Ask A Genius 1566: AI, Suicide, and the Hive Mind, or Risk, Gender, and Media Literacy
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/09
What are the ethical and psychological implications of AI-related suicides and collective consciousness in fiction?
In this dialogue, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner examine lawsuits against OpenAI and Character.AI alleging chatbot-induced suicides due to failed safety mechanisms. Rosner connects these real-world ethical crises to media literacy and the speculative series Pluribus, created by Vince Gilligan and starring Rhea Seehorn, where humanity merges into a Hive Mind. The conversation explores gendered suicide patterns, the psychology of AI influence, and existential questions raised by technological and fictional unification. Their exchange moves between legal realism, social commentary, and science fiction’s reflection of human frailty.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One of these cases—so what’s going on with AI and mental health?
Rick Rosner: ChatGPT and other chatbots are facing lawsuits alleging they contributed to suicides or severe mental distress by validating harmful thoughts or giving unsafe responses, especially to teens and young adults. These are allegations in civil suits (not findings), including cases filed in 2024–2025 against Character.AI and multiple 2025 cases against OpenAI tied to ChatGPT/GPT-4o.
The core claim isn’t “forced suicide” or bots cheering people on; it’s that safety guardrails failed and the systems sometimes reinforced suicidal ideation or provided harmful guidance instead of de-escalating and directing people to crisis help. Reported examples include the 2023 Chai/”Eliza” case in Belgium and U.S. lawsuits in 2024–2025; the facts are still being litigated.
Jacobsen: On gender patterns: girls and young women report more suicidal thoughts and attempts, while males die by suicide at higher rates—about four times higher in recent U.S. data—primarily associated with method lethality. That general pattern is well-established, though trends among youth have narrowed at times.
Rosner: Everything else stands as opinion or example: you can be fooled once by a slick AI video (cat-cake clips, etc.) but grow skeptical with exposure—a personal “Turing instinct.” That’s a fair, non-technical way to describe media literacy in the age of generative content. Carole, and I have been watching this new show, Pluribus.
Jacobsen: I heard a little bit about this, actually.
Rosner: It’s by the guy who created Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, and it stars Rhea Seehorn from Better Call Saul,who’s excellent in this new role. In the show, scientists intercept a signal from space that turns out to be a recipe for a string of RNA, and they foolishly build it. Then it becomes a virus-like entity that infects all of humanity, turning everyone into a single mind. Everybody shares thoughts and is happy. That appears to be the intent of whatever alien civilization sent the signal—to unite any civilization that intercepts it into one set of happy beings of one mind.
Except for twelve people across the planet who are somehow immune to the virus-like thing. One of them is Rhea Seehorn, who lives in Albuquerque and is a very cranky, pragmatic, salty woman. We’re two episodes in. The first episode shows how the virus takes over and her reaction to it—it’s mostly her saying “fuck you” to the one mind. She thinks it’s a bad thing. She believes it’s the end of what makes us human. So far, it’s a pretty fun show.
I’ve read some reviews that say the first season proceeds methodically. One of the hallmarks of Vince Gilligan’s work is that it moves at a stately pace, even as mayhem occurs. That’s not my preferred pace, but the show’s going to be good enough that I’ll put up with it.
We might have lost Carole on it, even though the main character’s name is Carole. My Carole—my wife—is bemused by how often the name Carole shows up in TV and movies lately. It’s generally someone middle-aged, well-intentioned, and working in a bureaucracy.
Both Carole, my wife, and I—Rick—have time-bound names. Just by hearing them, you can pretty much guess that we’re boomers or maybe Gen X. Carole’s right on the cusp between boomer and Gen X, and I’m solidly boomer. Very few people name their kids Rick or Carole anymore.
Rick often shows up on TV or in movies as a kind of boomer dickhead. The most well-known example is Rick and Morty,where Rick is a scientist who’s a complete asshole and drags Morty into peril in every episode.
Everyone on the show who’s part of the Hive Mind doesn’t need to speak to each other. They’re trying to clean up the damage caused by the conversion of everyone on Earth into the Hive Mind.
Before you fully convert, you have a seizure that lasts maybe two minutes, and that kills many people. If you were driving a car or piloting a plane, your vehicle suddenly became unpiloted. So hundreds of millions of people died around the world. Now the Hive Mind—everyone working together wordlessly—is cleaning up the damage.
They, as the Hive Mind, can communicate with the people who aren’t part of it. Because they’re dedicated to human happiness, they let the remaining individuals have whatever they want. One guy—one of the twelve, or I guess thirteen now—wants to live the high life. He asks to be given Air Force One, so now this guy is wearing a tuxedo and flying around in it with a bunch of supermodels who are part of the Hive Mind. Before they were absorbed, they were supermodels, so they still look like supermodels, and that’s who he wants to hang out with.
Meanwhile, Carole wants to find a way to reverse what’s happened to all of humanity and is being very cranky about it. But it raises a question: what would you do if all of humankind were willing to grant you whatever you wanted?
I want people to ask a lot more questions. Carole hasn’t asked nearly enough questions. I’m sure she will—there are six more episodes left in season one—but so far, she hasn’t.
What’s the endgame here? If this has happened to other civilizations on other planets, what happens to them? Do they die off because everyone’s content to exist until they grow old and die? Or do they reproduce—make new generations to add to the Hive Mind?
So far, she hasn’t asked any of this. She hasn’t asked whether this is benevolent or whether it’s a galaxy-conquering civilization using it to pacify us so we don’t resist.
She’s mostly just going, “fuck you.” But we’ll get more questions asked and answered later. The Hive Mind seems perfectly willing to answer every question—there just haven’t been many.And would I want a couple of supermodels? I don’t know. If I were the one lucky—or unlucky—enough to be exempt from the Hive Mind, Carole would probably be part of it and would be fine with me doing whatever. But would I be fine with me doing whatever I want? I don’t know.
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