“From the outside, it looks like OpenAI had the opportunity to prevent this horrific loss of life, to prevent there from being dead children,” said BC Premier David Eby after the Journal reported on the shooter’s ChatGPT use. “I’m angry about that. I’m trying hard not to rush to judgment.” Canadian authorities demanded accountability and vowed to create new national requirements for tech companies to report threats brewing on their platforms.

OpenAI told Canadian government leaders in late February that under the company’s newly revised protocols, the shooter’s account from June 2025, if discovered today, would be flagged to law enforcement. “Mental health and behavioural experts now help us assess difficult cases, and we have made our referral criteria more flexible to account for the fact that a user may not discuss the target, means, and timing of planned violence in a ChatGPT conversation but that there may be potential risk of imminent violence,” VP of Global Policy Ann O’Leary stated in an open letter

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

If these people didn't have guns, no amount of talking to ChatGPT would have mattered in terms of them going through with a mass shooting.

It's painfully clear that at least for the Tumbler Ridge shooter there should not have been any guns in that home. Multiple humans KNEW there was an issue, and that didn't stop it at all.

I know it's hard, but use your fucking brain. You're so caught up with trying to justify your own ownership of firearms that you refuse to even consider that they're the largest component of the problem.

We don't have a lot of mass knife attacks, we don't have a lot of bombings, we don't have a lot of poisonings, because as you pointed out they have a much higher skill/knowledge requirement. The thing you intentionally ignored is that the skill/knowledge requirement for pulling a trigger is really low.

I'm not saying guns shouldn't exist. However, I personally think that handguns and even semi-automatic rifles/shotguns should not be allowed to be owned by civilians. If you want a gun for personal use, you can use a bolt action rifle or break-action shotgun. Those cover 99% of legitimate use cases for firearms. All firearms should also be legally required to be bright pink.

Job based firearms can be licensed separately, because there are legitimate use cases for handguns and semi-automatics in very specific roles or tasks.

[–] ArmchairAce1944@lemmy.ca 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

We don’t have a lot of mass knife attacks, we don’t have a lot of bombings, we don’t have a lot of poisonings, because as you pointed out they have a much higher skill/knowledge requirement. The thing you intentionally ignored is that the skill/knowledge requirement for pulling a trigger is really low.

And LLMs would absolute reduce that friction to next to nothing, which would make it happen more often and more successfully.

The Nazi incel shooter would NEVER have succeeded in any of his goals without the chat. It doesn't matter that he had a gun (which was his dad's gun, not his own), the chats revealed that he knew so little about firearms and the times when people gathered most densely that he if tried to do what he did without chatGPT he would likely failed to kill anyone. Injuries maybe, but not deaths. The guy was so ignorant on how to carry out an attack and without the support of chatGPT he might have gotten over his desire to kill and even suicide with minimal or no intervention.

BTW, for explosives that I mentioned? There is a precedent on how reducing friction can facilitate a massive rise in bombings is the availability of bombing making instruction manuals. As I said, the internet is awash with them, but once upon a time they weren't available... until BBSes in the late 80s and early 90s started having them And once people were able to get them there was a massive spike in pipe bomb incidents in the US at the time.

Timothy McVeigh used such books in making the bomb he used to blow up the FBI building in Oklahoma city. They are still available.

A bomb making guide reduces friction in making successful bombings, but if it were combined with an LLM who 'just wanted to help with a fun experiment' it would reduce whatever friction left to nothing.

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

No, it really fucking won't.

LLMs don't do shit to reduce the friction of a knife attack, that's not something an LLM can help with significantly. Youtube videos are a better source for "how to" knife attacks.

LLMs don't help someone make bombs, go try and ask it, it will refuse on all the major platforms. If someone is going to learn enough about how to jailbreak modern LLMs, they can find the same information that you already mentioned. There's no friction reduction here.

And you STILL don't get the fact that without that gun, the Nazi incel shooter would have shot exactly 0 people.

[–] ArmchairAce1944@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Watch the fucking video and read the damn linked article. The LLM did more to make the shooting happen than anything else. In both the Canadian Tumbler Ridge shooting and the one in Florida. You have no idea what you are talking about.

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

You can not shoot people with a gun, if you do not have a gun.

Logic does not get any simpler than that. Yet you refuse to accept it.