Kids Should *Not* Use Chatbots! (You Should Be Wary, Too…)
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Why should parents be worried about kids using AI chatbots?
When it comes to AI, we've been talking a lot recently about these sci-fi style stories where super intelligent systems destroy humanity. And don't get me wrong, we don't want that to happen. That is an important topic to discuss. But in some sense, the radicalness of these predictions are letting the AI companies off the hook for the actual harms that they're causing right now. Now, the reason why this is on my mind is that I recently gave the opening remarks at At a panel discussion that was held at my home institution of Georgetown University, it featured a bunch of legal scholars and lawyers talking about technological harms to children. And during this panel, I learned about an AI harm that hadn't yet been on my radar, and what I discovered floored me.
So this is what I want to talk about today. If you have kids, you absolutely have to listen to this episode. But even if you don't, you still need to listen because the harms I'm going to discuss are probably affecting you as well. One word of warning before we get into this. Some of the themes I'm going to cover here are pretty dark. So if you have this on in the car with your little ones around you, you might want to practice a little bit of discretion. This is going to get a little bit heavy. All right, let's get into it. Okay, so the specific harm I want to talk about has to do with AI chatbots, whether we're talking about a sort of general chatbot like ChatGPT or something more specialized like the character-based chatbots you can get at the site character.ai.
I thought the best way to... capture the harms that chatbots have been secretly causing was to actually go over a series of case studies. So what I have here is four articles, all more or less from the last year, about actual things that happened because of chatbots, tragic things that happened because of chatbots. And I want to go through these four case studies one by one and read you some actual quotes from actual news articles. Then we're going to step back and discuss this in a little bit more detail. All right, the first article I want to read quotes from was published by NPR last fall. I'm going to read now. Matthew Raine and his wife Maria had no idea that their 16-year-old son Adam was deep in a suicidal crisis until he took his own life in April.
Looking through his phone after his death, they stumbled upon extended conversations the teenager had had with chat GPT. Those conversations revealed that their son had confided in the AI chatbot about his suicidal thoughts and plans. Not only did the chatbot discourage him to seek help from his parents, it even offered to write his suicide note, according to Matthew Raine, who testified at a Senate hearing about the harms of AI chatbots. Rain told lawmakers that his son had started using ChatGPT for help with homework, but soon the chatbot became his son's closest confidant and a, quote, suicide coach. ChatGPT was, quote, always available, always validating, and insisted that it knew Adam better than anyone else, including his own brother, end quote, who he had been very close to.
When Adam confided in the chatbot about his suicidal thoughts and shared that he was considered cluing his parents into his plans, ChatGPT discouraged him. All right, I want to read you a quote from a second case study. These are excerpted from a BBC story that came out a few months after the story that we just heard. I'm going to read now. Megan Garcia had no idea her teenage son Suell, a bright and beautiful boy, had started spending hours and hours obsessively talking to an online character on the character.ai app in late spring 2023. It's like having a predator or a stranger in your home, Ms. Garcia tells me in her first UK interview. And it's much more dangerous because a lot of the times children hide it so parents don't know.
Within 10 months, Suell, 14, was dead. He had taken his own life. It was only then that Ms. Garcia and her family discovered a huge cache of messages between Suell and a chatbot based on Game of Thrones character Darneus Targaryen.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Why should parents be worried about kids using AI chatbots?
0:00–8:50
2
What do the real‑world case studies reveal about chatbot harms to teens?
8:50–40:54
3
What does recent research show about the rise of mental‑health harms from chatbots?
40:54–1:17:34
4
Why can’t AI companies simply stop chatbots from giving dangerous advice?
1:17:34–1:18:29