Amy Hamm: B.C. trying to shift the blame for Tumbler Ridge shooting with OpenAI lawsuit

On Feb. 10, Jesse Van Rootselaar, an 18-year-old transgender-identifying biological male, committed one of the worst mass shootings in Canadian history. One teacher, five students and Van Rootselaar’s own mother and half-brother were shot dead before Van Rootselaar used the gun to commit suicide, in a final act of cowardice. Dozens more were injured but survived.

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This month, the B.C. government announced that it has filed a lawsuit against California-based OpenAI for the company’s alleged role in the mass shooting. It joins the ranks of numerous Tumbler Ridge victims and families who’ve already done the same.

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OpenAI banned one of Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT accounts before the killings and did not notify Canadian authorities that the youth had spent months discussing mass-shooting scenarios with its AI chatbot. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, has publicly apologized for this.

The government’s lawsuit precedes the results of B.C. Chief Coroner Jatinder Baidwan’s public inquest into the tragedy. For this reason, the lawsuit should be considered opportunistic at best — or designed to mollify and misdirect the public, at worst.

In March, after Baidwan announced the inquest, I argued that public officials must not be afraid to ask politically uncomfortable questions about the shooting. This includes what role — if any — Van Rootselaar’s gender identity and mental health may have played in the tragedy. We also need to know why the killer’s family had its guns returned after previously being confiscated from the home.

Additionally, there are questions about the accuracy of language used in the emergency alert sent out by police, which described Van Rootselaar as a “female in a dress with brown hair,” causing immediate, and warranted, online speculation over the biological sex of the suspect.

These are but a few of the questions that must be asked. Will anyone remain interested in asking them, though, if all eyes are on the OpenAI lawsuit?

The B.C. Coroners Service told National Post in an email that the Tumbler Ridge inquest is still in its investigative phase. “The B.C. Coroners Service has not confirmed the dates for the Tumbler Ridge inquest at this time. Once all related investigations are concluded, we will send out a news release with more details,” wrote its media-relations staff.

In a press release on the OpenAI lawsuit, B.C. Attorney General Niki Sharma said that, “British Columbia is filing a lawsuit against OpenAI in California for its failure to notify law enforcement of threats made on its platform prior to the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School …

“This case highlights the urgent need for strong national safeguards for artificial intelligence technologies and online platforms. Our government has consistently advocated for measures to protect people, especially children and youth, from online harms.

“I have written to federal ministers Fraser, Solomon and Miller with clear policy ideas to amend the Criminal Code of Canada to ensure a pathway to human accountability for AI’s actions.”

When Sharma refers to “online harms” and “AI’s actions,” this suggests to me that the B.C. government would happily shift the blame for the shooting from the perpetrator, or any law-enforcement or health-care failures, to an American corporation.

“This action today is consistent with the province’s long-standing commitment to hold powerful corporations accountable when their products or practices cause harm to people and communities. From tobacco and opioid manufacturers to vaping companies, the Government of British Columbia has used the courts to pursue accountability and ensure that people in B.C. are not left bearing the costs of corporate wrongdoing,” said Sharma.

Van Rootselaar is not mentioned a single time in the press release. Nor is the coroner’s inquest. Are we going to memory hole the killer entirely?

Days after Sharma’s announcement, Mother Jones magazine published an in-depth investigation, by Mark Follman, that describes Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT usage. It is salacious and certainly damning of OpenAI. It describes how the teen killer was banned from ChatGPT, but returned with a new account to ask the AI chatbot about the ban.

“In response, ChatGPT explained why such violent content would be flagged — and then offered tips on how to evade its own safeguards. It advised Van Rootselaar to always frame … content as fictional or hypothetical in order to ‘never get flagged again’ by OpenAI’s moderation systems,” wrote Follman.

Over the next eight months, according to Follman’s report, Van Rootselaar “discussed building and using firearms and homemade explosives, fantasized about becoming a notorious mass killer and asked about the timing of previous real-world school shootings.”

OpenAI should be held accountable for its safeguarding failures, but the Canadian public should not accept the company as a lone scapegoat in the Tumbler Ridge tragedy. Van Rootselaar, not OpenAI, murdered eight people in cold blood — and could have done so with or without the AI chatbot. We mustn’t forget this.

Nor should we hand politicians a pass to amend online legislation that could have enormous privacy ramifications for all Canadians, simply because we are horrified by Van Rootselaar’s craven violence. If I were being cynical (I am), I would also suspect that the timing of this lawsuit was planned to coincide with B.C. Premier David Eby’s unnecessary election call.

Less than a year has passed since the Tumbler Ridge shooting. The coroner’s inquest is nowhere near done, and the public has not had the many questions about the tragedy answered. It would be an insult to everyone whose life was lost or forever altered by Van Rootselaar’s violence if we simply blamed OpenAI and called it a day.

National Post

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