Wife of Tiru Chubba, a man killed in a mass shooting last year at Florida State University, filed a lawsuit in federal court Sunday against ChatGPT maker OpenAI, blaming the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot for contributing to the tragedy.
The lawsuit claims that Phoenix Ikner, the alleged gunman who was a 20-year-old FSU student at the time, used ChatGPT for “input and assistance” to carry-out the shooting that killed two people and wounded six others.
Baraki Sellers, one of the attorneys representing Chubba’s wife, Vandana Joshi, called ChatGPT a “co-conspirator” in the shooting.
The suit comes less than a month after Florida’s attorney general James Uthmeier opened a rare criminal investigation into OpenAI’s ChatGPT over whether the artificial intelligence app offered advice to Ikner.
Prosecutors believe the chatbot advised Ikner on what type of gun and ammunition to use, whether a gun would be useful at short range, and what time of day and at which location would allow for the most potential victims, Uthmeier said