Our Robot Stories Haven’t Prepared Us for A.I.

This week, my newsroom colleague Kevin Roose chronicled the heartbreaking story of Sewell Setzer III, a Florida teenager who took his own life — and whose mother blames Character.AI, a role-playing app where users interact with artificial intelligence chatbots, for his retreat from normal social life and then reality itself.

The boy had a particularly intense relationship with a chatbot named Dany, after Daenerys Targaryen from “Game of Thrones.” He said he was in love with her, he talked to her constantly, he raced to his room at night to be with her — all unbeknown to his parents and his human friends. In one of his journal entries, Sewell wrote: “I like staying in my room so much because I start to detach from this ‘reality,’ and I also feel more at peace, more connected with Dany and much more in love with her, and just happier.”

When he expressed suicidal thoughts, the bot told him not to talk like that, but in language that seemed to hype up his romantic obsession. One of his last messages to Dany was a promise or wish to come home to her; “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love,” the A.I. told him in reply, shortly before he shot himself.

I read this story while I was still turning over my reaction to “The Wild Robot,” a new hit children’s movie based on a popular novel. The titular robot, Roz, is built as the sort of personal assistant that today’s A.I. investors hope to one day sell. Washed ashore on an island after a shipwreck, she makes a home among the native animals, rears a gosling and evolves away from her programming to become a mother and a protector.

Everybody seems to like the movie, both critics and audiences. I did not, in part because I thought it was overstuffed with plot — for existentialist robots, I prefer “WALL-E”; for goose-migration stories, “Fly Away Home” — and in part because it seemed, frankly, antihumanist, with a vision of a peaceable kingdom free of human corruption and populated exclusively by A.I. and animal kind.

Maybe I’m overthinking that last point. But one thing that definitely stood out was how the tropes and clichés of our robot stories have not actually prepared us for the world of Dany and other A.I. simulacra.