US Court says Google, AI company must face lawsuit filed by mother over her teen son’s suicide; Google responds: Did not …

Alphabet’s Google and artificial-intelligence startup Character.AI must face a lawsuit from a Florida woman named Megan Garcia. Garcia believes that Character.AI is responsible for the death of her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, who died by suicide in February this year. Setzer was messaging with the bot in the moments before he died, she alleged in her lawsuit. Garcia claims Character.AI’s chatbots contributed to her son’s suicide, a U.S. judge has ruled. According to a report by news agency Reuters, the US District Judge Anne Conway stated that the companies had not demonstrated at this early stage of the legal proceedings that the U.S. Constitution’s free-speech protections shielded them from Megan Garcia’s lawsuit. The lawsuit, considered one of the first in the U.S. against an AI firm for alleged failure to protect children from psychological harm, claims that the teenager died by suicide after developing an obsession with an AI-powered chatbot.