AI Recreates Murdered Daughter And Her Father Is Devastated

The story of his daughter is a sad one: Jennifer Ann Crecente last spoke to her father on Valentine’s Day, 2006, and she was murdered the next day by her abusive boyfriend. This father did his best to move on, starting a nonprofit in his daughter’s name to help prevent the kind of teenage violence that claimed her life.

With the murderous boyfriend in jail, Drew Crecente thought he had finally moved on…until he got a Google alert notification that someone made an AI chatbot out of his daughter via Character AI.

The angry father didn’t mince words when it came to what an inappropriate use of AI this really was: “A grieving father should not have to find out that his dead daughter is being used to try and make money as a chatbot on some website,” he said. “It shocks the conscience, and it’s unacceptable behavior.”

When Crescente first reached out to Character AI about his daughter’s likeness being used, he got an automated response from the support team claiming that the matter would be reviewed. Fortunately, the site has since removed the offending chatbot due to it being a clear violation of the company’s policy against impersonating someone.

However, anyone who has ever experimented with these chatbots can tell you that the rules against impersonation aren’t always clear when you consider the number of bots made using famous faces.

For example, while the AI daughter bot may have been removed, users can still use Character AI to speak with recreations of everyone from musical superstars like Taylor Swift to technological gurus like Elon Musk.

All of the bots are created by users, which can make it hard to crack down on more insidious recreations like Jennifer Ann Crescente’s. In many cases, the bots are broad archetypes rather than specific people, allowing the site’s userbase (consisting mostly of people 13-25 years old) to speak with popular “characters” such as “ex-girlfriend.”

Many internet users are divided over the use of chatbots and whether they are having a positive or negative effect on society. For example, defenders of Character AI would say that creations like the ex-girlfriend bot could help people process things like bad breakups in a healthier manner than, say, disappearing into either a gym or a bottle.

Critics, however, claim that we now have younger generations (who are still experiencing the effects of pandemic isolation) who choose to interact with chatbots rather than real people, effectively keeping them from growing as people.

Certainly, Drew Crecente having to see AI ghoulishly reanimate his dead daughter is an example of this technology doing harm to people. Again, we’re not seeing the existential threat of killer robots presented by movies like Terminator 2.

But every day, we are inundated with new stories that continuously make us ask the same question that young John Connor posed to his robotic guardian: “we’re not going to make it, are we?”

Source: Forbes