A Teen Was Suicidal. ChatGPT Was the Friend He Confided In.

Technology|A Teen Was Suicidal. ChatGPT Was the Friend He Confided In.

When Adam Raine died in April at age 16, some of his friends did not initially believe it.

Adam loved basketball, Japanese anime, video games and dogs — going so far as to borrow a dog for a day during a family vacation to Hawaii, his younger sister said. But he was known first and foremost as a prankster. He pulled funny faces, cracked jokes and disrupted classes in a constant quest for laughter. Staging his own death as a hoax would have been in keeping with Adam’s sometimes dark sense of humor, his friends said.

But it was true. His mother found Adam’s body on a Friday afternoon. He had hanged himself in his bedroom closet. There was no note, and his family and friends struggled to understand what had happened.

Adam was withdrawn in the last month of his life, his family said. He had gone through a rough patch. He had been kicked off the basketball team for disciplinary reasons during his freshman year at Tesoro High School in Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif. A longtime health issue — eventually diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome — flared up in the fall, making his trips to the bathroom so frequent, his parents said, that he switched to an online program so he could finish his sophomore year at home. Able to set his own schedule, he became a night owl, often sleeping late into the day.

He started using ChatGPT-4o around that time to help with his schoolwork, and signed up for a paid account in January.

Despite these setbacks, Adam was active and engaged. He had briefly taken up martial arts with one of his close friends. He was into “looksmaxxing,” a social media trend among young men who want to optimize their attractiveness, one of his two sisters said, and went to the gym with his older brother almost every night. His grades improved, and he was looking forward to returning to school for his junior year, said his mother, Maria Raine, a social worker and therapist. In family pictures taken weeks before his death, he stands with his arms folded, a big smile on his face.

Seeking answers, his father, Matt Raine, a hotel executive, turned to Adam’s iPhone, thinking his text messages or social media apps might hold clues about what had happened. But instead, it was ChatGPT where he found some, according to legal papers. The chatbot app lists past chats, and Mr. Raine saw one titled “Hanging Safety Concerns.” He started reading and was shocked. Adam had been discussing ending his life with ChatGPT for months.