A judge in Florida just rejected a motion to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that the chatbot startup Character.AI and its closely tied benefactor, Google, caused the death by suicide of a 14-year-old user, clearing the way for the first-of-its-kind lawsuit to move forward in court. The lawsuit, filed in October in Florida, claims that recklessly-released Character.AI chatbots sexually and emotionally abused a teenage user, Sewell Setzer III, resulting in severe mental and emotional suffering and, after a swift mental decline coinciding with an obsessive use of the platform, his February 2024 suicide. In January, the defendants in the case — […]