Associated Incidents
Toronto (Canada), April 29 (EFE) – Seven families of victims of the Tumbler Ridge massacre in Canada, a shooting that left eight people dead in addition to the perpetrator, who committed suicide, filed a lawsuit Wednesday in San Francisco (USA) against OpenAI.
The lawsuit accuses the company behind the ChatGPT generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot of “playing a role in the mass shooting” and of “being able to and should have prevented” the massacre.
On February 10, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killed five children and a teacher at a school in Tumbler Ridge, a small town in western Canada. The young woman, who suffered from mental health issues, also murdered her mother and brother that same day.
Following the massacre, The Wall Street Journal revealed that OpenAI had detected disturbing interactions between the shooter and its ChatGPT system months before the attack, but did not consider them serious enough to alert Canadian police.
The lawsuit filed by the seven families alleges that OpenAI staff asked company leaders to notify Canadian police about Van Rootselaar's interactions with the chatbot, according to Canadian television network Global News.
The plaintiffs claim that OpenAI refused to notify authorities because the alert would "set a precedent" obligating the company to contact law enforcement "every time its security team identified a user planning real-world violence."
The lawsuit adds that "the public would finally see what OpenAI was desperately trying to hide: that ChatGPT is not the safe and essential tool the company portrays it to be, but a product dangerous enough that its creators routinely identify its users as threats to human life."
The filing of the lawsuit in the U.S. comes six days after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman apologized to Tumbler Ridge for failing to alert authorities.
In a letter dated April 23 and addressed to the community, Altman expressed his “deepest condolences” to the victims’ families and acknowledged that the company did not inform law enforcement when it detected alarming activity on the account of the shooter, which was subsequently suspended. EFE
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