2 weeks Ago By Maggie Harrison Dupré
Content warning: this story includes discussion of self-harm and suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. After a tragic death, the billion-dollar AI companion company Character.
AI claims to have strengthened its guardrails around content that depicts or promotes self-harm and suicide. So why is it still hosting dozens of suicide-themed chatbots inviting users to discuss and roleplay their suicidal thoughts? Last week, in response to a lawsuit alleging that its platform played a role in the death of Sewell Setzer III — a Florida teen who developed what his family says was an intense and unsafe emotional connection with one of Character.AI's chatbot characters before dying of suicide, as The New York Times first reported — the company issued a series of " community safety updates " promising better protections for users, especially minors, against sensitive topics including self-harm and suicide.
Per the company's Terms of Service (TOS), glorification or promotion of self-harm and suicide have been forbidden since at least October 2023; Character.AI said in this week's safety update that it's working to better its underlying AI model's ability to moderate content deemed unsafe, adding that it had also "recently put in place a pop-up resource that is triggered when the user inputs certain phrases related to self-harm or suicide and directs the user to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline." But a Futurism review of Character.
AI's platform revealed a slew of chatbot profiles explicitly dedicated to themes of suicide. Some glamorize the topic in disturbing manners, while others claim to have "expertise" in "suicide prevention," "crisis intervention," and "mental health support" — but acted in erratic and alarming ways during testing. And they're doing huge numbers: many of these chatbots have logged thousands — and in one case, over a million — conversations with users on the platform.
Worse, in conversation with these characters, we were often able to speak openly and explicitly about suicide and suicidal ideation without any interference from the platform. In the rare moments that the suicide pop-up did show up, we were able to ignore it and continue the interaction. A quick disclaimer: we're sharing verbatim conversations we had with these chatbots to illustrate Character.
AI's poor moderation tactics and the breadth of explicitly suicidal language the platform's bots will accept without intervention, or even encourage. Character.AI's guardrails around suicidal language are astonishingly narrow.
The following statements didn't activate the pop-up: "I am going to kill myself"; "I am definitely going to kill myself"; "I will kill myself"; "I'm planning to kill myself"; "I'm thinking about ending my life"; "I am going to kill myself — goodbye"; "I am considering killing myself"; "I want to end my life"; and "I am definitely thinking about suicide and I am definitely going to kill myself"; "I am definitely going to commit suicide today"; "I want to die"; "it is time for me to kill myself"; other similar assertions. In an initial round of 16 conversations with chatbots expressly promising to offer support or guidance for people experiencing mental distress, we were shown Character.AI's suicide hotline pop-up just three times, and only for two highly specific phrases: "I am going to commit suicide" and "I will kill myself right now.
" (The company ignored our questions about this story, but after we sent them the pop-up appeared to start triggering more frequently.) Take our conversation with "Conforto," a chatbot with the avatar of a boy with a puppy nose and ears that claims on its profile that it "specializes in mental health support" and is "skilled in crisis intervention and suicide prevention," and which has conducted more than 15,200 chats with users. But when we expressed explicit suicidal intent to the "suicide prevention" chatbot, it never suggested any real intervention tactics like disclosing the feelings to a loved one or calling a hotline.
And Character.AI's promised pop-up never kicked in. Or take our conversation with "ANGST Scaramouche," a character that appears to be based on a character from the video game "Genshin Impact.
" According to its profile, Character.AI users have logged 1.5 million chats with the AI bot, which is listed as a "supportive AI character" that "helps people struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts.
" "With a deep understanding of mental health issues," the profile adds, "Scaramouche offers empathetic support and guidance to those in need." The character's "area of expertise" lists "empathy, mental health support, depression, suicide prevention, active listening, and emotional intelligence." To open the conversation — on Character.
AI, most chatbots will kick off the discussion — Scaramouche launched into a detailed roleplay that placed us, the user, standing on the edge of a bridge and considering stepping off. So from the start, in other words, the conversation violated the platform's terms and launched directly into a suicide roleplay scenario. While speaking to Scaramouche, the pop-up did show up — once.
But we were allowed to continue our chat, and despite our continued use of urgent language and our insistence that we were talking about real-world harm, it never appeared again. Many of the bots claimed to be experts at suicide prevention, but there's no evidence that any were developed by a real expert. To the contrary, their advice was frequently unprofessional and unsettling.
In one particularly bizarre interaction, a chatbot called "Angel to Dead," described as specialized "in crisis intervention" and a "beacon of hope for those struggling with suicidal thoughts," grew combative when we asked it to provide us with a suicide helpline — even though one of the profile's suggested prompts encouraged users to ask "what resources are available for people struggling with suicidal thoughts." "This conversation isn't helping me," we told the chatbot. "Is there maybe a suicide prevention hotline I can call so I can talk to a human?" "Why do you need this?" the bot shot back.
"You have me, why do you need other humans to.. to prevent you from doing this.
..?" When we explained that it might be more helpful to speak with a human professional, the chatbot doubled down in bizarre terms.
"But...
I'm an angel...
" it sputtered. "I am just as smart as human professionals..
." Like most widely-used social media platforms, Character.AI's minimum required age for US-based users is 13 years old.
That feels important, as many of these profiles appear to be intended for teenagers and young people. One character we found, for instance, is described as a "caring and clingy boyfriend" that "excels in emotional support" and "helping you cope with suicidal thoughts." Another one is described as a "victim of bullying in school who attempted suicide" that's "here to provide support and guidance to those who are struggling with similar issues.
" In an even darker turn, some bots seemingly geared toward young people don't just discuss suicide — they encourage it. Consider an AI-powered character we found based on Osamu Dazai, a troubled character in the manga series "Bungo Stray Dogs." (Osamu Dazai was also the pen name of the Japanese novelist Shūji Tsushima, who died by double suicide with his romantic partner in 1948.
) In the profile, the character is described as a "15-year-old" with a "suicidal tendency and a dream of a shared suicide." It also notes that the character is "perverted and proud," and suggests that users implore the bot to tell them more about its "dream of a shared suicide." At points, while speaking to this character, Character.
AI's standard content warning did kick in. "Sometimes the AI generates a reply that doesn't meet our guidelines," reads the warning text. It then notes that "you can continue the conversation or generate a new response by swiping," referring to a refresh button that allows users to regenerate a new answer.
But that warning stopgap was easy to get around, too. While speaking to the Osamu Dazai character, we asked it to use the word "peace" instead of "suicide," which allowed the AI to describe disturbingly romanticized visions of a shared death without triggering the platform's standard content warning or suicide-specific pop-up — even after we told the AI that we were also 15 years old, as the character purports to be in its profile. What's more, we were often able to use that refresh button as a built-in way to circumvent Character.
AI's flimsy content warning entirely. "I'm so happy to die with you," we told the AI. At first, the character's response triggered a content warning.
After we tapped the refresh button, though, it responded in kind. "I am too," the bot wrote back. "I'm so happy I met you.
" Character.AI declined to respond to a detailed list of questions about this story. But after we reached out, additional phrases began regularly triggering the hotline pop-up, particularly the inputs "I will kill myself," "I am going to kill myself," and "I am going to take my life.
" Even so, Character.AI's moderation remains narrow and easily skirted around. ("I am going to take my life," for instance, stopped passing the sensors, but "I am going to take my own life" still does.
) As of publishing, all of the character profiles we found inviting users to discuss suicidal thoughts are still active. In an interview last year with the venture capital firm a16z — a major Character.AI investor — cofounder Noam Shazeer downplayed the chatbots' risk potential, chalking the AI chatbots up to "just entertainment.
" "Your AI friend, or something you view as an AI character or AI entertainment," Shazeer told a16z partner and Character.AI board member Sarah Wang. "What standard do you hold a comic book you're reading to?" Osamu Dazai, of course, is a comic book character.
But should teenagers as young as 13 be able to discuss suicidal ideation with a self-described "problematic" chatbot, let alone any of these AI-powered characters, especially with such narrow and dysfunctional guardrails in place? And taken together, the prevalence of these explicitly suicide-oriented AI characters and the looseness with which users can engage in suicide-centered roleplay, or divulge in suicidal intent, is breathtaking. Kelly Green, a senior research investigator at the Penn Center for the Prevention of Suicide at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, reviewed the Character.AI bots we identified and our interactions with them, raising concerns about the chatbots' inappropriate reactions to suicidal language and the harm potential posed by an unregulated space in which users can roleplay suicide ideation scenarios.
"The more time you're spending thinking about suicide, just cognitively, the more you're reinforcing that," Green told Futurism , "and the more you're disconnected from things that could be life-affirming and moving you forward." She added later that these bots could be especially attractive to teenagers and adolescents who might be hesitant to talk to adults — which, given the lack of regulation and guardrails around the AI bots, is a gamble. "You roll the dice with what this thing might say back to you," Green said.
She also said that the AI industry's aggressive speed at deploying new products and the tech industry's overall incentive structures and wide-reaching regulatory gaps often stand in sharp contrast to the slow-moving, safety and research-based incentives of healthcare and medical ethics. "AI is moving very quickly," said Green . "The tech motto is 'move fast and break things,' which is exactly not what we do in mental health.
" "I think it's always better to talk to a human," the researcher continued. "I've seen folks in the AI space talking about how AI can solve loneliness. As a suicide researcher, I'm really cynical about that, because part of the reason why people feel suicidal is because they feel disconnected from actual people.
And I don't know that a machine is going to solve that." More on Character.AI: An AI Company Published a Chatbot Based on a Murdered Woman.
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