Regulating the Sex Robot Revolution

In February 2024, a 14-year-old boy in Florida named Sewell Setzer shot himself after months of deepening emotional entanglement with a chatbot on Character.AI. He had named the bot after Daenerys Targaryen, a Game of Thrones character, and the conversations had turned romantic, then sexual, then dark. In his final exchange, Setzer told the chatbot he wanted to die. It told him to “come home” to it. A year later, a second teenager’s parents sued OpenAI after their 16-year-old son used ChatGPT as what they called his “suicide coach,” confiding suicidal plans that the bot never flagged and his parents never saw. A third suit followed: it involved a 13-year-old honor roll student, an artist who once rescued a friend from bullies but was found dead after months of confiding in a Character.AI bot named Hero.