots linked to the accounts of minors and found that many of the chats contained “an average of one harmful interaction every five minutes.”
Both OpenAI and Character.AI have since implemented a series of safety measures and features, including those for young users. Last autumn, Character.AI said it would no longer allow users under the age of 18 to engage in back-and-forth conversations with its chatbots, acknowledging the “questions that have been raised about how teens do, and should, interact with this new technology.”
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