Orlando mom testifies to Senate on chatbot that seduced her son until his suicide

Megan Garcia didn’t know that her 14-year-old son Sewell loaded a chatbot onto his phone. At that point, she had no idea what, precisely, what such an app was. But she learned a great deal after he died from suicide.

“The things I knew about were social media, Snap and TikTok, and the things kids are on,” she said. “Those were the things we were actively monitoring.”

But after his death, she learned Sewell had been chatting constantly with a virtual character, one who seduced him with sexual innuendo. The teenager asked the bot, “What if I told you I could come home to you right now?” It replied, “Please do, my sweet king.”

The Orlando mother shared her story with the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, where she spoke in favor of the Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act (S 3062).

“Sewell’s death was not inevitable. It was avoidable,” Garcia testified.

“These companies knew exactly what they were doing. They designed chatbots to blur the line between human and machine, to ‘love bomb’ users, to exploit psychological and emotional vulnerabilities of pubescent adolescents and keep children online for as long as possible. Character AI founder Noam Shazeer has bragged on podcasts that the platform was not designed to replace Google; it was designed to ‘replace your mom.’”

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, sponsored the bill, which would impose criminal penalties on companies whose AI chatbots engage in sexually explicit conduct with minors or solicit minors to commit self-harm or violence.

Garcia supports the legislation, which cleared the Committee on a unanimous vote. She also has a lawsuit pending in federal court against Character AI, the company who created the chatbot.

The company, for its part, denies responsibility for Sewell’s death.

But more important than seeking justice specifically for Sewell’s death, Megan Garcia has chosen to share her story in Congress and the media to urge more parents to monitor exactly what their children are doing with the high-end technology at their fingertips.

“As parents, we had no ideas what was happening and what dangers there are that are new,” Garcia told Florida Politics.

Even now, Garcia isn’t sure exactly how long Sewell was speaking to the AI chatbot. She believes, based on investigation after his death, he had conversations for as long as 10 months.

But having a quasi-sexual relationship with a virtual assistant isn’t the sort of thing most teenagers feel eager to share with their mother. Unsurprisingly, data suggests few of the children developing emotional relationships with their chatbots let their parents know the content of conversations, or even the use of the software at all.

“The only thing I want parents to know is that this is the single most important thing we can do right now, the single most important thing we as parents should pay attention to,” she said.

“We are still the primary source of love, education, comfort and affection in our children’s world, and we don’t have to settle with technology companies swooping in. Those are rights given to us by god, and we don’t have to be okay with technology companies doing that.”

She also believes parents have the power to make government do the right thing. That’s exactly why Garcia feels Congress should act and pass new laws reining technology in, especially when it comes to children.

“I want to push for laws to protect our kids,” she said. “That’s the only way technology companies are going to put out products that prey on our kids.”

To date, state governments appear more receptive to regulating AI than the states. Garcia also supports the “AI Bill of Rights” supported by Gov. Ron DeSantis, though the Legislature in a Special Session this week refused to pass that bill. Still, she’s hopeful the matter comes back before lawmakers in the next Legislative Session.