The perpetrator of the devastating mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, Canada used ChatGPT to ideate about graphic mass murder for months leading up to the deadly massacre.
OpenAI is currently facing 37 lawsuits from families impacted by the February shooting at Tumbler Ridge, where 18-year-old shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar murdered six people at a local school — five students, all aged between 12 and 13, and a teacher — and injured 27 others before killing herself. (Van Rootselaar also fatally shot her mother and younger stepbrother before continuing the rampage.) It’s also being sued by the Canadian province of British Columbia over allegations that OpenAI could’ve prevented the killing but failed.
Weeks after the shooting, The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI, months earlier, had flagged the shooter’s ChatGPT logs for containing disturbingly graphic descriptions of mass violence, sparking an internal discussion over whether to report the user to local law enforcement. Company leaders opted not to raise concerns to local officials, and instead simply banned the user’s account — which did next to nothing, since Van Rootselaar simply opened a second profile, the AI company later admitted.
Until now, the graphic details of Van Rootselaar’s conversations with ChatGPT, which appears to have been the teen’s close confidant in the months and weeks leading up to the murders, have not been publicly known.
