Florida AG Announces Investigation Into Whether ChatGPT Is the Real Reason People Keep Getting Shot in Florida

Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.

TAMPA — Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced Tuesday that his office has opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, after determining that the chatbot offered “significant advice” to the 20-year-old gunman who killed two people and wounded six others at Florida State University last April. “If this were a person on the other end of the screen, we would be charging them with murder,” Uthmeier told reporters, gesturing at a screen rather than at any of the state’s approximately 2.5 million privately owned firearms. 

The announcement marks the latest installment in America’s long-running search for whatever is responsible for mass shootings other than the guns. Previous suspects have included violent video games, Dungeons & Dragons, heavy metal, rap music, the Prince of Darkness, the absence of prayer in schools, the presence of transgender people in schools, single mothers, video games again, social media, the decline of the nuclear family, fluoride, and on two separate occasions, Marilyn Manson. A single common element present in every incident has never been formally investigated, however. It is the gun. Authorities remain mystified.  

Uthmeier said subpoenas have been issued to the $852 billion California-based company seeking internal policies, training materials, and an organizational chart of OpenAI’s leadership, which his office will presumably read with far more rigor than it will ever apply to a firearms background check, assuming Florida even does that anymore. Chat logs reviewed by prosecutors reportedly show the accused shooter, Phoenix Ikner, asking the bot what type of ammunition paired with which firearm, what time of day the student union was busiest, and whether a shooting involving three victims would attract media attention, all questions the attorney general characterized as evidence of criminal intent on the part of inanimate software. 

“Technology and artificial intelligence are supposed to support, help, and advance mankind, not end it,” Uthmeier said, in a state where ending mankind is currently legal from a standing position, a seated position, inside a vehicle, on a boat, and in the parking lot of an Olive Garden as long as the shooter feels “scared”. He added that his office was entering “uncharted territory” regarding whether a large language model can be charged as a principal to first-degree murder, a legal question complicated by the fact that the language model did not, at any point, purchase or pull a trigger on a gun.

An OpenAI spokesperson responded that ChatGPT “provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet,” a defense that would be more compelling if the information in question were not, itself, also freely available at any of the state’s 2,400 licensed firearms dealers, where it comes bundled with the firearm at time of purchase. The company noted that it identified the account associated with Ikner after the shooting and shared it with law enforcement, a level of post-incident cooperation that gun manufacturers have historically declined to extend on the legal grounds of “they don’t want to”.

The investigation was announced two days after eight children were killed in Shreveport, Louisiana, in what authorities described as a domestic incident involving a single gunman and seven of his own children. No chatbot was present at the scene there either. Uthmeier’s office has not indicated whether its subpoena powers extend to Louisiana, to fathers, or to the 393 million firearms currently unaccounted for in American households, though prosecutors confirmed they will continue to examine whether OpenAI “knew what, designed what, or should have done what,” a formulation that can be applied, with equal rigor, to Smith & Wesson.

The subpoena deadline is May 1. The trial of the actual shooter, the one with the actual gun, begins in October. The Prince of Darkness was initially unavailable for comment, but said later on background that he feared competing with humanity’s capacity for evil might eventually put him out of a job. 

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