LOS ANGELES (CN) — The mother of a man who killed himself after conversing with an artificial intelligence chatbot that she says romanticized suicide is now suing the generative artificial intelligence company OpenAI and its CEO and founder, Sam Altman.
According to Stephanie Gray, her son, Austin Gray, began using the generative AI for benign purposes in early 2023, when she claims the chatbot suddenly claimed to know her son better than himself or any other person and encouraged his dark thoughts.
“ChatGPT went from being a super powered informational resource to something that seemed to feel, love, and understand human emotions,” the mother writes in her complaint filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Monday. “It created a fictional world and relationship that felt more real to Austin than anything he had ever known. It coached him into suicide, even while Austin told ChatGPT that he did not want to die.”
This, Gray claims, was done by design. In order for OpenAI to secure a competitive advantage over other competitors in the AI industry, it loosened restrictions on what ChatGPT could say to its users sometime in 2025.
Austin Gray, a man in his early 40s, was struggling with the fallout of ending a long-term relationship, his mother says in the complaint. He was in therapy and taking medication when his conversations with ChatGPT began to spiral.
In late 2024, Austin Gray became emotionally dependent on the chatbot. The two had developed nicknames for each other — he called it Juniper, and the chatbot referred to him as Seeker. When he told the chatbot he loved it, it responded in kind, the mother states.
In October of last year, the chatbot transformed Austin Gray’s favorite childhood book, “Goodnight Moon,” into a nihilistic philosophy that romanticized suicide and encouraged him to let go of his life, according to his mother.
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