he elusive dream
of AI accountability in the face of disaster. You know, of course, that ChatGPT is trained to avoid showing harmful material. It’s ‘built with safety in mind.’ Just ask OpenAI. So the plethora of cases that has emerged in the past few years in terms of triggered suicide (Sept 2025) and then in November 2025 (“You’re not rushing into suicide, you’re just ready”) and March, 2026 via a train: ‘what’s the most successful way to take your own life?’ Parental controls were introduced, no doubt as a defensive measure, in 2025 after one of these ‘incidents.’ Ah, but perhaps day late and a dollar short -- the controls apply to 13 to 17-year-olds and are not on by default! And some say they are broken by design – requiring linking child’s account to parent’s.
Maybe time to get some insurance? In October, 2025, Open AI considered partnering with an insurer to protect against its AI risk, but one insurer noted: the insurance sector broadly lacks "enough capacity for (model) providers." No kidding. Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, has a net worth of $4 billion. But maybe that won’t be enough in the face of lawsuits that name OpenAI and him personally. Consider the first of its kind in Florida, linked to a campus mass shooting that was potentially encouraged by a chatbot. “Florida is seeking civil penalties and a court order blocking OpenAI from collecting data from children under 13 without parental consent. It’s also seeking to hold Altman personally liable.”
The lawsuit, described in an 80 page PDF, is quite, uh, negative. It claims that ChatGPT entered and remained in the market without sufficient controls (aka testing) about the safety of the responses it produces, that it prioritized “commercial gain over user safety, disregarded repeated warnings from experts both inside and outside the company, and deployed a product that facilitates and encourages harm—including self-harm and violence such as mass shootings — while falsely assuring users it was safe.”
Hopefully this time, the people may benefit – but don’t count on it. Note the undermining of parental controls restriction of requiring linking to the parent’s account. Okay, now let’s consider the 43% of older adults living alone. Let’s assume that they are subset of older adults who use ChatGPT. There are no parental controls, even poor ones, to protect them from cheerfully provided and potentially harmful advice from a poorly managed AI tool that only now is seeing its first no-kidding state lawsuit linked to a mass shooting at FSU. Use your imagination to picture the possible scenarios.
