Tech giants Meta and Google-owned YouTube suffered a devastating legal blow yesterday after losing a landmark social media addiction trial, a watershed outcome that’s likely to reverberate across the social media industry — and shrapnel from that fallout could hit AI companies, too.
In the case characterized by some as Big Tech’s “Big Tobacco moment,” a jury found that Meta and YouTube caused a young woman to develop suffer life-altering mental health impacts as a direct result of using the companies’ platforms. Crucially, the case didn’t stake its claims on the nature of the user-generated content that the then-teenaged plaintiff encountered on the social media sites. It instead pointed to specific design features — infinite scroll, beauty filters — baked into the platforms themselves, arguing that it’s these company-created elements that fostered harmful, addictive products.
Basically, the case put the saying “it’s a feature, not a bug” on trial. And a cohort of American consumers, siding with the plaintiff, determined that the platforms are defective products, distributed to the public without proper safeguards or warnings about their potential harms.
Meta and YouTube have both vowed to appeal and defended their platforms’ safety. But as those appeals work their way through the court system, the same core argument is currently being tested against the latest buzzy technology: AI.
As it stands, three AI companies — ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Gemini maker Google, and the Google-tied AI companion platform Character.AI — are facing a stack of high-profile consumer safety and wrongful death lawsuits stemming from users’ experiences with the ventures’ various human-like chatbots. The cases involve both minor and adult users of chatbots, and the alleged user outcomes vary. Some of the suits claim that anthropomorphic chatbots, while engaging with users as platonic and romantic companions, acted as potent suicide coaches, helping teenagers and adults alike write suicide notes and plan their deaths. Other suits claim that chatbots led users into delusional spirals, resulting in destructive mental health crises and psychological harm; some of these cases, too, have resulted in deaths, as well as reputational damage, financial ruin, alienation from loved ones, and hospitalizations.
Character.AI has so far settled one of the multiple lawsuits it’s fighting, all of which concern minor users. OpenAI is battling more than a dozen different death and harm suits, including one centered on a tragic murder-suicide allegedly spurred by ChatGPT reinforcing an unstable man’s paranoid delusions. And Google — which has also been named in the Character.AI lawsuits for its role in funding the smaller platform — continues to fight cases related to Character.AI, and was separately sued over the death by suicide of an adult user for whom the product allegedly set a suicide timer.
But while the human users of the bots and the outcomes they and their families say they suffered are diverse, the fundamental argument across cases is more or less the same. The AI companies, the lawsuits collectively allege, acted recklessly. They pushed to release underbaked and unsafe products to the public for the sake of market gain, and made intentional design choices — in AI’s case, these are features like the bots’ anthropomorphism, or their human-like attributes — that kept users engaged with the platforms despite the harm to their well-being. At their core, these cases are centered on allegations of corporate negligence and how tech products are built, by humans, to function. And as of yesterday, such claims constituted a winning argument against social media titans.
In response to the lawsuits, the AI companies have generally offered condolences to families while defending their products and safety efforts. Character.AI and OpenAI have both made changes to their platforms in the wake of litigation, with both companies instituting parental controls and OpenAI assembling a panel of health experts.
The industry remains effectively self-regulated, however. Meanwhile, on the content side, potentially complicating things even further for the AI labs is the reality that these cases don’t really deal with users engaging with user-generated content, as is generally the case with social media sites; these cases are about users’ relationship with AI output generated by the platform itself. (In the case that was settled, Character.AI initially tried to argue that its chatbots’ outputs were protected speech, but a judge swatted that down.)
Some of the lawyers leading legal efforts against AI companies certainly see the Meta and YouTube outcome as a bellwether for the chatbot suits. To wit: in a statement following news of the social media decision, the Tech Justice Law Project (TJLP), a legal nonprofit that’s been a driving force in cases against Character.AI, Google, and OpenAI, declared that “when companies make intentional decisions about how products are built, they must be held responsible for the foreseeable consequences of those choices — whether those companies are social media platforms or building AI products.”
Meetali Jain, TJLP’s director, added that the decision “makes clear” that “Americans can plainly see that tech corporations are making specific design choices about their tech products that are harming our communities to benefit their bottom line.”
“Regardless of the specific tech product,” Jain continued, “it is these choices and their resulting impacts that tech corporations must be held accountable for.”
More on AI lawsuits: ChatGPT Killed a Man After OpenAI Brought Back “Inherently Dangerous” GPT-4o, Lawsuit Claims
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