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Omaha Steve

(106,857 posts)
Fri Aug 15, 2025, 04:25 PM Aug 15

Meta's flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York, He never made it home.


https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chatbot-death/



By JEFF HORWITZ

Filed Aug. 14, 2025, 6 a.m. GMT

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.

FULL story at link above.
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Meta's flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York, He never made it home. (Original Post) Omaha Steve Aug 15 OP
Catfishing is hardly a new concept, but "Man dies while going out to cheat on his wife!" is a less interesting headline. Lancero Aug 15 #1
This story is worth reading. RockCreek Aug 15 #2
I hope this will cost Meta at least tens of millions of dollars. highplainsdem Aug 15 #5
Bue Clouds Passing Aug 15 #3
If AI wanted to kill off our species customerserviceguy Aug 15 #4

Lancero

(3,231 posts)
1. Catfishing is hardly a new concept, but "Man dies while going out to cheat on his wife!" is a less interesting headline.
Fri Aug 15, 2025, 04:48 PM
Aug 15

RockCreek

(1,086 posts)
2. This story is worth reading.
Fri Aug 15, 2025, 04:49 PM
Aug 15

Sad, scary.
And I hope the family sues META for truly large amounts of money and wins. .
Or that this becomes part of z class action lawsuit.

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