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Families sue OpenAI over failure to report Canada mass shooter's ...
Families of seven victims of a mass shooting at a secondary school in British Columbia are suing OpenAI and the company’s CEO for negligence after it failed to alert authorities to the shooter’s troubling conversations with ChatGPT.The lawsuits, filed on Wednesday in a federal court in San Francisco, allege that the violent intentions of the shooter, identified as 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, were well-known to OpenAI. Employees at the company flagged the shooter’s account eight months before the attack and determined that it posed “a credible and specific threat of gun violence against real people”, according to the lawsuit.The families allege that employees urged Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, and other senior leaders to notify Canadian law enforcement agencies eight months before the attack, but the company decided not to warn authorities and deactivated the shooter’s account instead. Much of this is based on accounts that employees inside the company told the Wall Street Journal.The decision to not alert law enforcement led to the devastation of the rural community of Tumbler Ridge, the suit alleges, where on 10 February the shooter stormed the secondary school with a modified rifle and opened fire. They shot the first person they came across in a stairwell, and proceeded to the library, where they killed five others and injured 27 more. The shooter then killed themself.Before going to the school, the shooter killed their mother and 11-year-old brother in their family home.The school victims range in age from 12 to 13 and include a 39-year-old teaching assistant. One of the survivors, 12-year-old Maya Gebala, was shot in the head, neck and cheek. She has been in intensive care at Vancouver’s children’s hospital since the shooting and has received four brain operations. If she survives, she will probably have permanent disabilities, her attorneys said.The families who brought the seven lawsuits accuse OpenAI and Altman of negligence, aiding and abetting a mass shooting, wrongful death, and product liability. Their lawyers say it is the first wave of suits against the AI company over the shooting, and about two dozen more cases are forthcoming.In a statement to the Guardian, OpenAI said: “The events in Tumbler Ridge are a tragedy. We have a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence. As we shared with Canadian officials, we have already strengthened our safeguards, including improving how ChatGPT responds to signs of distr...
Families sue OpenAI over Canadian mass shooter's use of ChatGPT
A woman mourns at a makeshift memorial for the victims of a deadly mass shooting that took place in the town of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. A lawsuit filed Wednesday claims that OpenAI was negligent for failing to report the shooter to authorities after her account was flagged for "gun violence activity and planning." (Paige Taylor White | AFP via Getty Images) Families of those injured and killed in a school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia are suing OpenAI for negligence and providing a dangerously defective version of ChatGPT to the shooter. The seven suits, filed in federal court in San Francisco, allege that OpenAI failed to take actions that could have prevented injuries and deaths in the shooting, which took place on February 10. They claim that the company failed to report the shooter's conversations with ChatGPT to authorities, and that ChatGPT itself was a defective product that did not challenge the shooter or direct her to seek real-world help. The suits are the latest seeking to hold a tech company responsible over the design of its products, a once-novel legal approach that is being increasingly used against chatbot makers, social media and other platforms. For those who lost loved ones "there's nothing that the legal system can do that will make them whole again," Jay Edelson, the lead attorney representing the families, told NPR in an interview. He added that they hope the trials will hold OpenAI leadership to account: "They should not be trusted to have the most powerful consumer technology on the planet." In a statement in response to the lawsuits, OpenAI said it had a "zero tolerance" policy for using its tools to assist in committing violence: "We have already strengthened our safeguards, including improving how ChatGPT responds to signs of distress, connecting people with local support and mental health resources," an OpenAI spokesperson told NPR in an email. In a lengthy blog post published late Tuesday, OpenAI further explained its policies: "When conversations indicate an imminent and credible risk of harm to others, we notify law enforcement." "Profit over lives" The shooting at Tumbler Ridge is among the deadliest in Canadian history. It occurred when Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, entered the local secondary school with a long gun and a modified handgun, according to authorities. Van Rootselaar proceeded to kill five students and a teacher before killing herself. Authorities later learned that she had also killed her ...
Families of Tumbler Ridge shooting victims sue OpenAI and CEO Sam ...
Seven families of victims in a February school shooting sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman on Wednesday, alleging the company and its ChatGPT chatbot were complicit in the injuries or deaths of their ...
