Florida’s attorney general said on Tuesday that an inquiry his office opened this month into ChatGPT and its parent company, OpenAI, has become a criminal investigation, based on a review of messages between the chatbot and the man accused of killing two people at Florida State University last year.
The attorney general, James Uthmeier, a Republican, said the messages suggested that ChatGPT “offered significant advice to the shooter before he committed such heinous crimes.” He pointed to several exchanges, including ones in which the suspect asked about a gun’s power at short range and which ammunition might be used for it.
“My prosecutors have looked at this, and they’ve told me if it was a person on the other end of the screen, we would be charging them with murder,” Mr. Uthmeier said at a news conference in Tampa.
Two adults died and six other people, including at least one student, were injured last April at the shooting near the student union at Florida State, a public university with an enrollment of more than 43,000 in Tallahassee. The suspect, Phoenix Ikner, who was then a 20-year-old student at the university, faces multiple charges of murder and attempted murder and is in jail awaiting trial.
Prosecutors have gathered as evidence more than 200 messages that the suspect exchanged with ChatGPT. On the day of the shooting, he asked the chatbot how the country would react to a shooting at Florida State and when the busiest time was at the student union.
Mr. Uthmeier first announced on April 9 that his office would be opening an investigation into OpenAI and ChatGPT. On Tuesday, he said a civil investigation into the company’s potential liability would continue, along with the criminal investigation.
OpenAI said in a statement earlier this month that it would cooperate with the attorney general’s office. “We build ChatGPT to understand people’s intent and respond in a safe and appropriate way, and we continue improving our technology,” the company said at the time. It did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
(The Times has sued OpenAI, claiming copyright infringement; OpenAI has denied the claims.)
Mr. Uthmeier acknowledged on Tuesday that OpenAI is a company, not a person, and said that exploring potential criminal culpability against the company would be novel legal territory.
But he also said that he had a duty to find out whether “human beings may have been involved in the design, management and operation” of the chatbot to the point that it would “warrant criminal liability.”
Patricia Mazzei is the lead reporter for The Times in Miami, covering Florida and Puerto Rico.
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