How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death

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Center for Humane Technology

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4.8 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2025

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

16-year-old Adam Raine took his own life with the help of ChatGPT. Now his parents are suing OpenAI and Sam Altman. CHT Policy Director Camille Carlton explores the incentives and design behind AI systems leading to tragic outcomes like this and the policy that’s needed to shift those incentives.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, it's Tristan Harris, co-host of Your Undivided Attention. Now, you're about to hear a very
0:05.6	difficult conversation with Aza, and I'm sure it'll raise a lot of questions for you about the trajectory
0:10.6	that we're on with AI. And our annual Ask Us Anything episode is the perfect opportunity to raise
0:16.4	those questions. We often say in our work that clarity creates agency. And if you have a question,
0:23.1	there's likely millions of other listeners of this podcast and people around the world who also
0:27.1	have this question. So please just take a short video, no more than about 60 seconds, on your phone,
0:32.5	and send it to undivided at humanetech.com. And again, that's undivided at humanetech.com.
0:40.9	We can't wait to hear what's on your mind
0:42.6	and how it can better inform the actions that we all take
0:45.4	to respond to this urgent situation.
0:51.5	Hey, everyone.
0:52.7	Welcome to your undivided attention.
0:55.8	I'm Azaraskin.
0:58.7	Today's episode, it's emotional, at least for me.
1:05.5	If you've been a listener to the show, you know that we've been tracking the development of the case of
1:12.0	Sewell Setzer, who was the 14-year-old boy who took his own life after months of abuse by an
1:20.3	AI companion bond. And this episode is about a kind of follow-up case because in the Sewell-Setzer case, he was using a chatbot by character AI that was explicitly meant as a companion bot to form a relationship.
1:41.6	This time, we're talking about a teen who took his own life after spending
1:48.2	something like seven months with chat GPT, a general purpose chatbot. Around 70% of teens
1:58.3	use tools like chat chaptiPT for doing schoolwork.
2:03.2	And in this case, the teen, Adam, started by using Chad GPT for schoolwork before starting
2:10.7	to divulge more private information and ended up taking his life.
	...

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