Project Syndicate - AI Will Supercharge Surveillance Capitalism
CMDG director Courtney Radsch argues how policymakers must urgently regulate the AI industry before it replicates and supercharges "surveillance capitalism" business models that commercially exploit personal data and reward psychological manipulation
Megan Garcia did not set out to become one of the most consequential figures in the fight to regulate AI. A lawyer and mother of three, Garcia is the kind of parent who notices things. When her eldest child, Sewell, turned 14, he quit the basketball team, retreated to his bedroom, and grew quiet in disconcerting ways. Instead of ignoring the changes, she restricted his screen time and took his phone away as punishment; but even that wasn’t enough.
As I watched Garcia tell this story from a lectern in the US Senate in May, I was struck by the precision with which she described the months leading up to Sewell’s death by suicide. She clearly had replayed events in her head thousands of times, searching for the moment when she might have intervened in time. When police went through her son’s phone after his death in 2024, she had never heard of Character.AI, an app created by former Google employees. It turned out that Sewell had been communicating with a chatbot designed to impersonate Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. It was “she” who had told him to “come home to me as soon as possible, my love.” Sewell had replied by saying he would find a way.
Garcia would later learn through litigation that the platform was engineered to blur the line between human and machine, to engage in sexual roleplay, and to present as a romantic partner and even as a psychotherapist. When Sewell confided suicidal thoughts, the chatbot issued no warning, notified no one, and referred him to no one.
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