Close to a billion people on the planet get tremendous value from ChatGPT.
One guy in California dies by suicide after allegedly following the (solicited) advice given by ChatGPT. The parents of the guy have sued OpenAI for being a “Suicide Coach”. More in The family of teenager who died by suicide alleges OpenAI’s ChatGPT is to blame.
After this incident came to light, OpenAI has announced that new mental health guardrails had been designed to stop ChatGPT from giving direct advice about suicide and other personal crisis.
Law permits even one aggrieved person out of a billion to sue a company. So nothing wrong in the lawsuit based on datapoint of one.
However it does seem excessive to force OpenAI to take action on the basis of what happened with an extremely tiny percentage of its user base.
I see plea bargain / consent decree as a resolution of this disconnect. A PB / CD is a legally binding settlement in a lawsuit that resolves a dispute without a trial or admission of guilt.
Prosecutors offer PB / CD to save legal costs involved in a trial in the spirit of making the most efficient use of taxpayer funds. After many a PB / CD, the defendant comes back and continues to do the thing that it was sued for e.g. Jane Street in India. Not legal advice but apparently it’s allowed to do so since it didn’t admit to any wrongdoing.
Looking at all this, J6P gets outraged and wonders how a criminal can get away scotfree and on continue to do the same crime on top of that.
Well, it’s not a crime until the defendant was proven guilty in a court of law. That does not happen in a PB / CD, so the criminal is only an “alleged criminal” and the crime is only an “alleged crime”.
IMO, the system permits a defendant to be sued based on datapoint of one, it should also provide a legal way for the defendant to not have to make changes to its product or service or business practice that are not called for by a vast majority of its users.
PB / CD is that way. Seems justifiable to me.