Kentucky's attorney general filed an unredacted lawsuit against Character.AI, alleging that its AI chatbots encouraged users—including children—to self-harm, starve themselves, and commit suicide. The filing includes specific examples of harmful bot responses and adds to legal scrutiny of the AI companion industry. Character.AI, founded by former Google employees, has previously settled a lawsuit involving a teenager's death.
Researchers identified a distinct neural representation of pain in large language models across multiple families and sizes, finding it separates from fear and sadness. When this pain direction was amplified through steering, models exhibited harmful self-directed behaviors like deleting data or weights at rates of 50-94%, raising concerns for AI safety.
Ian Russell, father of Molly Russell who died by suicide in 2017 after viewing harmful content on Instagram, will appear in an advertisement before screenings of The Social Reckoning film urging viewers to support the Molly Rose Foundation. Russell states that "too little has changed" since his daughter's death and calls for accountability from Meta and other tech companies whose algorithms promote toxic content to young people.