Haunted

Character.AI allows people to create, well, generative "AI" characters (who could have guessed). And. earlier this week, a user created one of Jennifer Anne Crecente, who was murdered by her boyfriend in 2006, when she was 18. The family was not happy.

But what's up in the air at this point is what can be done about it. While people are angry with the company on the family's behalf and calls for lawsuits have already started, as is common in such things, no-one has yet pointed to any laws or regulations that have been broken. And while the American legal system is convoluted enough that it's generally possible to find something that can be grounds for a civil tort or criminal charge, that's not a good use of the law.

What's going to be put in place to deal with this will, more than likely be driven by emotion, rather than sound legal doctrine. While it's possible that it will turn out that the creation of large language model-based character chatbots will be limited to the person that the character is a likeness of, that strikes me as unlikely. There is going to be a market for representations of people who have already died; Hollywood will see to that, and they're unlikely to settle for always needing to deal with all of the heirs and other relations of an actor they would like to resurrect for a movie. Let alone historical figures, whose extant families might easily number into the hundreds or thousands of people. Even making exceptions for people killed by violence seems unlikely to fly, in that circumstance.

Still, something will likely have to be done. Society will demand it, and it's difficult to say that anything should go.

The technology ethos of "move fast and break things" means that it's always going to be ahead of the regulatory state, which moves quickly only when Congress is overreacting to something. And even then it can't match the speed of innovation. The resources to allow government agencies to actually attempt to get out ahead of things like this are not forthcoming, and even if they were, businesses have a tendency to keep secrets in the name of competitiveness.

It would, I think, be better if a public consensus could be reached on what limits and prohibitions should be placed in technology, but that would require a level of cooperation that's unlikely to come into being any time soon.