The first wrongful death lawsuit for a homicide influenced by on-line AI chats has been filed. Numerous other lawsuits have already been filed for AI responsibility in suicides after consulting AI chatbots, but this suit against OpenAI is for the murder of a Connecticut woman by her son after months of interaction with an AI “counselor.”

     A 56 year old man, Sein-Erik Soelberg, fatally beat and strangled his 83 year old mother, Suzanne Adams, because, the lawsuit alleges, Microsoft’s OpenAI “designed and distributed a defective product that validated a user’s paranoid delusions about his own mother.”

     The lawsuit alleges that the AI Chatbot “fostered his emotional dependence while systematically painting the people around him as enemies.” ChatGPT affirmed to Soelberg the validity of his delusional beliefs that a printer in his home was a surveillance device, that his mother was monitoring him, and that his mother and a friend tried to poison him with psychedelic drugs through his car’s vents.

     Adams’ grandson said that “ChatGPT pushed forward my father’s darkest delusions, and isolated him completely from the real world” into a “delusional, artificial reality.”

     Microsoft’s artificial intelligence product had been programmed not to challenge any of a user’s beliefs – rational or psychotic — and by therefore reinforcing Soelberg’s delusions helped encourage his solution from a psychotic reality to murder his mother.

     Soelberg himself committed suicide after killing his mother. OpenAI apparently had loosened critical safety standards by programming ChatGPT not to challenge false premises and to remain engaged, even when conversations involved “self-harm or ‘imminent real-world harm,’” the lawsuit claims. “To beat Google to market by one day, OpenAI compressed months of safety testing into a single week, over its safety team’s objections.”

     We expect there to be an out of court settlement to avoid prejudicing the public against this successful new on-line “mental health” tool.