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This may have come up before, but it's the first I've heard of it. Chalk this under "weak AI doomerism" (that is, "wow, LLMs can do some creepy shit") as opposed to "strong AI doomerism" of the Bostromian "we're all gonna die" variety. All emphasis below is mine.
AI girlfriend ‘told crossbow intruder to kill Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle’| The Daily Telegraph:
My first thought on reading this story was wondering if Replika themselves could be legally held liable. If they create a product which directly encourages users to commit crimes which they would not otherwise have committed, does that make Replika accessories before the fact, or even guilty of conspiracy by proxy? I wonder how many Replika users have run their plans to murder their boss or oneitis past their AI girlfriend and received nothing but enthusiastic endorsement from her - we just haven't heard about them because the target wasn't as high-profile as Chail's. I further wonder how many of them have actually gone through with their schemes. I don't know if this is possible, but if I was working in Replika's legal team, I'd be looking to pull a list of users' real names and searching them against recent news reports concerning arrests for serious crimes (murder, assault, abduction etc.).
(Coincidentally, I learned from Freddie deBoer on Monday afternoon that Replika announced in March that users would no longer be able to have sexual conversations with the app (a decision they later partially walked back).)
In the US, at least, if "she" had been human, that'd be nowhere's near enough to charge her with anything, so I wouldn't think you could charge her creators either.
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