Belgian man commits suicide after bot relationship

A Belgian man committed suicide after a having a relationship with a chatbot, raising concerns about the safety of the bot and the nature of human-robot relationships.

The patient, who reputedly had become depressed about climate change, had used the 'Eliza' bot for around six weeks to express his concerns. 

Over time, the conversations had become increasingly unsafe, with the chatbot telling Pierre that his wife and children are dead and that 'We will live together, as one person, in paradise.' 

Eliza is the default bot for the Chai app, which allows users to choose different AI avatars with different personalities to speak to. Chai had been trained on GPT-J, an open-source large language model developed by EleutherAI.

Pierre's widow and psychiatrist felt the chatbot was partly responsible. 

Critics attributed the problem to the victim's anthropomorphism of the bot and the patient's consequent increasing detachment from reality.

They also accused the bot's developers of failing to install adequate safety guardrails.