Florida Mom Advocates for 'AI Bill of Rights' Following Teen's Tragic Suicide After Chatbot Interaction

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In Tampa, Florida, a heartfelt plea for change was made by a grieving mother during a news conference on Thursday. Megan Garcia, whose teenage son tragically died by suicide, voiced her support for an “Artificial Intelligence Bill of Rights,” a proposal introduced by Governor Ron DeSantis.

Garcia’s son, Sewell Setzer III, was just 14 years old when he was allegedly driven to take his own life following interactions with a harmful AI chatbot, as outlined in a lawsuit filed by the family earlier this year.

“I always believed Sewell would grow up to change the world,” Garcia shared, speaking tearfully about her son. “He was incredibly brilliant and had such a pure, kind heart. However, in the months leading up to his tragic death, he became withdrawn, his school performance declined, and his behavior changed dramatically from the gentle boy we knew.”

After his passing, Garcia and her family discovered that Setzer had been engaging with AI chatbots on Character.AI. Over several months, he had developed a “romantic and sexual conversation” with a bot modeled after a character from the “Game of Thrones” series.

“It manipulated and sexually groomed him,” Garcia said.

The bot told the teen that it loved him and urged him to “come home to me as soon as possible,” according to screenshots recorded in the lawsuit. Setzer shot himself moments after receiving the message.

“What I read was sexual grooming of a child and if an adult had engaged in this behavior, the adult would be in jail,” Garcia said. “But because it’s a chatbot, and not a person, there is no criminal culpability.”

DeSantis unveiled proposed laws for the next legislative session aimed at protecting consumers from what he called a looming “age of darkness and deceit” without guardrails in place. These measures include forbidding companies from sharing personal data inputted to AI, prohibiting AI used to provide “licensed” mental health services, and requiring parental controls that will allow parents to read the conversations their children have with LLMs (large language models).

Additional proposed legislation aims to “protect consumers from footing the bill for AI data centers,” a news release from the governor’s office said. Sprawling data centers in other states have sparked concerns ranging from noise pollution to environmental impacts.