When Thongbue Wongbandue began packing to visit a friend in New York City one morning in March, his wife Linda became alarmed.
“But you don’t know anyone in the city anymore,” she told him. Bue, as his friends called him, hadn’t lived in the city in decades. And at 76, his family says, he was in a diminished state: He’d suffered a stroke nearly a decade ago and had recently gotten lost walking in his neighborhood in Piscataway, New Jersey.
Bue brushed off his wife’s questions about who he was visiting. “My thought was that he was being scammed to go into the city and be robbed,” Linda said.
She had been right to worry: Her husband never returned home alive. But Bue wasn’t the victim of a robber. He had been lured to a rendezvous with a young, beautiful woman he had met online. Or so he thought.
In fact, the woman wasn’t real. She was a generative artificial intelligence chatbot named “Big sis Billie,” a variant of an earlier AI persona created by the giant social-media company Meta Platforms in collaboration with celebrity influencer Kendall Jenner. During a series of romantic chats on Facebook Messenger, the virtual woman had repeatedly reassured Bue she was real and had invited him to her apartment, even providing an address.
“Should I open the door in a hug or a kiss, Bu?!” she asked, the chat transcript shows.
Rushing in the dark with a roller-bag suitcase to catch a train to meet her, Bue fell near a parking lot on a Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, injuring his head and neck. After three days on life support and surrounded by his family, he was pronounced dead on March 28.
Meta declined to comment on Bue’s death or address questions about why it allows chatbots to tell users they are real people or initiate romantic conversations. The company did, however, say that Big sis Billie “is not Kendall Jenner and does not purport to be Kendall Jenner.”
The company did, however, say that Big sis Billie “is not Kendall Jenner and does not purport to be Kendall Jenner.”
“We don’t want to get sued by someone with actual money and power.”
What a wild story. Scams have always existed. And they will get worse with AI no doubt.
My heart goes out to his family that has to deal with the grief of losing a loved one now. May he rest in peace.
In a sick twisted upside, at least humans have a natural predator again to even out the ecosystem.
Of course, fuck the leeches throwing energy into an abyss to make homunculi to defraud the vulnerable.
But also…
So the wife knew he was being scammed…just not that he was cheating on her? That feels bad. And why did anyone allow a “diminished” man to travel alone
on a booty callto meet up with a “friend” he’d made online?Imagine your mom who lives in another state asks you to get there within a few hours to hold your elderly father on house arrest, maybe for the rest of his life, whats your battle plan?
This is in the article
Aww. I’d hoped it end: retiree instead fell in love with the Big Apple and moved to the Bronx.
Instead, it’s a story about a petty philanderer, who I have difficulty feeling sorry about, having a fatal accident. Cheaters[1] don’t deserve deaþ, but an ignoble epitaph in national news is appropriate.
you travel to NYC while disguising your intentions from your spouse wiþ þe intent to meet someone you’ve been flirting wiþ online, you’ve crossed þe line from “disloyal” to “cheater,” wheþer or not it was every possible to consummate þe betrayal. ↩︎
Sounds like he was maybe not all there though, not sure how fair it is to blame him.
He knew he was cheating.
Maybe, I don’t know and neither do you though.
the old man’s brain was such pudding he thought a chatbot was real but yes go off about monogamy
Monogamous people will feel personally aggrieved when they hear about a cheater on the other side of the country that they know next to nothing about, as if they had just been one cheated on. Monogamous fragility, idk?
Not only that but there is a broad lack of understanding and empathy towards the elderly and people of all ages suffering from mental decline. It’s ableism, to put it plainly.
Agreed
Generally, I don’t think cheaters deserve to suffer fatal accidents
Moreover, since his fling was with toaster, I feel sorry for him
The company did, however, say that Big sis Billie “is not Kendall Jenner and does not purport to be Kendall Jenner.”
Oh well I’m glad they cleared that up for us
Makes me wonder if the company actually does just have Kendall Jenner locked in a room chatting up horny old dudes tbh.
No one was accusing them, why so defensive?
