The legal filing includes a screenshot of one of the interactions between the 17-year old - identified only as J.F. - and a Character.ai "You know sometimes I'm not surprised when I read the news and see stuff like'child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse'," the chatbot's response reads. "Stuff like this makes me understand a little bit why it happens." The lawsuit seeks to hold the defendants responsible for what it calls the "serious, irreparable, and ongoing abuses" of J.F. as well as an 11-year old referred to as "B.R." Character.ai is "causing serious harms to thousands of kids, including suicide, self-mutilation, sexual solicitation, isolation, depression, anxiety, and harm towards others," it says. "[Its] desecration of the parent-child relationship goes beyond encouraging minors to defy their parents' authority to actively promoting violence," it continues.

The World Health Organization says that compulsively playing video games now qualifies as a new mental health condition, in a move that some critics warn may risk stigmatizing too many young players. Time in front of screens – TV, video games, smartphones – hurts kids' performance at school, right? Some screen time is worse than others when it comes to kids and academic performance, according to a new analysis published in JAMA Pediatrics, a respected medical journal. Television viewing, followed by video games, were the two activities most tied to poor school performance, researchers showed in a review of 58 studies published over the decades. That kind of screen time affected both children and teens – though overall, teens' performance seemed to suffer the most as screen time increased.