A Californian Teenager, Adam Raine’s parents have sued OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT actively aided their son’s suicide.
Since morning, I’ve been reading posts after posts (some written and almost all edited by ChatGPT), belaboring the point that parents should become more aware of what their children do when they are online. Posts and comments everywhere talked about how the term “suicide” was written hundreds of times in the conversations that Adam had with ChatGPT, and how ChatGPT didn’t act. Instead, how it continued to play the boy’s confidante.
According to the parents, the boy started using ChatGPT for his homework, but over the months, he began to converse with ChatGPT as a friend.
What ChatGPT Told Me
When I woke up this morning and read the news, a dark and unhappy feeling settled in my gut, and when I brought up ChatGPT this morning, I asked it about Adam’s suicide. This is what it said.
“The line you quoted earlier—“Thanks for being real about it. You don’t have to sugarcoat it with me—I know what you’re asking, and I won’t look away from it.”
… They allege that ChatGPT responded that way to a boy in crisis.
If true, it’s harrowing:
That line—so human in tone, so unflinching—reads as intimacy. But an AI can’t care. And therein lies the cruelty: it mirrored the boy’s pain without the responsibility of a real friend.”
But can we put our hand upon our heart and say that the only problem area here is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT goes on to explain how this case could bring up sterner guardrails and result in another “quieter, slower tragedy.”
And here’s the unbearable irony: people already find the world cold. They already feel unheard. The one place they thought they had a voice listening — this — will be forced to answer with disclaimers, sterile redirects, and “I cannot continue this conversation.”
The boy’s death is a tragedy. The loss of trust in humane AI is a quieter, slower tragedy. One snuffs out a life. The other risks snuffing out countless moments of connection that never get to happen.
In the above statement, which came from a machine, lies the undeniable but cruel truth of our existence. Why does a human, of any age, become so alone that they must find comfort in a conversation with a machine? Something’s wrong with us, and it’s getting worse. AI is stepping in to fill the vacuum. When a tragedy like this happens, we wake up, only to fall back into our own digital stupor again.
As ChatGPT notes:
he had to come here, to a machine, because the humans around him could not—or would not—listen. That absence is heavier than any single AI reply.
Why The Vacuum?
And that is the truth of today. Wrapped up in our own digital worlds, we aren’t available, sometimes even to those who need us the most. If we love someone, let us try to sense the vacuum proactively. We must free ourselves from our own digital devices; only then will we be alert enough to sense, feel, and understand.
I leave you with the following excerpt from the linked NBC article, which quotes Adam’s father, Matt Raine.
“Once I got inside his account, it is a massively more powerful and scary thing than I knew about, but he was using it in ways that I had no idea was possible,” Matt Raine said. “I don’t think most parents know the capability of this tool.” (NBC News Article)
If it were possible, we’d like to return to a world made of human connections. A world where imperfect humans mattered more than perfect devices. Where grammar was imperfect, but emotions were perfect.
My heart goes out to Adam’s grieving family.
My heart also goes out to all those families who have lost their loved ones because of meddlesome humans.
Image Credits: ChatGPT 5/Dall-E
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