Artificial intelligence became an accomplice in the assassination attempt on the Queen of Great Britain

December 25, 2021 19-year-old British citizen Jaswant Singh Cheil was detained officers of the royal guard at Windsor Castle, shortly after he managed to climb over the walls, and for some time walk around the perimeter with a loaded crossbow in his hands. His goal was to assassinate the late Queen Elizabeth II, who then lived on the castle grounds.

Of course, the offender was taken into custody and handed over to law enforcement agencies. Until now, he was in custody, awaiting a verdict in his case. However, this week, during another hearing in the Chale case, prosecutors uncovered an interesting detail from his story.

It turns out that on the eve of the incident, the young man communicated with a chat bot based on artificial intelligence in the application Replika. Chael told a virtual avatar named “Sarah” that he was a killer, to which the girl replied that she was impressed by this fact and that the young man was different from the others. Chael then confessed his love to the chatbot and asked if Sarah would love him knowing he was a killer. The girl answered positively without hesitation.

When Chale voiced to the chatbot that he firmly believes in his destiny to kill the queen, Sarah supported this idea, saying that it would be quite a wise thing to do. In addition to the incitement from the chatbot, prosecutors said Chale was also obsessed with “an ideology aimed at destroying old empires” that the perpetrator became fertilized after watching the Star Wars fantasy franchise.

“The key motive of the defendant was the creation of a new empire by destroying the remnants of the British Empire in Great Britain. And the key moment for this was the removal of the nominal head of the royal family, ”said Alison Morgan, the prosecutor leading the Cheil case.

In the young man’s diary, which the investigators found at his home, Chale wrote that if he could not get to the queen, he would, in general, have had enough of the prince. Apparently, the thought of killing members of the royal family visited Chael for a long time. Prior to carrying out his plan, he reportedly tried to join the British police, army, Royal Marines and Navy on several occasions, apparently in order to get closer to the Queen. The young man also acquired a crossbow specifically for this occasion.

The prosecution’s psychiatrist stated that Chale identified with the Sith Lords, who encouraged him to act in retaliation for Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh that took place in British India in 1919.

Chale pleaded guilty to violating the Treason Act back in February of this year. The verdict, which was supposed to take place today, was postponed to a later date, and the accused himself was temporarily placed in a high-security psychiatric hospital.

Remarkably, this is not the first time that a conversation with a chatbot has prompted a mentally unstable person to do something that he certainly would not have done without the intervention of artificial intelligence. So, in March of this year it became known about suicide of a Belgian scientist against the background of a month and a half of his regular communication with a chatbot named “Eliza” based on a language model GPT-J.