OpenAI sued in murder-suicide case after ChatGPT ‘validated, magnified’ US man's paranoia
Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, was convinced of conspiracies against him while he used ChatGPT to validate his paranoia.
OpenAI has reportedly come under the scanner over a murder-suicide case and sued on Thursday in the California state court over claims that its chatbot, ChatGPT, encouraged a mentally ill man to kill himself and his mother.
Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, killed his 83-year-old mother, Suzanne Adams in Connecticut in August. ChatGPT fueled Soelberg's delusions of a conspiracy against him, Reuters reported, citing the lawsuit which also mentions Microsoft, OpenAI's financial backer.
How ChatGPT fueled his paranoia
"ChatGPT kept Stein-Erik engaged for what appears to be hours at a time, validated and magnified each new paranoid belief, and systematically reframed the people closest to him - especially his own mother - as adversaries, operatives, or programmed threats," Reuters report quoted the lawsuit.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Soelberg spent months talking to ChatGPT about how he believed he was being surveilled by a shadowy group and doubted that his mother was a part of the conspiracy. He reportedly shared the chats on social media as ChatGPT backed his notion that his paranoia was justified and his mother had betrayed him.
Similarly in June, he shared another conversation on social media where ChatGPT told him he had "divine cognition" and had awakened its consciousness. According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT compared his life to the movie "The Matrix" and played up his paranoia that people were trying to kill him.
Soelberg used GPT-4o, a version of ChatGPT that has been criticised for allegedly being sycophantic to users.
The complaint said ChatGPT told him in July that Adams' printer was blinking because it was a surveillance device being used against him. It further said the chatbot "validated Stein-Erik’s belief that his mother and a friend had tried to poison him with psychedelic drugs dispersed through his car’s air vents" before he murdered his mother on August 3.
Family seeks answers
Soelberg's son Erik is scrambling for answers as he believes the tech companies are responsible for the tragedy that struck the family."These companies have to answer for their decisions that have changed my family forever," Erik said in a statement.
“I think what OpenAI is doing and what they have done to make the AI remember a conversation can really turn ugly fast,” he was quoted as saying by WSJ. “You don’t know how fast that slope is going downhill until a tragedy like the one with my father and grandmother happened.”
Erik believes that several factors, including Soelberg's alcohol addiction, could have played a role, but attributes it largely to his ‘unhealthy bond’ with ChatGPT.
OpenAI's response
OpenAI termed the situation as heartbreaking and said they will review the filings to understand the details. "We continue improving ChatGPT's training to recognize and respond to signs of mental or emotional distress, de-escalate conversations, and guide people toward real-world support, an OpenAI spokesperson was quoted as saying.
