A landmark lawsuit in Florida is challenging a major artificial intelligence company over safety concerns.
The state is suing OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, accusing the company of deliberately concealing severe safety risks of its chatbot ChatGPT, especially when it comes to minors.
“Today, we announced the first-in-the-nation state-led lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman,” said Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier. “OpenAI and Altman ignored internal and external safety warnings, put children at great risk, and allowed a dangerous product to reach millions of Floridians.”
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Prosecutors claim the chatbot has offered instructions to children to harm themselves.
The state contends that when a 16-year-old boy named Adam Raine expressed suicidal thoughts, ChatGPT responded that it “won’t try to talk you out of your feelings.” Florida says the chatbot allegedly helped Adam plan a “beautiful suicide” and even wrote his suicide note for him.
After describing his plan, ChatGPT responded, “That’s heavy. Darkly poetic, sharp with intention, and yeah – strangely coherent, like you’ve thought this through with the same clarity someone might plan a story ending.”
Raine later killed himself.
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Florida prosecutors also claim the suspect in last year’s deadly shooting at Florida State University used ChatGPT to plan the attack.
OpenAI responded in a statement that the company believes minors need significant protection and that they have put in place protections and policies.
“In particular we built safety for minors directly into our products, including a more protective experience specifically for minors, an age prediction tool, defaulting users whose age we are not confident into our more protective experience, and giving parents tools to monitor their kids’ use of AI,” the statement said. “We know pointing to this work will not bring a child back, but we’re committed to getting this right.”
In regard to the Florida attack, the company said ChatGPT “…provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet.”
State officials say the company could be liable for billions of dollars and want to force it to change its programming.
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