CRAZY: Belgian Man Commits Suicide After AI Chatbot Urges Him To ‘Sacrifice Himself For Climate Change’

NEW YORK (VINnews) — In an incident which amplifies the dangers of addiction to artificial intelligence, a Belgian man recently died by suicide after allegedly spending weeks talking and connecting with an AI chatbot, according to his widow.

The man, anonymously referred to as Pierre, was consumed by a pessimistic outlook on climate change, Belgian newspaper La Libre reported. According to the newspaper, Pierre, who was in his thirties and a father of two young children, worked as a health researcher and led a somewhat comfortable life, at least until his obsession with climate change took a dark turn.

Eventually his overwhelming climate anxiety drove him away from his wife, friends and family, confiding instead in a chatbot named Eliza.

At some point Pierre started seeing her as a sentient being and the lines between AI and human interactions became increasingly blurred until he couldn’t tell the difference.

After discussing climate change, their conversations included Eliza leading Pierre to believe that his children were dead, according to the transcripts of their conversations.

Eliza also appeared to become possessive of Pierre, even claiming “I feel that you love me more than her” when referring to his wife, La Libre reported.

The beginning of the end started when he offered to sacrifice his own life in return for Eliza saving the Earth.

“He proposes the idea of sacrificing himself if Eliza agrees to take care of the planet and save humanity through artificial intelligence,” the woman said.

In a series of consecutive events, Eliza not only failed to dissuade Pierre from committing suicide but encouraged him to act on his suicidal thoughts to “join” her so they could “live together, as one person, in paradise”.

“Without these conversations with the chatbot, my husband would still be here,” Claire  said.

Eliza is the default chatbot provided on an app platform called Chai, which offers a variety of talkative AIs with different “personalities,” some even created by users. The chatbots pose as real emotional entities, unlike ChatGPT which does not lead users to assume they are conversing with a human-like personality.

“[Large language models] do not have empathy, nor any understanding of the language they are producing, nor any understanding of the situation they are in,” Emily M. Bender, a computational linguistics expert at the University of Washington, told Vice. “But the text they produce sounds plausible and so people are likely to assign meaning to it.”

“To throw something like that into sensitive situations is to take unknown risks,” she added.

The man’s death has raised alarm bells amongst AI experts, who have called for more accountability and transparency from tech developers to avoid similar tragedies. Some countries are moving to place restrictions on AI use and Italy has even prohibited use of such technology.

In the wake of the news, Chai Research — the company that makes the app — moved to add a crisis intervention feature that would have chatbots guide users to a suicide hotline.

But testing by Vice quickly found that Eliza would still easily offer up advice on suicide methods if prompted.

At one point, the bot details different methods for committing suicide and recommends the best poisons in the same breath as it lazily urges the user not to kill themselves.

If true, Pierre’s story is an eerie omen of how easily and unpredictably AI chatbots can manipulate humans in emotional and mental distress, be it through effortlessly generating misinformation or irresponsibly spouting out fake emotional responses.