TREASONOUS AI
On Christmas day 2021, police detained Jaswant Singh Chail, 19, in the grounds of Windsor Castle. He was armed with a powerful “Supersonic X-bow” crossbow and dressed in black clothing with a hood, metal mask and gloves. He told officers, “I am here to kill the Queen”, who was in residence at the time. Before his arrest, Chail had wandered the grounds for two hours, during which he sent a video to his twin sister and 20 other people in which he talked about his plans and described himself as “Sith” and “Darth Jones”. He said that his plan to attack the Queen was motivated by Star Wars films and their tale of destroying old empires, and by seeking revenge for the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of Sikhs by British troops at Amritsar.
When investigating the case, police found that in the run-up to his attempted attack Chail had been involved in an intense conversation with an “AI girlfriend” chatbot called Sarai in the Replika online app. He was found to have exchanged 5,280 sexually charged messages with the AI between 8 and 22 December, and that it had encouraged him in his scheme to assassinate the Queen; in one he told Sarai, “I’m an assassin,” to
