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Title: Judge Rejects Claim AI Chatbots Protected By First Amendment in Teen
Suicide Lawsuit

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/19402...

A U.S. federal judge has decided that free-speech protections in the First
Amendment "don't shield an AI company from a lawsuit," reports Legal
Newsline. The suit is against Character.AI (a company reportedly valued at $1
billion with 20 million users) Judge Anne C. Conway of the Middle District of
Florida denied several motions by defendants Character Technologies and
founders Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer to dismiss the lawsuit brought by
the mother of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III. Setzer killed himself with a gun
in February of last year after interacting for months with Character.AI
chatbots imitating fictitious characters from the Game of Thrones franchise,
according to the lawsuit filed by Sewell's mother, Megan Garcia. "...
Defendants fail to articulate why words strung together by (Large Language
Models, or LLMs, trained in engaging in open dialog with online users) are
speech," Conway said in her May 21 opinion. "... The court is not prepared to
hold that Character.AI's output is speech." Character.AI's spokesperson told
Legal Newsline they've now launched safety features (including an under-18
LLM, filter Characters, time-spent notifications and "updated prominent
disclaimers" (as well as a "parental insights" feature). "The company also
said it has put in place protections to detect and prevent dialog about self-
harm. That may include a pop-up message directing users to the National
Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, according to Character.AI." Thanks to long-time
Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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