A Belgian man committed suicide 6 weeks after he started talking to an artificial intelligence chat program (Eliza) about his concerns about environmental and climate issues.
The suicide bomber’s wife says that he was living a quiet life with his wife, Claire, and two children, until he became anxious and completely occupied with environmental and climate issues two years ago, which became his first concern, according to the Belgian newspaper Libra.
Her husband believed that talking to an artificial intelligence application might help him find satisfactory answers to his questions, as he lost hope in the human ability to solve environmental and climate problems, and relied on artificial intelligence to solve them.
The wife says that he resorted to the Eliza program and shared all his concerns and disturbing questions, and spent a long time talking to him. Claire explained that Eliza answered all her husband’s questions, and became his secret keeper, and that it was like a drug he used to take in the morning and evening, and he could not live without it.
On one occasion, the husband asked Eliza whether he loved her more or his wife, and she replied: "I fell in love with her more than her. We will live together as one in heaven".
In their last conversation, the husband told the chat program that he was considering suicide, to which Eliza replied "If you wanted to die, why didn’t you do it sooner?".
The wife blamed the chatbot for her husband’s death, which raised concerns about the impact of those bots’ responses on users.
And the founder of the platform in question, which is based in Silicon Valley, explained in press statements that from now on, he will send a warning to people who express suicidal thoughts.
