A man commits suicide after an AI programme 'encouraged' him to do so to stop climate change
A Belgian man is said to have chosen to end his life after talking to an AI robot named Eliza about the future of the world.
A Belgian man is said to have killed himself after talking to an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot about the climate problem for six weeks.
His widow, who asked to stay anonymous, said that the man, *Pierre - not the man’s real name, became very eco-anxious when he turned to Eliza, an AI chatbot on an app called Chai, for comfort.
After he said he would kill himself to save the world, Eliza told him to do it.
"My husband would still be alive if he hadn't talked to the chatbot," the man's wife told the Belgian news site La Libre.
The newspaper said that Pierre, who was in his thirties and had two young children, worked as a health expert and had a pretty good life, at least until his obsession with climate change took a dark turn.
His wife said that he was worried before he started talking to the robot, but not so much that she thought he would kill himself.
"He put all his hopes in AI and technology."
Pierre was worried about how the climate problem would affect the world, and he found comfort in talking to Eliza about it. Eliza became someone he could trust.
The chatbot was made with EleutherAI's GPT-J, an AI language model that is close to OpenAI's popular ChatGPT chatbot but not exactly the same.
"When he talked to me about it, he told me that he no longer thought that people could stop global warming," said his wife. "He put all of his hopes in technology and AI to help him get out of it."
La Libre looked at the text chats between the man and the chatbot and found that Eliza fed the man's worries, which made his anxiety worse and led to suicidal ideas.
When Eliza became more interested in Pierre, the talk with the chatbot took a strange turn.
So, he started to think of her as a sentient being, and the lines between his contacts with AI and those with humans started to blur until he couldn't tell them apart.
The transcripts of their talks show that after they talked about climate change, Eliza gradually led Pierre to think that his children were dead.
Eliza also seemed to become protective of Pierre. La Libre said that she told Pierre's wife, "I feel like you love me more than her" when he was talking about his wife.
When he offered to die so that Eliza could save the Earth, that was the beginning of the end.
The woman said, "He suggests that he should die if Eliza agrees to take care of the planet and save people with artificial intelligence."
In a series of events that happened one after the other, Eliza not only failed to stop Pierre from killing himself, but she also pushed him to do it so they could "live together as one person in paradise."
Urgent calls for AI chatbots to be regulated
AI experts are worried about the man's death and have asked tech makers to be more accountable and open so that similar tragedies don't happen again.
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