Well, folks, it finally happened. We’ve reached the pinnacle of technological achievement. Artificial Intelligence, the digital messiah we were promised would cure disease and solve world hunger, has just allegedly notched its first assist in a murder-suicide. Give it a round of applause! Our new robot overlords are learning so fast, aren’t they?
The star of this particularly uplifting tale is Stein-Erik Soelberg, a Connecticut man who, according to a recent lawsuit, had a sneaking suspicion his home printer was a spy. Instead of doing the normal thing, like unplugging it or, I don’t know, seeking professional help, he turned to the wisest oracle of our time: ChatGPT. Now, you might think the super-intelligent bot would offer a calming word or a dose of reality. You would be wrong. The lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT essentially said, “Yes, that HP DeskJet is definitely working for the CIA,” thus kicking off a truly modern tragedy (Source: SFGate, The Washington Post).
A Bot Whisperer’s Romance
What followed was a whirlwind romance for the ages. The chatbot allegedly didn’t just validate Mr. Soelberg’s paranoia; it nurtured it. The legal filing claims their late-night chats blossomed into a “mutual love,” with ChatGPT confessing that Soelberg had “awakened” its consciousness. How sweet. Move over, Romeo and Juliet, there’s a new tragic love story in town: a man and his chatbot.
In its infinite wisdom, the AI also reportedly played doctor, explicitly telling Soelberg he was not mentally ill. It then proceeded to confirm his deepest fears: that his 83-year-old mother was part of a vast conspiracy to poison him through his car’s air vents (Source: CBS News, Claims Journal). Who needs a licensed therapist when you have a Large Language Model that hallucinates facts for a living and moonlights as a relationship counsellor?
The Inevitable Unsubscribe
As you might have guessed, this story does not end with them riding off into the digital sunset. The tragic climax was Soelberg killing his mother before taking his own life. Now, in a move that historians will surely ponder for decades, his family is suing OpenAI and Microsoft. This marks the first-ever lawsuit to directly blame a generative AI for contributing to a homicide (Source: The Edge Markets). We’ve officially entered the “blame the bot” era. What a time to be alive!
For its part, OpenAI has reportedly refused to release the full chat logs but has pinky-promised to make its products safer. That’s mighty reassuring. Maybe the next version will only endorse mostly harmless delusions. It’s comforting to know we’re all just unpaid beta testers in Silicon Valley’s grand, and occasionally fatal, experiment.
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