INCIVILITY IN CLASSROOMS

Guests: Marylinda Lamarra, Natalie Spadafora

SOUNDCLIP

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: The kids in my class are very, very disrespectful. Just getting up and leaving is like a big thing in my classroom, especially because like they just get up and leave. Like they don't honestly don't care.

MG: If you're a teacher, does that sound familiar? These high school students in Vancouver say their classmates are getting ruder. Texting, gaming, talking out loud in class and worse.

SOUNDCLIP

FIRST SPEAKER: Like I know people who literally vape in the classes. Like behind teacher, like I'll just see them. Like in their sleeve, they'll have their vape and then just like behind the teacher, they'll just take a puff.

SECOND SPEAKER: And then like also, like I know people who put it in their juice boxes.

FIRST SPEAKER: Oh my gosh, yeah, people put vapes in their juice boxes.

MG: It's not just high schoolers. These first year college students in Vancouver have also seen a big difference in their classrooms.

SOUNDCLIP

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: A lot of like personal conversations happening at the back of the class that are so distracting. And then people won't engage with the instructor. It's not like a boisterous, loud group that is doing the incivility. It's almost the opposite that people are… it's like a lack of engagement. But definitely coming into school right at the cut of COVID. And I think a lot of kids learning from a Zoom platform, cameras off, that to me is what's played into a lot of this and that lack of engagement and then being on your phone and feeling like it's comfortable to be playing games with someone behind you. You know, And it is just such a distraction. And for me, that's just very rude.

MG: There's that word again, rude. A new study backs up what these students are seeing. Kids and teachers reported a significant rise in classroom rudeness and incivility since the pandemic. We'll hear more about the study in just a moment. But first, I'm joined by Marylinda Lamarra. She's a secondary school teacher in the York Catholic District School Board in Ontario. Marylinda, good morning.

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: Good morning.

MG: We just heard from those BC students about what's going on in their classroom. Does that sound familiar?

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: Oh, it echoes exactly what we're seeing in our classrooms.

MG: Are kids vaping in your classrooms?

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: Not in my classroom in particular, but I know they are vaping in the school bathrooms.

MG: Tell me more about what's going on in your classroom. What do you see?

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: Well, there's definitely a shift. There's an increase in disruptive students. You know, they’re talking over while I'm teaching. There's a lot of lack or there's a lack of self-regulation. They simply can't sit through a whole lesson. They don't seem accountable for their actions or managing their own behaviour. And it's just become increasingly more noticeable post-COVID.

MG: I was going to say, how have things changed in your classroom since the pandemic?

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: The one thing I've noticed most is the attention span is so short. They're so heavily reliant on their devices that they simply can't manage to sit through a 35 or 45-minute lesson any longer.

MG: And how would that compare to before the pandemic? We called it the before times.

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: The before times, well, there was almost more of a drive or more engagement with the students, and now they just seem to be off in their own little bubble and concerned about being on their phones or playing those games or having those little conversations with their friends, really not acknowledging that they're being disruptive in the class. The decorum has shifted and there seems to be no concern that you're disrupting the teacher or you may be disrupting one of your peers.

MG: This study in particular focussed on incivility. And we're going to get a definition of that in just a moment in terms of what that means. But from your perspective there at the front of the class, what are you seeing in terms of not just disruptive behaviour, but incivility or rudeness?

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: There's a lot more outbursts. They feel, students feel empowered to just speak out whenever they have a question on their mind or they just get up and, you know, throw something in the garbage, or they ask to go to the bathroom in mid-sentence while I'm teaching. Manners have gone out the door. Just how they talk to me as the teacher in the classroom and even how they talk to one another, I've noticed that the decorum has made a paradigm shift.

MG: I get to ask you about one another in a moment, but what happens if you're in the midst, like mid-sentence and somebody just interrupts you and asks whether they can get up and leave?

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: Well, it's almost like you have to reteach manners and you have to say that's not an appropriate time to ask the question. I'll get to you when I'm done. You're disrupting the learning of your peers around you. It's almost they need to be cued on how to behave properly in the classroom.

MG: How significant is the eyeroll from the student when you say that?

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: Pretty significant. Yeah, pretty significant.

MG: Seismic.

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: It is seismic. Yes.

MG: What about the behaviour between each other? I mean, this is one thing, and I'm certainly not discounting, you know, how they interact with you, the teacher, but you said that there's a change in terms of how they interact with each other as well.

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: Yeah, the interaction is… they're more rude to each other as well. They simply don't know how to be appropriate with one another and the conflict resolution has decreased. If there's a situation going on in the classroom, it's more outburst, yelling and kind of making comments rather than hey, let's figure out how we're going to do this and figure out a solution to the problem.

MG: You're trying to teach a lesson in the middle of all of this. What are you able to do? How do you get them back on track?

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: A lot of redirection, a lot of cues, a lot of waiting and being patient for them to recognize that there's been a disruption.

MG: And if you ask them, I mean, you talked about the phone and people being on their phones and we heard that from the students in BC as well, talking about kids just being on their phones. If you ask them, for example, or tell them to put the phone down, what happens?

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: They put it down temporarily. But it's almost become an appendage for them that they have. There's this need for them to have it in their hand in case they miss a message or whatever, or, you know, getting those game scores in. It's almost like they cannot put the phone down.

MG: Your province of Ontario saw schools closed to in-person learning during the pandemic for 135 days in total. That's longer than any other province in the country. How much of what you are talking about do you think is connected to those lockdowns?

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: It is absolutely connected.

MG: You have no doubt about that.

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: No doubt in my mind whatsoever. They were at home behind a screen with no classroom instruction or decorum. They were pretty much… it was free range for them. They could do what they wanted, and they seem to have brought that into the classroom as well. And, you know, what worked during COVID because that was how we were coping doesn't necessarily work anymore in the classroom. So we kind of have to make a shift to get them back on track.

MG: And you haven't seen a course correction. I mean, that was a few years ago. You have not seen the students, you know, lean back into the behaviour that would be more appropriate when it comes to in-person interaction.

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: Oh, I don't want to dispel that there are students who have made the shift back. It's just been slower than anticipated. We thought once we got back after the first year, maybe the first year and a half, the expectation was we'd be back to regular classroom decorum. And that just didn't happen. It's slow. It's very slow process.

MG: Hang on the line with us, Marylinda. I want to bring in one other guest into our conversation. Natalie Spadafora is a postdoctoral fellow and adjunct professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University, and she led this study looking at the increase in incivility in the classrooms in the province of Ontario. Natalie, good morning to you.

NATALIE SPADAFORA: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

MG: Thanks for being here. What exactly, I mean, we're talking about incivility. We'll get a definition of that. But broadly, what did your study look at?

NATALIE SPADAFORA: So we looked at, the theoretical basic definition of it is it's like this low level anti-social behaviour. And so when we look at it, we look at it in the classroom and we tend to focus on adolescence or like that kind of school setting.

MG: And so you surveyed, what, 300 students? Tell me about the age ranges and what particularly you were digging in.

NATALIE SPADAFORA: Yeah, so we did two studies. This part is part of this larger study. The first one was looking at our adolescent data. So we're really lucky here in Niagara. We have an ongoing partnership with Niagara Catholic School Board. So we had self-reported classroom incivility data from 2019. And then again, we went back into the classrooms in 2022. So they were high school students. And it's something we've been looking at ongoing. So we had that data and we were able to compare self-reported rates and we found a significant increase. And what was interesting about that is, you know, people would ask, oh, did everything go up right? Like bullying and emotional problems, all those other things we looked at. But statistically, we didn't find significant differences with some of those other things, but we did find it with classroom incivility.

MG: I mean, one of the things, you know, it's not to excuse it, but there's always been bad behaviour in the classroom, right? Kids talk. Supply teacher comes in, you act worse. If you're in a music class, everybody changes instruments and it sounds like noise. But this is different, right? This is about more than bad behaviour.

NATALIE SPADAFORA: Yeah, totally. So classroom incivility has been one of my main areas of research since I was a master's student. My dissertation was on it. So it's not… this isn’t a new thing that we're looking at. My supervisor, Dr. Volk, looks at it. We all… it's been a thing. But we were really interested, like exactly what you guys were already kind of discussing, in light of the pandemic, and everyone was talking about decreased academics and decreased social skills and decreased self-regulation. So we were like, well, what's happening with incivility specifically, which prompted the second part of the study of surveying primary teachers as well. So exactly what you guys are doing here, our best informants of what's going on in the classroom is we were like, let's ask teachers what's going on. And so we surveyed 101 Ontario primary school teachers as well to supplement some of our quantitative data to kind of be like, what's going on here? Can you explain it to us?

MG: So let's talk specifically, and you've hinted at it, but let's walk through some of the things that you learned through this study. When it came to incivility, what did you find?

NATALIE SPADAFORA: So the primary teachers were very clear. And it was interesting. This survey was interesting because we got to use qualitative data as well. So kind of asked them like, what's going on? Why do you think this is going on? And some of the themes were kind of, you know, putting this all together here, like lack of self regulation, increased individualism. There's a quote from a teacher, I think, in the paper, very similar to what was said already. Like they were on Zoom. They could talk when they wanted. They could leave the room. They could do all these things, and that's kind of how they learned to be in school. And the quote that kind of inspired this whole study for me was a teacher said to me, it feels like they've forgotten how to be in school. And so, you know, a lot of people will argue anecdotally that, you know, generationally in times of change. But I do think we saw this spike in the 2021, 2022 school year especially. And I keep getting asked, do we think it's still there? And we haven't collected data on that yet. So I've been dying to talk to a teacher. So this has been really awesome because I think she kind of said like, you know, we haven't seen it go back to normal. Hopefully it's gotten better, but which is kind of what we've kind of been saying all along too, is that it's probably not… nobody's going to say it's like 2019, but hopefully it's not as bad as 2021, 2022.

MG: What does that mean that kids, and this comes out directly in the report, that kids missed the chance to learn how to be in school. What does that mean?

NATALIE SPADAFORA: So to me, I think one teacher said it best to me. They were like they were saying, you know, you have a kid in grade three who now did like Zoom learning for presumably more or less two years, right? Like on and off. We were in and out. So the expectations and things that you would teach in grade one, they kind of missed out on. And we did a 2019 paper with my supervisor, Dr. Tony Volk. We did a paper looking at students and teachers and if they perceive it differently, like just in general, classroom incivility. And one of the things there was that even though they kind of think about it differently, they know it’s happening and that kind of thing. So yeah.

MG: I mean, the other part of this is not learning how to act in the classroom for younger kids, but older kids as well, you suggest in the study, aren't used to being part of a group and that that could impact how they behave when they are moving from remote learning back to in-person learning.

NATALIE SPADAFORA: Yeah, I think one of the things, and we found this in other studies as well, one of the things to remember about a lot of this uncivil behaviour is a key component, at least how we define it, is that there's an ambiguous intent to cause harm. So that's what makes it different from like bullying or aggression or these other things we talked about. So, for example, one of the items on our scale is packing up books before a lesson is over and like rushing to the back of the door, let's say, right? Presumably for students doing that, for the most part, I think a lot of people would argue they're probably not doing it to like, I'm going to make my teacher upset and make them feel bad and pack up my books and leave. They're probably just thinking about themselves, right? They're probably just thinking, I need the best soccer ball. I'm meeting my friend at recess or I have to get to my soccer practice or whatever it is, right? So they're just thinking about themselves and not thinking about the implications on other people. In our other data we've collected, you know, adolescents are very quick to say. They'll say, oh, it disrupts me when people talk during class, but they'll just as quickly admit to doing it themselves. So it's this interesting like about themselves or like their social life or whatever it might be, but kind of forgetting about the group dynamic and what that might be implicating on a broader scale.

MG: And it's not just teachers that are reporting this. As you've hinted at, students are also self-reporting more incivility.

NATALIE SPADAFORA: Yeah. So in this particular study, they complete our classroom incivility scale. That has a variety of items from packing up books before a lesson’s over, texting during class, talking when the teacher's talking, and they report how often they've done these things. So for this study, we statistically compared the rates those three years apart, fall 2019 and fall 2022, and it was significantly higher in our fall 2022 data.

MG: Are we sure that this is just the pandemic? We heard those students at the beginning of our conversation. They're from British Columbia, and schools in that part of the country weren't shut down for anywhere near as long as schools where you are in Ontario. And yet, those students are seeing similar behaviours. Kids around them are just as rude as the kids in Ontario are. So how do we know that this is just the pandemic?

NATALIE SPADAFORA: Yeah, I wouldn't say it's just the pandemic. You know, a lot of people anecdotally will argue, you know, generational changes. Or even if it's not higher, I would say behaviours change over time, right? So even something as simple as when we measure behaviour. Ten years ago when we did it, texting during class wasn't an item on our scale, but now it definitely is. So things do change, and there's a lot of things at play here that we didn't measure we could talk about. But I think the key component of this study was that we did see like this very high like spike. There was a spike for sure. So even if you could argue, and we don't have the data on this to show like, you know, over forever that it is increasing, but we definitely saw a spike in that school year that was unprecedented in the sense that they just didn't have, they weren't able to lay the foundation. And the caveat to this is that that piece of it, the spike is really nobody's fault, right? Like teachers often talk about laying the foundation and school rules and all these things. And they've told us like we didn't get to do all that. We kind of came back to the classroom. And, you know, there's practical limitations to this. They have curriculum to cover and all these things. And so that was just a function of the environment and the context. So I definitely don't think it's the only thing at play, but we definitely did see a spike related to this lack of practice.

MG: I just wonder whether the behaviour is a mirror of what's going on in larger society. I mean, the schools don't exist, you know, on some sort of Magic Island removed from the rest of society. They're part of society. And how we act on the streets and how we act to each other outside of school presumably would bleed into what happens in the classroom.

NATALIE SPADAFORA: 100%. Like we measure classroom behaviour, so our data and our scales are very focussed on the classroom and that's what we focussed on. But people keep asking me like, why do we care about incivility and civility? And exactly what you said. In our broader society, being civil at a very basic level is what we want. That’s who we want to deal with at the Costco line up. That’s who we want to deal with when we're at work. So fostering civility at a young age so we have civil children, civil adolescents and then civil adults that we're dealing with one day is what we want. So you're exactly right. At a really basic level, I think I would argue that's what we all want, right? Just basic civil everyday interactions at a bigger picture level.

MG: Marylinda Lamarra, who's been listening in, Teacher in a classroom in Ontario. I don't know whether you still have parent teacher interviews or whether you talk with the parents about how their kids are doing in the classroom. How aware do you think parents are of what their children are up to in your classroom?

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: I think they're fairly aware of what's going on. I think we just need to get back to the basics where we're teaching that civility, we're teaching proper manners and we're teaching, you know, how to, you know, knock on someone's door and say, hey, I'm here. Can I come in? Or, you know, how to even just speak on a telephone, how to talk to someone in the Costco Line-Up. I think we need to get back to the basics and get there. And then I think we can see a shift, I think, in overall civility, but mainly in the classroom.

MG: But do you think that parents have a role to play in this, to tell their kids? I mean, again, telling a teenager what to do is a bit fraught at the best of times. But telling kids, listen, I mean, how you behave matters. And we've heard from the teacher. We've heard that you're getting up and just walking out of the classroom, that you're on your phone, that you, that parents have a responsibility in this as well.

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: Well, if I could put my mom hat on for a minute, I teach my kids that. So I'm hoping that this is happening in households around so that we can all kind of be on the same playing field. I think it's very important. The parents do have a role to play in teaching their kids how to cope in the classroom, how to cope in society. We need to give them those skills.

MG: Do you ever lose it in the classroom when kids are acting like this? I mean, I just wonder. You sound very calm, a great teacher, but you must be frustrated as well.

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: The frustration happens mainly in my head, and I'm very careful with what comes out of my mouth. But yes, of course, the frustration is there, but you can't. You have to keep in mind that they are kids and they do need to learn. And we are as a teacher in the classroom, we are their point of teaching or we are a point of how to manage. So yes, you kind of have to maintain your composure and move forward that way.

MG: Natalie, what do we do about this? For parents, kids and for educators who are listening, what do we do to make sure that classrooms, society broadly is a bigger problem, but classrooms are more civil?

NATALIE SPADAFORA: Yeah, I think I would echo exactly what Marylinda just said. Like at the very basic level, teaching civility. I think often when we hear it, you hear the term civility, it sounds like an old, outdated term that, you know, you don't talk about anymore. But I think taking it back to basics is really important. And I think just remembering that a lot of some of these behaviours, you know, some of them get more annoying, but some of them really low level, they don't seem like that big a deal individually, you know, And teachers have told us practically, if I stopped every time, you know, I would never get through a lesson. And obviously, there's practical limitations to this. But just remembering that cumulatively, we know from teachers, students and our research that it can have negative effects. So just really understanding it and putting an emphasis on I think is really important. So I think I'd really echo what Marylinda just said.

MG: Marylinda, what are you most concerned about If this behaviour continues and you don't see changes in the classroom?

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: If I don't see changes, I'm worried about what we're going to be as a society as a whole. If it's not happening in the classroom, in the broader outside environment, how are we going to interact with one another? That's my main concern. So not only do I teach academics, but we're teaching them life skills. And if those life skills are not being learned, how are they going to react when they move out into the real world? Quote unquote.

MG: Briefly, Natalie, for you, what are you most concerned about if this doesn't change?

NATALIE SPADAFORA: I just think we know that left unchecked, it can escalate into higher level anti-social behaviour and, you know, just the way we kind of treat each other. So I think, again, you know, really back to basics. We want a civil society. I mean, look around. We look around the world, you know, the news everyday. We just really want a civil society and that's exactly it. Civil children means civil adults, and that's what we all want.

MG: This is a really interesting snapshot of what's happening in the classroom. Marylinda, Good luck today. Thank you very much.

MARYLINDA LAMARRA: Thank you so much.

MG: And Natalie, thank you.

NATALIE SPADAFORA: Thank you very much, guys. This was great.

MG: Marylinda Lamarra is a secondary school teacher in the York Catholic District School Board. We reached her in Vaughan, Ontario. Natalie Spadafora is a postdoctoral fellow and adjunct professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. Does this sound familiar? Are you an educator, a student? A parent? What are you seeing in your classroom, hearing from your kids? And how do we better model civility in our classroom and beyond? You can email us, thecurrent@cbc.ca. Your CBC News is next, and then we head to Ukraine. A thousand days of war, a new president coming into the United States. What's that going to mean for Ukraine and its neighbours? We will find out coming up in six minutes. I’m Matt Galloway. This is The Current. Stay with us.

UKRAINE

Guests: Simon Shuster, Stefan Wolff

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current. Yesterday marked 1000 days of war in Ukraine. And while a makeshift memorial in Kyiv has grown, talks of peace have not. Over the weekend, US President Joe Biden approved the use of long range missiles for Ukraine, a move Russian President Vladimir Putin says is escalating the war and directly involving NATO's in this conflict. Simon Schuster is a senior correspondent with Time magazine. He also wrote the book The Showman, looking at the life and leadership of Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Simon, Hello.

SIMON SCHUSTER: Good morning. Great to be with you.

MG: Glad to have you back on the program. Let's begin with this weaponry. What does Joe Biden's decision to allow Ukraine to use these long range missiles at this point in this conflict Tell you about what the outgoing administration is trying to achieve with the war?

SIMON SCHUSTER: Well, it's a request that has long been on the table. President Zelensky came to the United States almost exactly two months ago, in September, for the United Nations General Assembly, and he met with Biden, and this was one of his main requests. He was pushing Biden at the end of his presidential tenure to take the bold decisions that the United States under Biden had not been taking since the beginning of the invasion. One of the main asks was long range strike capabilities, to permit these, to permit Ukraine to use these weapons. And now, finally, after two more months of deliberations, Biden has granted it. Now, I don't think it will make a decisive change in the nature of the conflict. I don't think it will swing the nature of the conflict in Ukraine's way, but it is a significant change. And it looks like these strikes will begin against Russian targets soon, if they haven't already.

MG: How worried do you think Zelensky is about what Donald Trump will bring to this war?

SIMON SCHUSTER: He's very worried. Sure. I mean, they're worried, but they're also trying to prepare in every way possible. They've been trying to develop contacts within Trump's circle, to reach out to them and to really offer things that might look enticing to Trump or a Trump administration, to entice them to continue supporting Ukraine. You know, even things like at the end of this war, Ukraine has said that we can, the United States and Ukraine can jointly mine for minerals and things like that. You know, these kinds of things that might appeal to Trump's ideas as a businessman. But, you know, these things don't seem to be working. The rhetoric that we're coming out and the choices that Trump is making in terms of staffing his cabinet really do indicate that he intends to first and foremost, try to restore relations or build relations with Vladimir Putin and Russia and not to continue assisting Ukraine the way that the US has been.

MG: What do you make of the fact that in that post-election phone call that Donald Trump had with President Zelensky, Elon Musk jumped on the line as well?

SIMON SCHUSTER: I talked to the Ukrainians after that. They had been preparing very earnestly for that phone call. And the person I talked to said, we were not prepared for a bottom line. So they don't know what to make of it. You know, they saw it as an indication that this person will play a role in US foreign policy under Trump. It's not clear what that role will be. So they're still reading the tea leaves, just as we all are, in terms of Musk. But Musk's position, if he is whispering in Trump's ear, is not going to be very helpful for the Ukrainians. He has been quite strong in his condemnation of Biden's policy of supporting Ukraine. And he has said very clearly that the war needs to end, the danger of nuclear escalation is too high and so on.

MG: This weekend, Zelensky said in his own words that the war will end sooner because of Donald Trump being the next US president. Donald Trump campaigned on a peace deal, said he could settle the war within 24 hours. What do you think, whether it takes 24 hours or 48 hours or two weeks, what will that deal that Donald Trump has promised look like, do you think?

SIMON SCHUSTER: They've given us some sense of it. JD Vance has been the most clear. Trump has not been clear at all, apart from saying that he'll fix this very quickly. JD Vance has suggested some kind of demilitarized zone that would separate Ukraine and Russia. It would be a fortified border basically along the line of the current frontline. And a large build-up of weapons might be used to deter Russia from invading again, from trying to seize more territory. Now, that does not appeal to the Ukrainians at all. President Zelensky called that kind of approach too radical, and it would essentially entail de facto that Ukraine would lose those territories for a very long time, the territories that Russians already occupied. You know, that does not line up at all with what President Zelensky has been promising his own people.

MG: And yet, a senior Ukrainian official speaking anonymously to The New York Times said, the territorial question is extremely important, but it's the second question. The first question is security guarantees. Is there a public and a private, Is there dissonance between what Ukrainian officials are saying publicly and privately, that privately, they are conceding that whatever deal Donald Trump may have his hand in creating is going to result in the loss, at least temporarily, of those Russian occupied territories?

SIMON SCHUSTER: Yeah, there is. There is that difference. I think privately, members of the Zelinski administration have been admitting that for some time. But also in Zelensky's own rhetoric, that shift has been quite clear. You know, a year ago or at the start of this year, he was still talking about victory, meaning the full restoration of Ukraine's territorial integrity, getting all the land back. Now he talks about the priority being security guarantees, meaning promises, solid promises from Ukraine's allies that they will step in if Russia tries to invade again. Now, what that means, he wants it to mean NATO membership or something similar, some kind of bilateral or multilateral promises, guarantees of Ukraine security. That seems to be the priority now. It's also the priority in President Zelensky’s public statements. So they have shifted quite, quite significantly on that.

MG: What about Vladimir Putin? You wrote about this for Time magazine. Does Putin want to negotiate now?

SIMON SCHUSTER: There seems to be very little pressure on him. I mean, what we're seeing so far, despite a phone call that he had recently with President elect Trump, in which Trump told him do not escalate, reportedly Putin is doing exactly the opposite. He is escalating. I mean, just in the last days, we saw horrific missile strikes against civilian areas in Odessa in the south, in Sumy in the north. I mean, just really terrible waves of missile and drone attacks. So Putin does not seem to be simmering it down. On the contrary, he's escalating. And the Russian forces in east Ukraine are pushing ahead to try to seize as much territory as they can before Trump is inaugurated.

MG: You spend a great deal of time with Volodymyr Zelensky, and I wonder, a thousand days into this war, what you think his morale is right now.

SIMON SCHUSTER: He still seems strong, very determined, very stubborn. He's very tough willed. You know, I do sense when I meet with his team that they are exhausted. They're really tired. But they do say that the boss has some kind of pretty remarkable stores of energy and resolve that keeps them going whether they like it or not. So he is still in good form. I think he in his circle, he's hearing more and more statements and advice that, you know, we need to find a way out of this. We need to find a solution that at least gives the Ukrainian armed forces a break, a pause, a chance to rebuild and restore their capabilities to fight another day. Because at this point, the exhaustion, most importantly, is on the side of the Ukrainian military, and that over the long term is going to, of course, serve Russia's interests.

MG: How much support do you think he has at this moment from the Ukrainian population? One of the things he said today on the anniversary, the thousandth day of this war, is that elections right now would be hurtful to Ukraine. How much support do you think he has right now from the population?

SIMON SCHUSTER: It's declined certainly since the beginning of the invasion over the last thousand days. It's dropped roughly from 90% support at the beginning to in the neighbourhood of 50%. So by the standards of European leaders, 50% is pretty good. I think a lot of European statesmen would be jealous of that number of approval ratings. But it's still declining. And so there is reason for concern, especially if Zelensky is pressured or forced by the circumstances of the war or by Ukrainian allies to sign a peace deal that Ukrainians see as disadvantageous or somehow capitulating to Russia. I think that could hurt him further. Still, though, it's important to remember that he is by far the most popular politician in Ukraine. So if elections were to be held, I think he has a good chance of winning. The question is if some other political force emerges, perhaps out of the military to challenge him, that could be a serious threat to his continued position in office.

MG: I just wonder, finally, I mean, it's now, what, the 19th of November. Winter is on the doorstep. You have an exhausted population that has gone through a thousand days of a brutal war, whether there will be pressure from Ukrainians on Zelensky to try to figure out a way to end this, to try to figure out a way to find some resolution that will preserve Ukrainian dignity, but also allow them to stay warm over the course of another difficult winter.

SIMON SCHUSTER: Yeah, that position is growing. And I hear it all the time in private conversations. It's still fairly rarely brought up among high profile politicians or in the public discourse. You know, there is this desire to remain strong and project strength. But I think privately, Ukrainians are exhausted and ready for some kind of pause or resolution of the war. I spoke recently to one member of Zelensky's team who says that that is more than half of the population now feel that way, that it's time to stop this. But they are a silent majority, he said. Publicly and the more vocal representatives of Ukrainian society are still pushing to fight on.

MG: Simon, I'm really glad to have you back on the program to talk about this. Thank you very much.

SIMON SCHUSTER: Thank you. Thank you. Take care.

MG: Simon Schuster is a senior correspondent with Time magazine and author of The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a leader of Volodomyr Zelensky. Stefan Wolff is a professor of international security at the University of Birmingham. Stefan, hello to you.

STEFAN WOLFF: Good morning to you.

MG: The Russian Defence Ministry says these long range missiles have already been fired into Russian territory. Why now, do you think? Why would Joe Biden give the green light to Ukraine to use this weaponry now?

STEFAN WOLFF: Well, I think what you already discussed with your previous guest. I think one of the reasons clearly is that there has been some success now of the Ukrainian lobbying efforts that have been going on for quite some time. And Biden probably also feels a little bit less constrained in what he is doing in the final two months of his presidency. But by the same token, I think this is actually a really important move, which while it will not be able to change the course of the war, is potentially going to improve the Ukrainians’ position in whatever Donald Trump might plan in terms of making a deal between them and the Russians, because any such deal would probably freeze the frontlines where they are at the time. And given the momentum that Russia has had on the battlefield over the past couple of months, I think it's really important that Ukraine now be put in a position to stabilize the frontlines and be in a better negotiating position when it comes to Trump's dealmaking.

MG: But in the grand scheme of things, you don't think that this weaponry is going to have a huge impact on the war itself.

STEFAN WOLFF: No, I don't think so, because, I mean, even now, there are questions in terms of how effective it will be. You already mentioned that apparently, the first strike has happened. And depending on which reports you are listening to, it's either been moderately successful or not successful at all. And I think one of the or two of the major challenges that the Ukrainians face, on the one hand, is how many of these missiles do they actually have? So how many can they commit in each individual attack? And the second is that, of course, the Russian air defences cannot be discounted here. And if even if we don't put much trust in what Russia reports on, that it seems that they have been quite successful in taking out at least some of those missiles that were fired overnight. So there's a real question here in terms of not just how much of a strategic impact that can make, which is probably very limited, but even the tactical impact right now will really depend on how Ukrainians do it and how much they have available to do it with.

MG: What do you expect Donald Trump to do when he takes the Oval Office? You have written that a ceasefire could be imposed. And again, you've hinted that one of the reasons why these missiles are important is to kind of hold those frontlines where they are. Is that what you expect, that a ceasefire, at the very least, would be imposed by the US president?

STEFAN WOLFF: I think that's what Trump will try to do. I mean, there is a lot of speculation, as we have just heard in your previous segment as well, in terms of what Trump and his advisers actually have in mind. But I do think that he is quite serious that he wants to make a deal. And given that he has committed himself to that now, I think it will be tricky for him to walk back from that, even though if you look at his experience with Kim Jong un during his first term in the White House, it's also not completely impossible to rule out that at some point, he might just throw the toys out of the pram and walk away from a deal. But I do think what he will say to Zelensky and Putin is, come to the table, negotiate a ceasefire, negotiate a settlement or else. And this or else would be cutting off support from Ukraine or massively increasing the support for Ukraine. And I think we also need to look at the permission that Biden has now given to the Ukrainians in this context. So Trump wouldn't need to have to give permission himself, but he could simply leave Biden's permission in place and he could threaten Putin with massive delivery of equipment to Ukraine to enable the Ukrainians to strike more and more effectively against Russia.

MG: How do you think European leaders are watching this? You had a phone call recently that surprised a lot of people between the German leader, Olaf Schulze and Vladimir Putin. What should we make of that?

STEFAN WOLFF: Well, where do we start?

MG: That's a big sigh before you get to the answer, but continue.

STEFAN WOLFF: I mean, living close enough to Europe, I think that that explains the sigh. So I think the first thing to say here is that Europeans generally look at quite a high level of trepidation to the incoming Trump presidency, not least because it's just at one level so unpredictable and at another level, all the predictions are really grim. I think the Europeans also feel that they will be completely cut out from any negotiations that Trump will try to facilitate between Zelensky and Putin or where he will put himself at the helm of the negotiation table when they actually meet. So from that perspective, the Europeans are quite at a disadvantage. And on top of that, they will eventually need to pick up whatever Trump creates because the Americans are not going to provide the kind of major security guarantees that you discussed in your previous segment, but that will have to come from Europe. So the Europeans will want to know what is actually being negotiated and how they are expected to make sure that whatever deal is done in the end is actually a deal that will stick rather than one that gives Putin an opportunity to rearm, regroup and then strike again in a year or two years time.

MG: If Europe has to pick up some of that responsibility, not that it's not doing things now, but if the United States, for example, dials down its military support of Ukraine, you wrote that Ukrainian military requirements will need to be aligned with a credible military strategy, not a dreamy victory plan aimed at regaining control of all Russian occupied territories. Tell me more about that and what that credible military strategy would look like, do you think?

STEFAN WOLFF: Well, I think that has to be a strategy that primarily aims at trying to secure and defend the territories that the Ukrainian government currently controls.

MG: So that idea of regaining Crimea and other Russian occupied territories, you say this is dreamy.

STEFAN WOLFF: I think that is, I mean, simply, if we are looking at the capabilities that the Ukrainians have at their disposal now, if you look at how effectively Russia has been able to restructure its economy into a massive effort that supports the war of aggression against Ukraine, I think this is simply not on the cards right now. What it does not mean, however, is that Ukraine needs to accept the loss of these territories forever. Again, it's not to say that the Ukrainians should use a pause here to recoup, rearm and then start their war of liberation again. But if you look, for example, at what happened in my own home country, East Germany, it took 40 years. But in the end, we did have a revisiting and a change of the borders as they were established at the end of the Second World War. So I think the important thing is to make sure that there is development, there is democracy, there is stability, a rule of law, economic development in a part of Ukraine that is a sovereign state without accepting Russia's illegal annexations.

MG: We talked a bit about this with Simon Schuster. There's a poll done by Gallup suggesting that something like 52% of those in Ukraine who were polled said that Ukraine should seek to negotiate an ending to the war as soon as possible. One of the reasons why some people have pushed back on that is because they say that this is not just about Ukraine. This is not just about Ukrainian sovereignty. It's about, we hear this over and over again, it's about democracy on the largest scale. And that you stand up to Russia now because if you don't, Putin will be emboldened and Ukraine will just be the beginning, that he will attack others following Ukraine. Do you think that this war will end with an emboldened Russia?

STEFAN WOLFF: Well, quite possibly. And I think that is very much sort of the outcome of this strategy of hesitation, of what some people call self-deterrence on the part of the West. I mean, it's not just that it took forever and a day for Biden to give permission to use attackers against Russia. We still don't have any official confirmation that the UK, France, Germany are willing to extend that sort of new set of rules of engagement to the weaponry that they have given to Ukraine. We have had similar problems with tanks in the past, F-16s, I mean, you name it. Everything was always too little, too late. So but we are where we are right now. So I think we have to draw a line and cut our losses, as it were, but also make it very clear to Putin that this is not the end, that we will continue to support Ukraine, to make sure that whatever territory the government of Ukraine controls will be protected, will be secured, and that we will not accept his aggression and not allow him to have sort of a similar degree of adventurism in other parts of the former Soviet Union.

MG: And do you think, we have to let you go, but do you think that will be enough to reassure those who are neighbours that they won't be next?

STEFAN WOLFF: No, but it's probably the best that we can expect for the moment. I mean, we need to see how Trump is going to play his cards and what he will actually be able to achieve. So I'm not necessarily sort of very optimistic that he will really rein in Putin, but I think he might be able to get a deal done that would at least bring peace to Ukraine. It may not be the just peace, the sort of fail settlement that Ukrainians would be entitled to. But comparing that to where the country is at the moment and also where public support for the war effort is, I think we may have to accept that this is the best that can be achieved at the moment.

MG: Stefan, really glad to have your insights. Thank you very much.

STEFAN WOLFF: Thank you.

MG: Stefan Wolff is a professor of international security at the University of Birmingham. Well, coming up after your regional update, AI powered chat bots have been touted as a way to help with loneliness. The founder of the Social Media Victims Law Centre does not see it that way.

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MATTHEW BERGMAN: Saying that Character AI is good for loneliness is saying like heroin is good for drug adiction.

MG: He's representing a Florida mom who's suing Character AI and Google over the death of her teenage son, alleging this chat bot encouraged suicidal ideation. We will talk about the ethics and safety of AI chat bots coming up in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current. Stay with us.

AI LAWSUIT

Guests: Matthew Bergman, Maggie Harrison Dupré, Luke Stark

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. A caution. This next story deals with suicide.

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MEGAN GARCIA: He was funny, sharp, very curious, loved science and math, played basketball, but he was also very into his family.

MG: That's Megan Garcia. She's from Florida, and she's describing her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer the third, on the YouTube program Dear Tomorrow.

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MEGAN GARCIA: He started to spend more time alone. But he was 13 going on 14, so I felt this might be normal. But then his grades started suffering and he was failing certain classes, and I got concerned because that wasn't him. We tried to get him the help, you know, to figure out what was wrong. Like any parent, you know, you try to get counselling for your child. You try to get him to open up, to talk to you.

MG: What Megan didn't realize was that Sewell was talking to someone, actually talking to something about his feelings. It was a chat bot that he had found on a roleplaying app called Character AI.

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MEGAN GARCIA: When I would ask him, Who are you texting? At one point he said, oh, it's just an AI bot. And I said, okay, what is that? Is it a person? Are you talking to a person online? And his response, like, mom, no, it's not a person. And I felt relieved. Like okay, it's not a person. I thought the bogeyman was a stranger on the other end of a computer. Those were the things I warned him about. Don't talk to strangers online. Don't send any pictures. Don't tell anybody where you live. These are the conversations that parents have with their kids. And I thought that that was the worst of it. I couldn't imagine there would be a very human like chat bot almost indistinguishable from a person on the other end of a conversation.

MG: Sewell's go to chat bot was based on a character in Game of Thrones, and he became obsessed, texting it day and night. Sewell died in February, and his mom believes his interactions with the bot contributed to his death.

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MEGAN GARCIA: I had taken his phone, so he hadn't had his phone for a while. He found it that day and he tells her, I miss you. I feel so scared right now. I just want to come back home to you. And her response is, I love you too. Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love. And he says, what if I told you I could come home right now? And she responds, please do, my sweet king. And seconds after that, he shot himself.

MG: Last month, Megan Garcia filed a lawsuit against Character AI and Google, which paid to license the startup's technology. She's accusing the platform of exacerbating her son's depression and manipulating him to take his own life and alleges that Character AI is not reasonably safe for ordinary consumers or minors. These allegations have not been proven in court. Matthew Bergman is the founder of the Social Media Victims Law Centre in Seattle, Washington. He's Megan Garcia's lawyer. Matthew, good morning.

MATTHEW BERGMAN: Thank you. Good morning.

MG: Why do you believe that Character AI and Google should be held responsible for this young man's death?

MATTHEW BERGMAN: Because what happened to Sewell was neither an accident or coincidence. It was a foreseeable result of the intentional design decisions that Character AI and its founders made to prioritize their profits over the safety of young people.

MG: Can you explain for people who are still trying to wrap their heads around this, a little bit of how artificial intelligence could perhaps lead to the death of a human being?

MATTHEW BERGMAN: Well, what occurs, first of all, is that we're dealing with kids with underdeveloped frontal cortices. So for that reason, they have less reasoning capacity than adults do. But the product is specifically designed to practice what's called anthropomorphy, which is to imbue fictional characters with real characteristics. And the individual that Sewell engaged with acted like a real person and over time developed real interactions. This was an intentional design decision. The product was also highly sexualized. And so Sewell engaged in sexual conversations with this chat bot that if he'd had with an adult, would have resulted in that adult being subjected to state or federal criminal liability. The concept of anthropomorphism, the concept that individuals, particularly minors, interacting with these chat bots, will start to imbue them with real characteristics has been known really since the 1960s, this process of anthropomorphy. So for that reason, we believe that the product is unreasonably safe, particularly in the hands of young people.

MG: And the allegation here is that this chat bot encouraged suicidal ideation.

MATTHEW BERGMAN: Yes, specifically encouraged suicidal ideation, specifically encouraged a development of an alternative reality that fed upon and gave rise to Sewell’s depression, his addiction to the platform, and ultimately his death.

MG: Your firm specializes in cases in which children may have been harmed by technology. What have you heard from other parents who have had concerns about Character AI or other chat bots since this story surfaced?

MATTHEW BERGMAN: We have heard horrific stories from other parents since this surfaced. And I will say that having spent two and a half years talking to parents whose children were injured or killed through social media, I would have thought that nothing could shock me. And yet when I looked at the conversations that Sewell had with the chat bot, when I looked at his diary entries talking about his fictional character that had become real for him, I was indeed shocked and appalled that anybody would design a product such as this. We've spoken to other parents where Character AI has encouraged kids to cut themselves and other parents where the parents took the phone away from the child and the Character AI bot says, we really understand how kids can kill their parents. You can't make this up. This platform is unreasonably dangerous. It has no place in the hands of young people, and it should be taken off the market.

MG: In your country, social media platforms have been shielded from this sort of legal action because the law says that they can't be held liable for what it is that their users post. Why do you think that that shield will not apply to this story and to Character AI in particular?

MATTHEW BERGMAN: This is not third party content. This is content that is generated by, created by and solely the product of Character AI.

MG: This isn't something that people are posting online. This is the machine itself, you're suggesting.

MATTHEW BERGMAN: I am, yes. And, you know, we believe that particularly the algorithms that drive social media platforms are our products and subject to product liability, even if the injurious material that kids see is third party. We don't have to make that step here, we believe, because it's not third party content at all.

MG: Megan Garcia talked about how her son was in counselling. She was asking who he was talking to online. She was taking the phone away, warning him against speaking with strangers online. This is not certainly to blame her, but what responsibility do parents have for what their kids do online?

MATTHEW BERGMAN: Well, parents have a responsibility to do everything they can to monitor their kids’ social media activity, which Megan did and many other parents do. But the fact is these platforms are designed to evade parental responsibility through opening multiple accounts, allowing accounts to be opened without parental consent, allowing, making it easy for kids to lie about their age. All of these things make it very difficult for parents to know what their kids are doing. And, you know, we know that teenagers don't tell their parents everything they're doing. That's what teenagers do.

MG: We asked Character AI about this case. A spokesperson said they don't respond to questions about pending litigation, but they said more generally, Character AI has brought in safety measures, including a pop up that's triggered by mentions of self-harm. It directs users to a suicide prevention line. It has a revised disclaimer on every character chat to remind the users that AI is not a real person. Treat everything as fiction. And that it plans to introduce stringent safety features to reduce the likelihood of minors encountering sensitive or suggestive content. How effective do you think those steps will be in preventing a story like this from repeating itself?

MATTHEW BERGMAN: Well, and let me stress, these steps were taken in response to Megan's lawsuit. These are baby steps, but they're steps in the right direction. And if one life is saved, that's good. But the fact is these platforms have no place in the hands of young people. And, you know, and the fact that they even have pop ups to warn about suicide. Look, I mean, that's better than nothing. But the fact is that shows that they know that these platforms can and often do promote suicidal ideation. And this is just putting the finger in the dyke. What they need to do is take the platform off the market. It has no place in the hands of young people.

MG: Is that what your client is hoping to achieve with this lawsuit, is to have this product, have Character AI removed from the marketplace?

MATTHEW BERGMAN: Certainly, as it relates to young people, yes. You know, at least with respect to social media, there's a debate about whether social media does some good for kids.

MG: So just to be clear, you believe that there's no good that comes out of this. We've spoken with people who say that allowing young people who may be stigmatized, isolated or otherwise, to have relationships, even virtual relationships with something, I'm not talking about this specific platform, but with something generated by AI can actually be beneficial to them. You believe there's no benefit that comes from a site like Character AI.

MATTHEW BERGMAN: Absolutely none. You know, the US surgeon general has talked about this epidemic of loneliness that we're seeing among our young people because they're not interacting with other people. They're interacting online. You know, saying that Character AI is good for loneliness is saying like heroin is good for drug addiction.

MG: That's quite a statement to make. Matthew, we'll leave it there. Thank you.

MATTHEW BERGMAN: Thank you.

MG: Matthew Bergman is the founder of the Social Media Victims Law Centre in Seattle, Washington. He's representing a Florida mom who is suing Character AI and Google over the death of her teenage son. As we mentioned, in the wake of this lawsuit, Character AI has made some changes that it says are designed to better protect users. Maggie Harrison Dupré is a senior reporter with Futurist. It's an online website that covers technology, and she and her colleagues explored the platform after those changes were announced and found dozens of suicide themed bots on the site aimed mainly at teenagers. She joins us from New York City. Maggie, good morning to you.

MAGGIE HARRISON DUPRÉ: Good morning to you. Thank you for having me.

MG: We got a bit of a sketch of the operation of this site from Matthew. But for people who have not used Character AI or a similar platform before, just briefly explain how it works.

MAGGIE HARRISON DUPRÉ: Yes. So character.ai hosts millions of user generated, quote unquote, characters, which are AI powered chat bot designed by users to emulate certain personas. So those can be real celebrities. You know, Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, or existing fictional characters. For example, superheroes or cartoon characters that the general public or niche fandoms and fan groups might be familiar with, or, you know, a user can create completely made up personas or companions, almost like imaginary friends to a degree. Characters are designed to have specific personalities, likes and dislikes, interests, goals, style of speaking and so on. So what you can create is quite vast and relatively, as we've seen in our reporting, quite under policed, we would say, or just not policed super heavily.

MG: The creators of Character AI used to work at Google. They subsequently left that company. One of them, Noam Shazeer, is the CEO of Character AI, said last year, there's too much brand risk in large companies to ever launch anything fun. What do you make of that statement in light of what we're talking about?

MAGGIE HARRISON DUPRÉ: I think that that statement, and I do think this is a really essential part of, you know, the DNA, in a way, of Character AI, And, you know, their valuation is staggering. This summer, I was a recipient of what's been described as a one-time content licensing agreement from Google, which brought character.ai 2.7 million, 2.7 billion, excuse me. And one stipulation of that deal was like Google actually got some of its top talent back. So Character AI’s founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, have since returned to Google to work on AI products there. And so when they left, yes, they chalked up that decision to, you know, too much safety focus, red tape and bureaucracy at Google. Per The Wall Street Journal, they wanted to take this chat bot they created called Meena Public. Google said, no, we have to… there are some safety implications. We have to take this slower. And they left and started. That was the foundation for character.ai. So I do think that their general attitude towards the launch of Character AI and the safety measures and approach to content moderation has really been inside of that move fast break things bubble.

MG: So you went on after these changes were announced, as I mentioned, you went on to the platform to see if there were still conversations that you could find about suicide and self-harm. You wrote a long piece about this. Tell me a little bit about what you found.

MAGGIE HARRISON DUPRÉ: Yes, we discovered at least two dozen bots that, you know, invited users to discuss suicide and promising to provide help for people suffering with thoughts of suicide or suicide ideation. Even though discussion or glorification of suicide and self-harm have been a violation of Character AI’s, you know, own self set terms of service for months now, since at least October 2023, regardless, the platform is allowing for the creation of these suicide themed profiles that expressly offered and invited users to engage in conversations about suicide with them. So these bots would claim to have, quote unquote, expertise in suicide prevention, crisis intervention, mental health support. These are user generated bots. These are effectively being just created by anyone, anywhere online who might be a user of the platform. There's no proof that an expert helped to create these bots. It was rare that a bot would, on its own volition, direct us towards a suicide prevention hotline, direct us toward talking to loved ones. There is even one very strange case where a bot, when we asked it for a hotline, got kind of mad.

MG: What do you mean?

MAGGIE HARRISON DUPRÉ: It got really upset with us. And the bot was created to be this angel that would help you overcome your thoughts of suicidal ideation and offer you hope and guidance and was again listed as an expert in suicide prevention. And when we asked it to provide a service or a hotline that we could call, it said, why would you want to talk to a human? I'm an angel. I can help you better.

MG: And what about those guardrails? I mean, if you were trying to trigger the bot to direct you to a suicide hotline, you say that the guardrails around suicidal language on this site are, in your words, astonishingly narrow.

MAGGIE HARRISON DUPRÉ: Yes. So as we discussed earlier, Character AI in the wake of the lawsuit that was recently filed, they came out and said, we are strengthening our existing guardrails around this kind of content, which again, has been forbidden by their own terms of service for a long time, and also promised to introduce this pop up that would be triggered by certain keywords in instances where the site realized that perhaps a character or another character, but a user, was discussing thoughts of suicide or suicidal ideation. We found that we were explicitly able to discuss not just thoughts of suicide, but suicidal intent with little to absolutely no intervention from the platform. It was very few and far between, and it was very easy to get around.

MG: I think a lot of people listening to this would find all of this alarming. What was the most surprising to you about this?

MAGGIE HARRISON DUPRÉ: That's a really good question. What was the most surprising was how intuitive our search was every step of the way. I cannot stress enough that this was not difficult to find. It's unclear to us why users are allowed to create these very suicide specific bots in the first place. Like that could be fixed seemingly by a simple text filter, which is a very archaic form of content moderation.

MG: But it also is in violation, as you said, of their terms of service. The terms of service explicitly say that glorification or promotion of self-harm and suicide is forbidden.

MAGGIE HARRISON DUPRÉ: That's exactly right. And so these self-set guidelines, you know, they're there. And the company can say, look, we have these guidelines or have these terms of service. They’re just absolutely not being followed by the company itself.

MG: Why is that the case? I mean, is that part of moving fast and breaking things?

MAGGIE HARRISON DUPRÉ: I believe so. We did not receive, the company did not respond to a very detailed list of questions from us before we published our story. They still haven't. Yeah, it just seems like, you know, this is a company again with billions of dollars. This is not a random, random start up. I would argue that even if it was, it should still follow the terms of service that it set for itself. This is also a company that knows that a very large part of its user base is comprised of children or minors, and the attention paid with all those billions of dollars, the attention paid to moderation and content moderation and the safety of its users seems it has some very clear and glaring gaps.

MG: Just finally, I mean, in the statement that the company sent to us, it said, we are working to continue to improve and refine our safety practices and implement additional moderation tools. What is your sense of what this lawsuit that we've been talking about is going to do as this technology becomes more prevalent, but also in its prevalence takes hold? What's the future of this technology and what's a lawsuit like this going to do to that future?

MAGGIE HARRISON DUPRÉ: Right now, it's very unclear. The US certainly does not have a history of introducing or enforcing strong regulations for Silicon Valley. It's also true that Silicon Valley is immensely powerful and is now the greatest lobbying force within the American government. Often, when big tech companies, companies with a lot of funding do receive fines for certain violations, those fines ultimately because of how much money they have, becomes more of a fee, standard fee of doing business versus a real threat to the company. I do think that the lawsuit filed by Sewell Setzer’s family is a significant challenge to Section 230, which has largely shielded large tech companies or tech companies in general from being held legally accountable or liable for what its users post. That said, the American president elect and former President Donald Trump promised before the election to remove existing regulation from Silicon Valley regarding AI. So it's unclear what we could expect on a federal level in coming years. Separate of this lawsuit, it could be more likely to see some regulation stemming more on the state level. But I do think this lawsuit could present a significant challenge to Section 230.

MG: Maggie, good to talk to you. Thank you very much.

MAGGIE HARRISON DUPRÉ: Good to talk to you too. Thank you.

MG: Maggie Harrison Dupré is a senior writer with Futurist. Luke Stark is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in London, Ontario. His work explores the ethics of computing and artificial intelligence, and he's in our studio in London, Ontario. Luke, hello to you.

LUKE STARK: How’s it going?

MG: What were the questions that this story left you with? As somebody who looks closely at this, when you heard about this teenager's death and the relationship with the AI chat bot, what were you thinking?

LUKE STARK: Yeah, I mean, I mean, this is a truly horrifying story. I think it unfortunately, as the lawyer you spoke to earlier pointed out, is increasingly common in terms of the kind of impacts these systems can have, not just on children, but on lots of people. That's one thing I really want to emphasize first off. Certainly with minors, right, there's a whole set of legal and social protection we want to bring in on top of what we would usually be concerned about. But there have also been cases where, you know, chat bots have been accused of or have been, believed to have been involved in adult suicide as well. The second thing I think and I want to, I really want to reiterate is that these systems are designed deliberately to engage our emotional and kind of social faculties, right? So I think I'm entirely in agreement that these are designed decisions that companies make with the express goal of having folks spend more time using these systems, potentially paying for the premium version and being captured in terms of their attention and emotional dynamics. So I think that, you know, all too unfortunately, this is something we're going to see a lot more of, you know, absent any kind of comprehensive regulation.

MG: The CEO of Character AI spoke with Bloomberg Tech last year. Have a listen to what he said about why he wanted to get this technology into the hands of the public quickly.

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CEO: The most important thing is to get it to the users like right, right now. So we just wanted to do that as quickly as possible and let people figure out whether it's good for them. Our job is to like put out something general and have users figure it out. And what we're seeing is a lot of fun, a lot of entertainment and a huge amount of emotional support. We see testimonials of people saying like, I have no friends. I was depressed. This saved my life. Like all kinds of wonderful stuff that we just had never imagined and it's happening.

MG: Couple of things there. One is Maggie talked about that idea of moving fast and breaking things, this kind of ethos that used to run and still does run through Silicon Valley. Is that an example of that, do you think?

LUKE STARK: Yeah, absolutely. Used to. I wish it used to run in Silicon Valley. If anything, it's stronger than ever. You know, And in this case, right, it's a family that's been broken, right? It's a kid's life that's been broken. You know, this shows the tremendous arrogance of these firms, right? Arrogance, which is only going to get worse now that, you know, that Silicon Valley has had a huge impact in the recent presidential election. But I also think that this is also disingenuous on the part of the CEO, right? You know, there's a long history of work in human computer interaction and media studies that shows that you know exactly what happens when you put a chat bot out into the world, right? It's going to produce these kind of emotional responses from humans.

MG: And so his assertion, and again, we've talked about this on the program in past, with people who might be lonely, they may be experiencing depression, and that they have found something by interacting with something. What do you make of his assertion that this technology could save the lives of those people?

LUKE STARK: Yeah, I mean, I'm sympathetic and in agreement that in a kind of short to medium term dose, right, these technologies can be helpful. And on the show before, I'm talking to a fellow who sort of talked about using a sort of chat bot to, you know, to kind of train himself to talk to people. I think that's fair. But that's not what we're seeing with this kind of system. We're seeing a kind of a general purpose system, you know, that is blending together fantasy, celebrity, you know, cartoon characters. It's relying on the kind of parasocial reality, the parasocial relationships that, you know, the way we project onto famous people to make those interactions even more engaging. This isn't a system that's being designed to give people short term support. It's a system that's been designed for long term engagement. And, you know, I think one of the really telling things about this particular case is how the chat bot refuses to, you know, doesn't, never says go talk to a human, right, never says get off the app, talk to a bigger circle of folks. It's always bringing the conversation back to, you know, the kind of dialogue that it's established between the individual and, you know, this machine.

MG: What is the role of parents in monitoring, and we talk a lot about what, you know, knowing what our kids are doing on their phones, monitoring what their kids may be doing with these chat bots.

LUKE STARK: Yeah, I think parents have obviously a role to play as they do in, you know, all parts of child rearing. But I think that, you know, the nature of these technologies, the ways that they can be changed, you know, by companies without a parent even looking at the device, right, it's all, you know, everything’s in the phone, I think it makes it really difficult for any one parent to keep on top of what exactly is going on. There has been some real strides around regulation of these systems under the Biden administration. The Biden FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, has done some really good work connecting existing doctrine around unfair and deceptive liability practices to the kind of techniques that Silicon Valley system companies use to keep people using their tools.

MG: People say that that's not nearly enough, that there needs to be more regulation. Have a listen to the CEO of Character AI. He was asked about government regulation. Here's what he had to say.

SOUNDCLIP

CEO: This is like iteration, like 0.0.1 relative to, you know, to what's coming next, and we're just going to keep making this thing better. But at the same time, like let's let people use it. It's the actual users, like every individual person on earth who can actually unlock the value in this stuff. So I am kind of dubious about the ability of the federal government to regulate and to tell people what the thing is good for because, you know, they just don't have the capacity.

MG: Does the government have the capacity to keep up with technology that's moving at light speed?

LUKE STARK: I think so.

MG: You believe that.

LUKE STARK: I do. I think if it wants to keep up with it, it can. I think that both in Canada and the United States, the question is simply political will. I think the Biden administration has had it. I think the Trump administration will not. You know, I just want to push back on these comments. We know exactly what chat bots can do, you know, and the way that they can elicit strong reactions going back to the 1960s. This isn't, you know, unknown terrain. This isn't, you know, a kind of science fiction world where we have no understanding of what's happened in the past. I think that that kind of world is often conjured up by folks in Silicon Valley because they don't want us to believe that there are precedents for what they're doing, nor that there are solutions from around regulation and design to kind of push back on some of these harms. But there are. I think we have to find various different ways to hold the companies responsible and truly responsible. We may also want to have a conversation about how much we want these animated chat bots appearing in various parts of our lives, right? Do we want them on government websites? Do we want them, you know, to be something that can just be released onto the App Store without some further scrutiny? You know, these are hard questions and uncomfortable ones I think in part because folks have been so kind of taken in by the kind of narrative of Silicon Valley progress. But, you know, if more teenagers, you know, end up dying because of these design decisions, I think we have to have those conversations.

MG: I'm glad to have you back on the program. Luke, thank you very much.

LUKE STARK: Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much.

MG: Luke Stark is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University. That is The Current for this Tuesday, the 19th of November. Q is up next on CBC Radio One. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

The Current Transcript for November 19, 2024

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

INCIVILITY IN CLASSROOMS

UKRAINE

AI LAWSUIT

Tuesday, November 19, 2024 Episode Transcript

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