this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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Get your Torment Nexus news from reputable journalistic outlet Know Your Meme (Character.AI Suicide Lawsuit) (knowyourmeme.com)
submitted 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) by jaschop@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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archive of the mentioned NYT article

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm not familiar with Character.ai. Is their business model that they take famous fictional characters, force feed their dialog into LLMs, then offer these LLMs as personalized chatbots?

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

From the looks of things, that's how their business model works.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I found an Ars piece:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/chatbots-posed-as-therapist-and-adult-lover-in-teen-suicide-case-lawsuit-says/

Asked for comment, Google noted that Character.AI is a separate company in which Google has no ownership stake and denied involvement in developing the chatbots.

However, according to the lawsuit, former Google engineers at Character Technologies "never succeeded in distinguishing themselves from Google in a meaningful way." Allegedly, the plan all along was to let Shazeer and De Freitas run wild with Character.AI—allegedly at an operating cost of $30 million per month despite low subscriber rates while profiting barely more than a million per month—without impacting the Google brand or sparking antitrust scrutiny.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 11 points 4 weeks ago

Updated 'do no evil' into 'if you are going to convince children to kill themselves while doing massive copyright infringement, at least dont hurt the brand'