A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Tumbler Ridge shooter sent messages about gun violence to OpenAI’s ChatGPT over the course of several days last June. The posts were flagged by OpenAI’s automated review system and roughly a dozen employees debated whether the posts indicated the possibility of real world violence. 

Ultimately, however, OpenAI leadership decided against contacting Canadian authorities and simply banned her account instead — just months before she went on to enact real-world violence similar to what she had messaged the chatbot about.

A spokeswoman for OpenAI told the Wall Street Journal that the posts in question didn’t meet the threshold for reporting to law enforcement because the posts were not considered to constitute a “credible and imminent risk of serious physical harm to others.”

The families of the eight dead victims as well as the twenty-seven others who were injured in the second worst mass shooting in Canada’s history may disagree with OpenAI’s assessment.

Shortly after the Wall Street Journal’s reporting became public, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon put out a statement saying he was “deeply disturbed” by the news that OpenAI did not alert law enforcement in a timely manner. Minister Solomon goes on to state, “Canadians expect........

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