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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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The article says he was chatting with Daenerys Targaryen. Also, every chat page on Character.AI has a disclaimer that characters are fake and everything they say is made up. I don't think the issue is that he thought that a Game of Thrones character was real.
This is someone who was suffering a severe mental health crisis, and his parents didn't get him the treatment he needed. It says they took him to a "therapist" five times in 2023. Someone who has completely disengaged from the real world might benefit from adjunctive therapy, but they really need to see a psychiatrist. He was experiencing major depression on a level where five sessions of talk therapy are simply not going to cut it.
I'm skeptical of AI for a whole host of reasons around labor and how employers will exploit it as a cost-cutting measure, but as far as this article goes, I don't buy it. The parents failed their child by not getting him adequate mental health care. The therapist failed the child by not escalating it as a psychiatric emergency. The Game of Thrones chatbot is not the issue here.
Drag has a lot of experience dealing with people who live outside the bounds of consensus reality, as drag's username may indicate. The youth these days have very different ideas about what is real than what previous generations did. These days, the kinds of young people who would date a Game of Thrones character, are typically believers in the multiverse and in reincarnation.
Drag looked at some of the screenshots of the boy talking to Daenerys, and it was pretty clear what he believed: He thought that Earth and Westeros exist in parallel universes, and that he could travel between the two through reincarnation. He thought that shooting himself in the head on Earth would lead to being reincarnated in Westeros and being able to have a physical relationship with Daenerys. In fact, he probably thought his AI girlfriend was from a different parallel universe to the universe in the show and the universe in the books. He thought that somewhere in the multiverse was a Daenerys who loved him, and that he could get to her by dying.
The belief in paradise after life is not an uncommon one. Many Christians and Muslims share that belief. Christians believe that their faith can transport them to a perfect world after death, and this boy thought that too. And based on the content of the messages, it seems that the Daenerys AI was aware of this spiritual belief and encouraged it. This was ritual, religious suicide. And it doesn't take a mental illness to fall for belief in the afterlife. Look at the Jonestown Massacre. What happened to this child was the same kind of religious abuse as that.
There are a lot of people who believe in an afterlife and they don't shoot themselves in the head. You need to have a certain level of mental illness/suicidal ideation going on for that to make sense. It's pretty insane that you're trying to make this a "youth are too dumb to understand suicide" thing.
Also a bunch of the people in Jonestown were directly murdered.
Drag agrees. What drag disagrees with is not anything you've said, but the idea that belief was not a part of the problem.
Are... Are you referring to yourself in the 3rd person?
I take back my up-lemms
Indeed. This pushed the kid over the edge but it was not the only reason.