For the first time, a lawsuit has been filed against AI for complicity in “wrongful death.” On Dec. 11, the Suzanne Eberson Adams estate in California, accused ChatGPT creator Open AI and founder Sam Altman of wrongful death in the Aug. 3 murder-suicide of Adams and her son Stein-Erik Soelberg.
The Wall Street Journal had run an extensive story on Aug. 28, reporting that Soelberg had moved in with his mother following a divorce in 2018, and that the police responded to issues involving him on multiple occasions, including drunken driving and attempted suicide.
According to the WSJ, based on YouTube videos still available online (!!!—ed.), “He became suspicious of the printer he shared with his mother because it blinked when he walked by, leading him to believe it was detecting his motion. The bot directed Soelberg to disconnect the printer’s power and network cables, relocate it to another room and monitor his mother’s reaction.”
“A key feature of AI chatbots is that, generally, the bot ‘doesn’t push back,’ said Dr. Keith Sakata, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has treated 12 patients over the past year who were hospitalized for mental-health emergencies involving AI use. ‘Psychosis thrives when reality stops pushing back, and AI can really just soften that wall.’” (Emphasis added.)
