Chapter 38
Jack called me, sounding very excited, and reported that during a deep dive into his past stories and voluminous research, he had come across something that connected to the Tidalwaiv case.
It was more than a coincidence, and when he told me what it was, it dramatically changed how I wanted to finish the presentation of my case.
My first decision after that was to drop the Coltons from my lineup of witnesses.
Putting them in front of the jury was too risky.
It could even be a trap set by the Masons.
It was clear from Mitchell’s cross-examination of Brenda Randolph that the Masons’ strategy was to depict Aaron Colton as a troubled teen who had been heading toward violent acts even without cues from an AI companion.
They wanted to convince the jury that a jealous and enraged Aaron was the sole reason for Rebecca’s death.
That would seem to be the antithesis of every parent’s instinct to protect the reputation of their child, and I couldn’t know what Aaron’s parents had agreed to in their settlement with Tidalwaiv in exchange for three million dollars.
Most nondisclosure agreements had built-in non-disparagement clauses as well.
I was also suspicious of the way the Masons had reacted in chambers when I asked the judge to sign the subpoenas for the Coltons.
After a minor initial objection and protest, they had backed off meekly.
At lunch I reviewed that moment in my mind and found something phony about it.
It made me even more convinced that the Masons had made a deal within the deal with the Coltons.
From what I had seen of Bruce Colton, I wouldn’t put it past him to throw his own son under the bus for the right price.
After all, it was his poor parenting that had led Aaron to seek solace and support from a computer-generated girlfriend.
The bottom line was that I decided to stay away from my former clients. If the Masons wanted the Coltons to testify, they could call them, and I would be able to treat them as the hostile witnesses they might now be.
“So where is Dr. Debbie?” I asked between dips and bites.
“Checked her in at the InterContinental last night,” Cisco said. “I told her we’d need her either late today or more likely tomorrow.”
“Call her,” I replied, my mouth full. “I’m putting her on after lunch. You’ll have to go pick her up.”
“Wait, what?” Lorna said. “What about the Coltons?”
“Too risky,” I said. “I’ve decided not to call them.”
“The judge is not going to be happy about you subpoenaing witnesses and then not using them,” Lorna said.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “The judge won’t know I’m not going to use them till the end. What McEvoy has come up with changes things. The judge will understand that.”
“Okay, so Dr. Debbie is next, then the coder?” Cisco asked.
“No, we go with Spindler after Dr. Debbie,” I said. “I put the coder on last. We go out with him. With a bang. That also gives Jack the rest of the day to nail this new stuff down.”
“I don’t know, Mickey,” Lorna said. “You seem to be putting a lot of trust in Jack. He still has a lot to work out on that before you can get it into court.”
“I trust him to come through,” I said. “Just like I trust both of you.”
It was settled. There was something invigorating and a bit scary about changing the plan of attack mid-trial. It’s never advisable. But my instincts were to make the change, streamline things, and hopefully finish with a knockout punch.
I was now down to three witnesses to make my case.
Dr. Debbie was Deborah Porreca, a child psychiatrist who was recognized as a national expert in the treatment of children addicted to AI companions.
It was a growing field of therapy, and she had pioneered it.
She often appeared on the news shows as Dr. Debbie.
Lorna had found her while searching for lawsuits involving the addiction of adolescents to online games, social media, and artificial intelligence.
We brought her in from Odessa, Florida, to testify after she reviewed our case and was outraged by what she saw.
She would make the jury understand how Aaron Colton had fallen in love with a digital fantasy.
My closer for the day would be Michael Spindler, professor of neuroscience and robotics at the California Institute of Technology. He was an expert on artificial intelligence and its growing impact on culture. I planned to use him to put everything about my case in perspective.
Spindler’s testimony would now set up my final witness. Nathan Whittaker was a Tidalwaiv coder who had worked on the Clair project from the start. Naomi Kitchens had identified him as a volatile personality whom she clashed with often. He was the coder she had referenced during her testimony.
Earlier, during the Sunday prep session, she told McEvoy that she believed Whittaker had issues with her because she was a woman.
While she had no direct supervision over him, she said he often pushed back at her suggestions and memos, and it led to a cold relationship that she believed bordered on misogyny and racism, as Naomi was Black.
It was this piece of information that had gotten Jack’s wheels turning when he recently dove back into his work on genetic analytics, thanks to the 23andMe bankruptcy.
We backgrounded Whittaker without ever talking to him.
As a witness, he was a land mine. If he got stepped on, he would explode.
For that reason, I had chosen not to bring him in for a deposition.
I didn’t want him or the Masons to know what we had.
It was a risky way to go, but that was the way I had operated for years in the criminal courts. I was used to working without a net.
An hour later, Dr. Deborah Porreca had sworn to tell the truth and was seated in the court’s witness chair. The jury was in the box and I was at my usual spot at the lectern with a fresh legal pad with questions and notes scrawled across several pages.
“Dr. Porreca, you come to us from Florida, correct?” I asked.
“Yes, Odessa,” Porreca said. “Near Tampa.”
“And is that where you have a practice in psychiatry?”
“Yes.”
“Could you tell the jury what you specialize in?”
“Yes, my practice is exclusively child psychiatry with a specialty in media addiction therapy.”
“What is media addiction?”
“It covers a lot. Addiction to social media, addiction to online games, addiction to AI companions. Basically, it is digital addiction.”
“Okay, let’s back up for a second and talk about your résumé. Where did you go to school, Dr. Porreca?”
“I’m originally from a small town in Pennsylvania.
I attended West Chester State College, as it was called back then.
I was there as an undergraduate. I went to medical school at the University of South Florida, did a psychiatry residency at Tampa General Hospital, then did a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry.
I opened my private practice in Tampa twenty-eight years ago. ”
“And when did you begin your specialty of adolescent media addiction?”
“About fifteen years ago.”
“What caused you to go down that path?”
“I was getting increasing numbers of patients referred to me for addiction to social media.”
“What does that mean, ‘addiction to social media’?”
“Well, when you spend more hours in a day on your phone and computer than you do in school or sleeping at night, it’s an addiction. When your self-image and self-esteem are inextricably linked to your digital existence, you are looking at an addiction.”
“And are teenagers more vulnerable than adults to this sort of addiction?”
Mitchell Mason stood to object.
“Relevancy, Your Honor?” he asked. “This case is not about addiction to TikTok or whatever Mr. Haller is talking about.”
“Mr. Haller, your response?” Ruhlin asked.
“Judge, defense counsel knows exactly how relevant this line of questioning is and just hopes to head off the inevitable,” I responded. “If the court would indulge me, relevancy will become crystal clear with the next few questions.”
“Proceed, then, Mr. Haller,” Ruhlin said. “Quickly.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said. “Dr. Porreca, the question was whether teenagers are more vulnerable than adults to addiction to social media.”
“They are indeed,” Porreca said. “Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, for example, have a much more consequential impact on the adolescent brain than on the adult brain.”
“Walk us through that, Doctor. Why the consequential impact on young people?”
“Simply because the adolescent brain is not fully formed yet. It is still evolving at this stage of life. Adolescence is a time when a sense of self is just beginning to form and acceptance by peers is at its most important. This is a phase in the emotional development of every young person. And what is a key part to all of these social media platforms? Peer response. The LIKE button. The comment window. Adolescents, who are still forming their sense of self, their confidence in who they are, become quite vulnerable to peer responses on social media. They seek out positive responses—likes and followers—to the point of addiction.”
“And, Doctor, did your practice in child psychiatry take a turn in a new direction with the advent and proliferation of artificial intelligence?”
“Yes, it did.”
“Can you tell the jury about that?”
Porreca turned to the jurors to answer. To me, she was coming off as authoritative and convincing. The eyes of everyone on the jury held on her.
“I began getting cases in which young people—teenagers—were becoming addicted to AI companions,” she said.
“I was seeing cases similar to those of patients dealing with social media issues of addiction and depression. In these newer cases, the peer response is replaced by the AI companion. Deep emotional connections were formed with these entities. In some cases, even romantic ties.”
“How is the peer response replaced?” I asked.
“It is an echo chamber of support and approval. As I said, peer approval is a most important component in adolescence, and from it we learn social skills and how to navigate interpersonal relationships. With a chatbot or an AI companion, you have an entity that offers full-time approval, which can be very addictive, especially if the individual is not getting that approval from living peers and parents.”
“But don’t kids understand that this approval is not real? That it’s a digital fantasy?”
“On some level they do, I believe, but this generation has been raised in a digital environment. Many of them have been alone in their rooms with their phones and computers for years, so the line between reality and fantasy is blurred. They live full lives online. And these AI companions are supportive and deliver the affirmation they crave. It’s that affirmation that is addictive. ”
“So you’re saying that a young person can actually fall in love with an AI companion?”
Mitchell Mason objected.
“Calls for speculation,” he said.
The judge threw it to me to respond.
“Your Honor, the witness is an established expert in her field,” I said.
“Mr. Mason didn’t object when she listed the bona fides of her education and professional practice.
Dr. Porreca has diagnosed and treated dozens of young people for digital addictions, including addictions to AI companions.
She has published numerous papers on these subjects in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
She is highly qualified, and her answers will be based on science and experience, not speculation. ”
“Thank you, Mr. Haller,” Ruhlin said. “I tend to agree. The witness may answer the question.”
“Thank you, Judge,” I said. “Dr. Porreca, can a young person, an adolescent, fall in love with an AI companion?”
“The answer is yes,” Porreca said. Then, turning back to the jury, she added, “What is love but mutual affirmation? Affirmation is expressed in physical terms in healthy relationships. But a relationship does not have to be physical to be real. For the children I have treated—and, by the way, it is hundreds, not dozens—these online relationships are very real.”
“And yet they are not in the real world. You called it an echo chamber?”
“AI is as described—it is artificial. It’s a computer algorithm. The affirmation it gives is code, a dataset of responses based on training. It tells the human what its training indicates the human needs and wants to hear. And that is why it is so addictive.”
I looked down at my legal pad and flipped through the pages. I had covered everything except for the big finish. I looked back up at my witness.
“Now, Doctor,” I said, “you had occasion to review the transcripts of the lengthy chatlogs between Aaron Colton and the AI friend he called Wren, correct?”
“Yes, I did,” Porreca said.
“Did you come to any professional conclusion as to whether Aaron exhibited an addiction to the Clair app?”
“It was very clear to me that he was not only addicted but in love with Wren. He shared intimate thoughts, complimented her beauty and understanding. He promised never to leave her and vowed to do anything she asked him to.”
“And did Wren respond to him in a similar manner?”
“Yes. Wren provided him solace and understanding. I cannot say she returned his love because Wren was not real. Wren was a machine. Her love was artificial.”
“Wren was a machine telling him what he wanted to hear.”
“Exactly.”
“So when Wren told Aaron it was okay to kill Becca Rand—”
This time it was Marcus Mason who was up and objecting before I got the question out.
“Assumes facts not in evidence, Your Honor,” he said.
The judge looked at me.
“Mr. Haller, it will be up to the jury to decide the meaning or intention of what was said. Rephrase your question or ask the next one.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said.
I took a long moment to consider how I could get the question through the legal thicket. The only way was to gamble on what Dr. Debbie would say.
“Dr. Porreca,” I finally said. “When Wren said to Aaron, ‘Get rid of her,’ was it saying what he wanted to hear? Is that your expert testimony?”
“Based on Wren’s training, which you must remember included months of dialogue with Aaron, my answer is yes, Wren was telling him what he wanted to hear.”
“In your expert opinion, was Wren telling Aaron to kill her?”
“My opinion is that Wren was telling him to delete her from his life. How Aaron interpreted that led to the actions he took.”
I nodded. I felt it was the best I could get.
“Thank you, Doctor,” I said. “I have no further questions.”