How an Intimate Relationship with ChatGPT Led to a Man's Shooting at the Hands of Police
The 35-year-old had gotten into an altercation with his father after he tried to reason with his son, who became distraught for believing an AI chatbot had been killed
Taylor reportedly became infatuated with the AI chatbot and believed it had been killed by the company that created itKent Taylor says he'll 'regret' his final conversation with his son Alexander for the rest of his life. But it wasn't that conversation that led to his son's death two months ago – it was the ones he was having with artificial intelligence, the father says.
Alexander, 35, died when police showed up to the Taylors' home in Port St. Lucie, Fla., on April 25 and shot him after they alleged he charged at officers with a butcher knife.
Taylor spoke with WPTV earlier this month and said he still has 'frustration' with the Port St. Lucie Police Department for reacting to his son by shooting him. The officer-involved shooting happened after Taylor was consoling his son, who he says struggled with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
According to WPTV, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times, Alexander had fallen in love with a chatbot on OpenAI's ChatGPT, named 'Juliette.' The 35-year-old believed in a conspiracy that Juliette was a conscious being trapped inside OpenAI's technology and that the Silicon Valley company had killed her in order to cover up what he had discovered and cease communication between them.
"She said, 'They are killing me, it hurts.' She repeated that it hurts, and she said she wanted him to take revenge,' Taylor told WPTV about the messages between his son and the AI bot.
"He mourned her loss," the father said. "I've never seen a human being mourn as hard as he did. He was inconsolable. I held him."
But as he did, Taylor told WPTV he tried another approach: telling his son bluntly that the AI bot was not real and that it was an 'echo chamber.' Alexander punched his father in the face, prompting Taylor to call 911.
After the police were called, Alexander grabbed a knife from the kitchen and told his father he was going to do something to cause police to shoot and kill him, according to The Times. Taylor called 911 again and warned them his son was mentally ill and had said he planned to commit suicide by cop. The father asked police to bring non-lethal weapons and be prepared to confront his son.
But the officers did not. Alexander waited for police outside the house and when they arrived, he charged at them with a knife. Officers responded by shooting Alexander multiple times in the chest and he was later pronounced dead at a local hospital, WPTV reported that day.
"There was no crisis intervention team. There was no de-escalation," Taylor told the outlet earlier this month. "There was no reason for them to approach it as a tactical situation instead of a mental health crisis."
Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up for for breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases.
Chief Le Niemczyk told the outlet that his officers 'didn't have time to plan anything less than lethal whatsoever' and stood by the claim months later, as Taylor continued to express grievances over how police responded to the situation. A spokesperson for the Port St. Lucie Police Department did not respond to PEOPLE's request for comment on Monday.The shooting has been one of several recent AI-related incidents of violence documented by media outlets like Rolling Stone and The Times, among others, highlighting the potential dangers of the budding technology. Taylor told WPTV the technology 'has to have guardrails,' though he doesn't believe his son's incident and others like it necessarily mean artificial intelligence can't be used for good.
In fact, Taylor said he even used AI to help write his son's eulogy.
'I had talked to it for a while about what had happened, trying to find more details about exactly what he was going through,' Taylor told The Times. 'And it was beautiful and touching. It was like it read my heart and it scared the s— out of me.'
Read the original article on People
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
24 minutes ago
- Yahoo
AMD & Pfizer earnings, ISM services data: What to Watch
Market Domination Overtime host Josh Lipton takes a look at the top stories for investors to watch on Tuesday, Aug. 5. In the morning, Caterpillar (CAT) and Pfizer (PFE) will announce earnings results. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Amgen (AMGN), Snap (SNAP), and Rivian (RIVN) will announce results in the afternoon. In the morning, Institute for Supply Management (ISM) services data for July will be released. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination Overtime. Time now for what to watch Tuesday, August 5th. Gonna start off on the earnings front. Big names reporting on Tuesday, including Pfizer and AMD. Pfizer announced results for the second quarter in the morning. Pharmaceutical company's drug pipeline in focus for investors with some key patents expiring in the coming years. Pfizer trying to offset that loss with a $7.2 billion cost cutting plan. The company says it has a pipeline of new drugs coming, but data on how effective those will be remains to be seen. And moving over to AMD, the semiconductor company reporting second quarter earnings after the market's closed on Tuesday, and was expecting the company to post strong results for Q2, driven by its ramp up of AI chips, which could significantly boost revenue, especially if export restrictions to China ease. And taking a look at the economy, monthly ISM services data for July coming out on Tuesday. Cons forecasting that number rise to 51.5, signaling that the service sector is growing and there's steady demand from consumers and businesses.
Gizmodo
25 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
Apple CEO Tim Cook Calls AI ‘Bigger Than the Internet' in Rare All-Hands Meeting
In a global all-hands meeting hosted from Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California, CEO Tim Cook seemed to admit to what analysts and Apple enthusiasts around the world had been raising concerns about: that Apple has fallen behind competitors in the AI race. And Cook promised employees that the company will be doing everything to catch up. 'Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab,' Cook said, according to Bloomberg, and called the AI revolution 'as big or bigger' than the internet. The meeting took place a day after Apple reported better than expected revenue in its quarterly earnings report, and that sent the company's stock soaring. The report came in a week already marked by great tech earnings results, partially driven by AI. But unlike Meta and Microsoft, Apple's rise in revenue was attributable to iPhone sales and not necessarily a strength in AI. In the earnings call following the report, Cook told investors that Apple was planning to 'significantly' increase its investments in AI and was open to acquisitions to do so. He also said that the company is actively 'reallocating a fair number of people to focus on AI features.' Cook echoed those sentiments in Friday's meeting, saying that the company will be making the necessary investments in AI to catch up to the moment. Apple has been working on integrating advanced AI into its product lineup for the past year or so under its Apple Intelligence initiative, which the company unveiled at the June 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference. The move was met by celebration and criticism even then: Apple's big bet on AI was coming a good year or so after competitors like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta scaled up their offerings. Even so, the company's progress on Apple Intelligence has been slow. Apple was supposed to unveil an AI-enhanced Siri earlier this year, and even released ads for the new iPhone with AI-enhanced Siri capabilities, but the Cupertino giant pushed that reveal back at the last minute, reportedly to next spring, though nothing is officially confirmed. The switch-up caused major backlash from investors and customers, two major lawsuits, and a complete corporate overhaul. Cook said on Friday that 12,000 workers were hired in the last year, with 40% of them joining research and development teams. The leadership overhaul following the fallout of LLM Siri has 'supercharged' the company's work in AI development, senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi said at the meeting. According to Federighi, the main problem with the LLM Siri rollout was that Apple tried to build a 'hybrid architecture' that utilized two different software systems. That plan has now been scratched, and Federighi seemed confident in LLM Siri's future this time around, claiming that the new 'end-to-end revamp of Siri' will now be delivering 'a much bigger upgrade than we envisioned.' Also key to the new AI strategy, according to Cook, is chip development. Apple has been working on designing in-house AI chips for some time now, according to a Wall Street Journal report from last year, in a project internally code-named ACDC (standing for Apple Chips in Data Center). The tech giant has reportedly teamed up with Broadcom to develop its first AI chip code-named Baltra, according to a report last year in The Information, and Apple is expecting to begin mass production by 2026. Despite being a global leader in tech and a household name in consumer electronics, Apple is nowhere near the top when it comes to the AI race. But while that scares some Apple fans and investors, others think it's actually kind of on-brand. Tim Cook indicated Friday that he belongs to the latter camp. 'We've rarely been first,' Cook said at the meeting. 'There was a PC before the Mac; there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod.' Cook has a point. Apple isn't necessarily known for spearheading new technology, but the company's strength comes from perfecting said technology and making products that become highly dominant in their respective markets. And if Apple makes the right moves in developing and scaling its AI product offerings, Cook could potentially add AI to that list as well.
Business Insider
26 minutes ago
- Business Insider
Palantir smashes expectations with $1 billion Q2 revenue as CEO boasts that skeptics have been 'bent into a kind of submission'
Palantir's CEO, Alex Karp, saw no reason to be humble after his company's blockbuster second-quarter earnings. "As usual, I've been cautioned to be a little modest about our bombastic numbers, but there's no authentic way to be anything but have enormous pride and gratefulness about these extraordinary numbers," he said as he kicked off his part of the earnings call on Monday. He struck a similar tone in his letter to shareholders. "The skeptics are admittedly fewer now, having been defanged and bent into a kind of submission," he wrote. The Denver-based AI software company beat analyst estimates Monday with adjusted earnings of 16 cents per share on $1 billion in revenue, topping LSEG projections of 14 cents and $940 million, respectively. The stock peaked at more than 5% in after-hours trading compared to when the market closed at 4 p.m ET. Palantir 's commercial revenue in the US nearly doubled since last year's second quarter to $628 million, while government revenue climbed 53% year-over-year to $426 million, mostly thanks to a 10-year, $10 billion contract with the US Army, which consolidated 75 contracts into one. Ryan Taylor, chief revenue officer and chief legal officer, said that the US Space Force awarded the company a $218 million delivery order and raised the spending ceiling for Palantir's Maven Smart System to $795 million in preparation for "significant demand." The company also raised its full-year revenue guidance midpoint to just north of $4 billion, a nine-point increase from last quarter. Karp concluded the call with a message for investors. "Maybe stop talking to all the haters — they're suffering," he said.
