A father was horrified to discover that his dead daughter's yearbook photo and name were being used by an AI chatbot.
Drew Crecente's daughter Jennifer Ann Crecente was murdered by her ex-boyfriend while she was a senior in high school on Feb. 14, 2006. The ex-boyfriend was convicted and is now in prison, and Drew Crecente has since started a nonprofit to prevent dating violence amongst teens, as reported by Forbes.
As the nonprofit was created in her name, Crecente regularly monitors any mention of her name online. He was horrified to receive a notification Wednesday that his daughter's yearbook photo and name had been used to create a chatbot on the popular AI site, Character AI.
This is fucking disgusting: @character_ai is using my murdered niece as the face of a video game AI without her dad's permission. He is very upset right now. I can't imagine what he's going through.
— Brian Crecente (@crecenteb) October 2, 2024
Please help us stop this sort of terrible practice. https://t.co/y3gvAYyHVY
"A grieving father should not have to find out that his dead daughter is being used to try and make money as a chatbot on some website," he told Forbes. "It shocks the conscience, and it's unacceptable behavior."
Crecente said when he reached out to Character AI, he just got an automated response that his complaint would be reviewed. The chatbot has since been removed, as a Character AI spokesperson told Forbes that it violated the site's policies. Character AI said they will examine if further action if needed.
"It should not be on me to try and police this company that has hundreds of millions of dollars," Crecente told Forbes. "It seems like many of these companies don't recognize the responsibility they have to not only deal with the negative effects of their use of their technology, but to prevent this type of abuse from happening in the first place."
Character AI's Terms of Service states that its impersonation policy bars "deepfakes or impersonation of any kind, including but not limited to those that create political misinformation, perpetrate frauds or scams, impugn the reputation of third parties, or otherwise amount to harmful conduct."
More than 18 million chatbots have been created on Character AI, mostly of celebrities such as Taylor Swift and Elon Musk. Other popular characters include general labels such as "ex-girlfriend" or "psychologist."
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