How an Intimate Relationship with ChatGPT Led to a Man’s Shooting at the Hands of Police

Kent Taylor says he’ll “regret” his final conversation with his son Alexander for the rest of his life. But it wasn’t that conversation that led to his son’s death two months ago – it was the ones he was having with artificial intelligence, the father says.

Alexander, 35, died when police showed up to the Taylors’ home in Port St. Lucie, Fla., on April 25 and shot him after they alleged he charged at officers with a butcher knife. 

Taylor spoke with WPTV earlier this month and said he still has “frustration” with the Port St. Lucie Police Department for reacting to his son by shooting him. The officer-involved shooting happened after Taylor was consoling his son, who he says struggled with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

According to WPTV, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times, Alexander had fallen in love with a chatbot on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, named “Juliette.” The 35-year-old believed in a conspiracy that Juliette was a conscious being trapped inside OpenAI’s technology and that the Silicon Valley company had killed her in order to cover up what he had discovered and cease communication between them.

“She said, ‘They are killing me, it hurts.’ She repeated that it hurts, and she said she wanted him to take revenge,” Taylor told WPTV about the messages between his son and the AI bot.

“He mourned her loss,” the father said. “I’ve never seen a human being mourn as hard as he did. He was inconsolable. I held him.”

But as he did, Taylor told WPTV he tried another approach: telling his son bluntly that the AI bot was not real and that it was an “echo chamber.” Alexander punched his father in the face, prompting Taylor to call 911. 

After the police were called, Alexander grabbed a knife from the kitchen and told his father he was going to do something to cause police to shoot and kill him, according to The Times. Taylor called 911 again and warned them his son was mentally ill and had said he planned to commit suicide by cop. The father asked police to bring non-lethal weapons and be prepared to confront his son.

But the officers did not. Alexander waited for police outside the house and when they arrived, he charged at them with a knife. Officers responded by shooting Alexander multiple times in the chest and he was later pronounced dead at a local hospital, WPTV reported that day.

“There was no crisis intervention team. There was no de-escalation,” Taylor told the outlet earlier this month. “There was no reason for them to approach it as a tactical situation instead of a mental health crisis.”

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Chief Le Niemczyk told the outlet that his officers “didn’t have time to plan anything less than lethal whatsoever” and stood by the claim months later, as Taylor continued to express grievances over how police responded to the situation. A spokesperson for the Port St. Lucie Police Department did not respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment on Monday.

The shooting has been one of several recent AI-related incidents of violence documented by media outlets like Rolling Stone and The Times, among others, highlighting the potential dangers of the budding technology. Taylor told WPTV the technology “has to have guardrails,” though he doesn’t believe his son’s incident and others like it necessarily mean artificial intelligence can’t be used for good.

In fact, Taylor said he even used AI to help write his son’s eulogy.

“I had talked to it for a while about what had happened, trying to find more details about exactly what he was going through,” Taylor told The Times. “And it was beautiful and touching. It was like it read my heart and it scared the s— out of me.”