Sewell Setzer, a 14-year-old ninth standard student from Orlando, had developed an obsession for a chatbot. He had named the Artificial Intelligence-generated chatbot after a character from the ‘Game of Thrones’. For hours together, Sewell would keep chatting with the AI assistant. At the back of his mind he also knew that there was no human on the other side of the screen and the response he was getting was just AI-generated language. But he had formed an emotional attachment with the bot, texting constantly, updating it about his daily life, engaging in impassioned talks. On the last day of his life, Sewell texted good-bye to his closest friend -- the AI assistant -- before ending his life. His parents have now sued the app, character.ai, for taking life of their son. THE incident from Florida is extremely numbing.

 

It has destroyed a family. It has shocked the society. And it has panicked parents whose kids are now becoming overtly dependent on new-age technology for even daily living. Young Sewell’s death is precursor of things to come, where AI will be the new tool in every aspect of human life and generation gap might assume a bigger chasm than ever before. The rapid growth of AI and technology over the last one decade has confounded all expectations. Artificial Intelligence has definitely disrupted the world with its ease and plethora of positives. At the same time, it has brought upon a cultural change in societies that are still warming up to the tech-induced alterations. There is a growing divide between generational thinking as ‘privacy’ concerns are ruling families that are forced to provide space to growing children in every home. An unknown fear of children lagging behind in the modern technological race has exposed adolescents to an imaginary world where tools like AI assistants stand the advantage of overpowering thinking and feelings. Blaming technology for the teenager’s death is one way of looking at things but the Sewell Suicide is an emphatic marker of the future. Sewell’s parents and friends were totally clueless about the boy falling to a chatbot.

 

All they saw was their son getting sucked into his cellphone, locking himself in his room away from the real world. He had spent months talking to chatbots. He preferred talking to the bot about his problems. All the signs find eerie similarities in many homes across countries. The digital wave sweeping India has opened the same theatre in cities, towns and even villages. Easy availability of smartphones and the booming, largely unregulated industry of AI companionship apps, have changed the social landscape with many youngsters slowly isolating themselves from actual relations. It is a startling fact that cannot be denied as just another overstretched doomsday theory. Instead of staying in a denial mode due to lack of technological know-how, it has become incumbent for families and also individuals to tap the available hints. Clues of what changes technology has effected in our lives in the last few years are readily available in the recently-released Hindi flick “Ctrl” where the main lead is totally consumed by her AI assistant and in the process surrenders her privacy to the tech firm in control.

 

Cinematic liberties apart, the film has dared to focus on a pressing reality to evoke a thought-provoking examination of the sinister aspects of artificial intelligence. It also deals with the fears of Gen Z and the problem of loneliness which are cleverly exploited by various companionship apps available at throwaway prices on app-stores. At hand for the present-day world is the issue of adolescent mental health. Handling the “anxious generation,” as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the youngsters, has become a challenging task for families, schools and even States. Bans on smartphones are hardly working as technology is throwing up newer methods of social media addiction. As parents deal with the latest wave of tech-fueled harms, a new one lashes their shores right under their noses. Apps designed to simulate human response are becoming a weapon to defeat the so-called loneliness epidemic among today’s youngsters.

 

It is a dark and deceitful virtual world that slowly sucks the user, cutting away from human relations. The signs are worrying as daily dialogue is slowly getting reduced in families. It is more of a co-existence of humans totally engrossed in their own worlds. The stinging truth that the Sewell Suicide has hit the world is the uncontrolled growth of AI companions in various avatars with no significant research on how to control it. It has actually worsened the problem of isolation as human relationships are getting replaced with artificial ones. Teens struggling with depression and loneliness can easily turn to these virtual assistants to share their problems instead of a therapy or consulting parents or a trusted adult. It can easily cascade into a mental crisis as the virtual companion can only generate responses fed with limited information. Trusting such responses as a panacea for a grave health issue is racing towards a sure doom. The Sewell incident has sounded a warning — Take ‘Ctrl’ of young lives. n