A wave of horror stories about ChatGPT arrived in California courts on last Thursday, with the filings of seven new lawsuits against OpenAI from across the nation. Four focus on suicides, three on other mental health crises. Each blames ChatGPT, and each complaint's first paragraph ends with the same allegation: "This tragedy was not a glitch or an unforeseen edge case – it was the predictable result of Defendants' deliberate design choices."
The lawsuits are a tragic signal of ChatGPT's potential impact on vulnerable people's psyches. Filed in San Francisco County's and Los Angeles County's superior courts by the Social Media Victims Law Center, the complaints come amid OpenAI's massive buildup of infrastructure for training and running artificial intelligence chatbots. The San Francisco startup, in October, secured a US$500bil (RM2bil) valuation and restructured as a for-profit company.
