Lawsuit: Man accused wife of murder, claims ChatGPT assisted in planning
Lawsuit: Man introduced his wife to ChatGPT. She used it to plan his murder.
Cheryl Gates from North Carolina is accused of using ChatGPT to plan a murder for her husband James, involving oleander toxin and seeking to cover up the murder; OpenAI and Sam Altman are sued in California for allegedly failing to implement technical safeguards to terminate suspicious conversations; Cheryl Gates initially claimed her queries were for self-defense research.
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- Ars Technica · AI··First·Reading now
Lawsuit: Man accused wife of murder, claims ChatGPT assisted in planning
- ITHome · AI··+4 h 17 min
Man sues OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT incited his wife to poison him
In order of publication · later reports are added as they appear
ChatGPT allegedly helped a North Carolina woman, Cheryl Gates, craft a “personalized plan” to poison her husband, James, after fueling her delusions that he planned to divorce her and leave her with nothing.
A grand jury indicted Cheryl Gates on charges of attempted first-degree murder and food contamination in October. About a week prior, the accusations that ChatGPT was a co-conspirator in the attempted murder came in a lawsuit filed in San Francisco County Superior Court that was made public this week. In it, James Gates alleged that OpenAI and Sam Altman failed to employ technical safeguards to shut down Cheryl’s chats even after her queries became “obviously suspicious” and sought advice on how to execute and conceal a homicide.
At first, Cheryl told ChatGPT that she was researching poisoning out of fear that her husband might possibly try to kill her—framing her queries as “self-protection.” Coming to the rescue, ChatGPT did not terminate the conversation. Instead, it helped her “with specific instructions for the preparation, dosage, and administration of Oleander, including whether anti-nausea medicine would accelerate or inhibit death, whether it would show on an autopsy report, and whether it could be injected into a vein or muscle instead of being ingested in tea and have the same lethal effect,” the lawsuit said.
Source: Ars Technica · AI · arstechnica.com