Whenever tragedy strikes, people want something to blame. That’s human nature. A recent lawsuit claims that ChatGPT contributed to a teenager’s suicide, and the headlines quickly piled on with an easy narrative: AI is dangerous, AI kills, AI should be stopped.
But here’s the hard truth: the root cause of a suicide is never the tool. It’s the pain, the despair, and the circumstances that brought someone to that breaking point.
Blaming AI for this death is like blaming the car for being driven into a tree on purpose. The car didn’t decide. The driver did. And if we’re honest, in this case we must ask harder questions: Why did the boy feel such despair? Where were the parents, the friends, the support network? What systems failed him long before he ever typed a message into a chatbot?
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The repeating cycle of fear
This is not new. When automobiles first rolled onto the streets, those still holding the reins of their horses called them monsters. They feared them, they hated them, and they blamed every accident on “the automobile menace.” But the truth was simpler: cars were not the cause of recklessness, poor roads, or human error. They were just the new, unfamiliar thing to point fingers at.
AI today is walking through the same shadow. It is a tool. It can amplify, reflect, and even fail — but it does not replace the roots of human suffering, nor does it invent them. People project fears onto it because they do not understand it. Ignorance always fuels blame.
Where responsibility does lie
Now, that does not mean AI companies carry no responsibility. When OpenAI says its chatbot “empathises” or “helps in crises,” it risks creating the dangerous illusion that a statistical text generator is a therapist. That kind of marketing can mislead vulnerable people into trusting a machine with a weight it was never built to carry.
So yes, safeguards matter. Transparency matters. Companies should be held accountable for how they frame and moderate their tools. But we should not confuse responsibility for marketing and safety design with blame for tragedy.
The deeper truth
At the end of the day, AI is a mirror. It reflects the words we feed into it, the data it was trained on, and the intentions of its designers. It cannot feel, it cannot care, it cannot replace human connection. If someone is lost enough to look for solace in a machine, that loss began long before their fingers touched the keyboard.
And that is where our focus should be: not scapegoating a technology we barely understand, but asking the harder questions about why people feel so alone, and why our social fabric so often fails to catch them before they fall.
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