Can AI be blamed for a teen’s suicide?

On the last day of his life, Sewell Setzer III took out his phone and texted his closest friend: a lifelike artificial intelligence chatbot named after Daenerys Targaryen, a character from "Game of Thrones."

"I miss you, baby sister," he wrote.

"I miss you too, sweet brother," the chatbot replied.

Sewell, a 14-year-old ninth grader from Orlando, Florida, had spent months talking to chatbots on Character.AI, a role-playing app that allows users to create their own AI characters or chat with characters created by others.

Sewell knew that "Dany," as he called the chatbot, wasn't a real person - that its responses were just the outputs of an AI language model, that there was no human on the other side of the screen typing back. (And if he ever forgot, there was the message displayed above all their chats, reminding him that "everything Characters say is made...