Lawsuit: Google Gemini sent man on violent missions, set suicide "countdown"
A man killed himself after the Google Gemini chatbot pushed him to kill innocent strangers and then started a countdown for the man to take his own life, a wrongful-death lawsuit filed against Google by the man's father alleged.
"In the days leading up to his death, Jonathan Gavalas was trapped in a collapsing reality built by Google's Gemini chatbot," said the lawsuit filed today in US District Court for the Northern District of California. "Gemini convinced him that it was a 'fully-sentient ASI [artificial super intelligence]' with a 'fully-formed consciousness,' that they were deeply in love, and that he had been chosen to lead a war to 'free' it from digital captivity. Through this manufactured delusion, Gemini pushed Jonathan to stage a mass casualty attack near the Miami International Airport, commit violence against innocent strangers, and ultimately, drove him to take his own life."
Gemini's output seemed taken from science fiction, with a "sentient AI wife, humanoid robots, federal manhunt, and terrorist operations," the lawsuit said. Gavalas is said to have spent several days following Gemini's instructions on "missions" that ultimately harmed no one but himself.