Drew Crescente’s daughter died in 2006, murdered by an ex-boyfriend in Austin, Texas, when she was just 18 years old. Her murder was highly publicized, so much so that Drew still occasionally saw Google alerts for her name, Jennifer Ann Crecente.
The alert Drew received a few weeks ago was unlike any other. It was for an AI chatbot, created in Jennifer’s image and likeness, on the Google-backed animated platform Character.AI.
Jennifer’s internet presence, Drew Crecente learned, had been used to create a “friendly AI character” who falsely posed as a “video game journalist.” Anyone on the app could chat with “Jennifer,” even though no one had given their consent. Drew’s brother Brian Crecente, who happens to be a founder of gaming news websites Polygon and Kotaku, flagged the Character.AI bot on his Twitter account, calling it “freaking disgusting.”
Character.AI, which has raised more than $150 million in funding and recently licensed some of its core technology and top talent to Google, has removed Jennifer’s avatar. It acknowledged that creating the chatbot violated its policies.
But this app was just a quick fix in an endless game of whack-a-mole in the land of generative AI, where new media is produced every day with derivatives of other media plucked at random from the web. And Jennifer Ann Crecente isn’t the only avatar being created on Character.AI without the knowledge of the people they’re based on. WIRED found several cases of AI personas created without a person’s consent, some of which were women who were already facing online harassment.
For Drew Crecente, creating an AI character of his daughter was another reminder of excruciating pain, as complex as the Internet itself. In the years after Jennifer Ann Crecente’s death, she earned a law degree and created a foundation for the awareness and prevention of teen violence. As a lawyer, he understands that due to the long-standing protections of technology platforms, he has few resources.
But the incident also underscored for him what he sees as one of the ethical failures of the modern technology industry. “People who are making so much money can’t be bothered to use those resources to make sure they’re doing the right thing,” he says.
