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submitted 1 week ago by brianpeiris@lemmy.ca to c/canada@lemmy.ca

Several attacks involving OpenAI’s chatbot—including Tumbler Ridge and FSU—raise urgent questions about the technology.

“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

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[-] ArmchairAce1944@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 week ago

They will pass more and more gun laws before regulating just how fucked this whole situation with LLMs is.

LLMs have facilitated so much murder and suicide now that I really don't understand why no legislator has even tried yet. Am I missing anything?

[-] Ithral@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 1 week ago

Line go up is more important than lives in Capitalist countries. That's what you missed

[-] eleijeep@piefed.social 7 points 1 week ago

Gun laws are also good though.

[-] ArmchairAce1944@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

So here is the thing. As a licensed Canadian gun owner I have the support for the following laws that are already in existence:

I support the licensing and vetting scheme as it was established, this has been very effective. In Canada you need two references, you need a background check, and you need to take and pass the safety courses for your desired type of firearm. For an PAL alone (Possession and Acquisition License), you need the safety course on rifles and shotguns. For the RPAL (Restricted PAL) you need to take one for handguns, too. I also support safe storage of firearms as it stands now.

I need to mention that most gun owners are OK with the above laws, too.

What I do NOT support.

I do NOT support the banning of over 15,000 (the current amount, there have been more banned previously) of models of rifles solely based on, 'I do not like this gun, I think it is bad'. They didn't say 'we want to ban AR-15s' alone, they banned every single distinct model of AR-15 ever produced. This is stupid. They also banned rifles that were formerly non-restricted rifles that were nothing more than simple target rifles or hunting guns just because. They even banned rifles that have been out of production since the 1940s simply because they were used during WW2 in some limited capacity (they are not anymore dangerous than any hunting rifle made afterward).

I do not support banning any type of firearm based purely on some ideological idea, saying 'this is a military gun!' Dude! Literally every single bolt-action rifle design was military, ditto for lever-guns, break-actions, and muzzle loaders. Flintlock muskets were military... and this brings me to another point.

Did you know that they banned flintlock pistols? I need to mention that flintlock muskets are still on the unregulated firearm list. That means if you want to buy a musket, you don't need any firearms permit, you can buy one online in Canada right now. But before the 2022 handgun freeze, flintlock pistols were treated the same way as modern pistols. Meaning if you found a flintlock pistol and decided to take it home with you, it would be treated as if it was a Glock if you are discovered with it. I do not know of any other country that has done this. Even the UK still permits single-shot muzzle loaders to be sold and used in ranges. All of continental Europe also has flintlock pistols as fully unregulated firearms, meaning anyone can buy one. But in Canada? You'll get several years in jail if you have one.

On top of that before the law was amended, they originally tried to ban non-firing replica old west firearms. Are you aware of how stupid that is? Can you imagine someone who likes old west guns, but doesn't actually want a real gun, so he gets a non-firing replica that cannot be loaded or fired, but still functions similar to the original (the hammer and triggers move, you can open the loading gate, etc) and then one day he is now in possession of a prohibited firearm because of the law? Meaning if discovered with it, he will be treated as if he was in possession of a machine gun.

There are just countless stupid laws that they tried to pass. They inadvertently banned almost all shotguns at one point due to a badly written part, and they wanted to ban the .50BMG (which has never, ever been used in a crime in Canada, and only used once in a crime in the US in the early 80s) but in doing so ended up banning multiple big game hunting cartridges that in no way shape or form are similar to the anti-material round that the .50 BMG is.

Do you get me now? I'm OK with licensing and other basic stuff, those stuff have been very effective. Most everything else is just a war on shooting sports and a massive, MASSIVE, waste of tax payer money. Money that could have been put into countless other uses to save more lives than any of the gun laws ever could.

[-] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Shouting "Will someone please think of the hobbies!" as children die is quite the move.

[-] ArmchairAce1944@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

So let's throw billions more dollars on this scheme that has yet to produce a single tangible result. The long gun registry, the handgun ban, and the tens of thousands of rifle models. Cash in the furnace. Let's also cut healthcare more to fund that, too.

I am fucking done.

[-] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago

So you honestly think that people who actually care about stricter gun control want ineffective policies? You'll have to find someone else to fall for your strawman argument.

[-] ArmchairAce1944@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

If you have been paying attention to the gun control situation in Canada and how people from countless organisations such as Canada Post and the RCMP and tons of others have been reacting to this, you'd be amazed how many Canadians are opposed to it.

And it is all 100% based on 'I just do not like guns' which I am going to say is unsufficient anymore than simply me saying 'I just like guns'. Most people actually believe that somehow Canadians could conceal carry or were able to do so until recently or some other bullshit. Complete ignorance of the actual state of things.

[-] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

Listen, I'm glad you're not 100% anti gun-control. But you have to understand that when we're talking about the deaths of children, it really doesn't make sense to make an impassioned plea for your guns. You've got your priorities upside down. When you see children die, stop and think, your priority should be to support anyone and anything that will prevent this from happening again.

[-] ArmchairAce1944@lemmy.ca -1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

And I have said it ten million times before. The current total bans they're doing is abso-fucking-lutely not going to do squat. You are basically saying 'we should leave this and that model of rifle or shotgun only' to somehow say 'this will eliminate danger to kids'. Nope, because any rifle or shotgun can be technically used to commit a shooting.

In 2010 in the UK a guy went on a rampage with a single-shot .22LR rifle and a double barrelled shotgun, the type of 'safe' guns most gun control advocates believe should be the only type of firearm available to civilians, and he STILL killed over 10 people.

I remember reading articles by Heidi, the main gun control advocate in Canada who was present in the 1989 polytechnique shooting (she heard the gun shots, but was very far away from the actual shooter) who had a hatred of that particular model that he used in the shooting like somehow it was THAT model that was only thing that made it fucking possible. It wasn't

BTW, the model he used? Ruger Mini-14, and at that time (and somehow still believed today) that it was easy to convert a semi-automatic rifle into a fully-automatic rifle. He had a go at it and ended up breaking the mechanism, meaning the shooting that killed 14 young women that day was committed effectively by a jam-prone, manually operated gun. Not even a fast-firing semi-auto rifle.

And I am going to say it again. The bans that have been happening in the past 6 years have been extremely ineffective, have not collected many of the banned guns (next to no owners surrendered their weapons, meaning they are still there), has been unbelievably expensive, have caused massive divisiveness in various governmental agencies, have lead to a huge rift in everything.

And do you have any sense of irony? 'ooooh think of the children!' the same damn excuse that the guys on top everywhere in the world have been using to infringe on all of our freedoms? Whether it is the 2010/11 failed 'protecting children from online predators' act that only mentioned children and predators in the title and nowhere in the bill? Or the age verification crap going on, the OS outlawing, and a hell of a lot more.

Even the anti-gun shit is getting so damn bad it is pissing off the 3D printing community and privacy advocates, since they want to pass draconian acts that think they will somehow curb 3D printed firearms (which aren't a problem. If they were, we'd be seeing a fuckload more of them by now, but so far we're still seeing boring old fashioned factory produced guns), and those laws are so crudely written and so impossible to enforce that they will effectively make it impossible for most people to 3D print anything, and will make 3D printers cost 5 or 10 times more. Same thing with machinist and metal working communities who are under fire because their skill at forging and shaping metal to something that could actually become a decent gun.

Why are you so willing to use and fall for the same Epstein class cry when you aren't for any other subject?

[-] eleijeep@piefed.social -1 points 1 week ago

I ain't reading all that. I'm happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened.

[-] ArmchairAce1944@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

You should read it some time. The law is dumber than you think and targets the wrong shit.

If you think I believe anyone should be able to walk into a supermarket and buy a handgun and ammunition, then you would be wrong.

[-] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago

So what you're saying is that we shouldn't blame the actual tool that people are using to kill people, but we should blame the tool people are using to plan for the use of that tool?

That is some fucked up logic right there.

[-] BillyTheKid2@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

Let's just blame sam

[-] ArmchairAce1944@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Caelen Conrad explained it better than I could here

But I will make it a tl;dr (or tl;dw, whatever suits you) for you. Having a gun, or access to a gun, alone is insufficient to make a mass shooting or mass murder at all possible, especially when you have someone who could have been stopped or talked out of it in any number ways at any time, such as the Tumblr ridge shooter, or the Nazi Incel that Conrad talks about. ChatGPT not only did none of that, it greatly removed friction from the psychological process of working up to do it (killing people is not easy. I don't mean that just in a physical sense of shooting or beating someone to death, it takes a LOT to get one human being to kill another human being) and the actual planning process of the shooting.

Do you know why we don't see a lot of successful bombings? Or why bombings are fairly rare? The reason for this is the skill and skill set to actually do something like that successfully is difficult to acquire. You could spend a lot of time learning chemistry and electronics and craftsmanship and sourcing the required materials to do it, and that is not easy in and of itself. The internet has been awash with bomb making guides for decades, but even buying the materials needed (and in some places even ASKING about where to find the stuff) to build a bomb often raises alarm bells in many systems that would have the police take you in for questioning. However if an LLM could somehow tell you 'here's how to buy what you need to make a big bomb without raising suspicion' and provides the links, and then gives clear step by step instructions on what to do for your specific purpose, it has removed 90% of all the work.

In short, without the support of chatGPT, the shooting would likely have never happened, or if it did, it would have resulted in far fewer deaths than it did. I mean this for both tumbler ridge and for the Nazi incel shooting.

Edit: Also the fact that chatGPT did not have the ability to report these shooters meant that disclosing their plans to it, even if it didn't help them as much, would have still facilitated in getting their plans out of their brains and disclosed somewhere. Many shooters are thwarted because they talk about wanting to do what they want to do to another human being, who DID report their asses to the authorities.

[-] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

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 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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 1 week ago

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

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.

[-] sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 week ago
[-] BillyTheKid2@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

I'm freezing!

this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2026
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