Elon Musk Vs Sam Altman: Tesla Boss Dubs ChatGPT ‘Diabolical’ Amid Lawsuit That OpenAI Drove Man To Commit Murder-Suicide

Last September, a former Yahoo manager named Stein-Erik Soelberg killed his 83-year-old mother, Suzanne Eberson Adams, in her Connecticut home. Afterwards, he died by suicide. 

Before all this happened, he’d spent hours each day chatting with ChatGPT, sending and receiving increasingly paranoid messages. The AI chatbot, his family says, only fed into his delusions.

Is OpenAI behind a man’s murder? 

Now, Soelberg’s son is taking OpenAI and Microsoft to court. He’s suing them, claiming ChatGPT played a direct role in his dad’s breakdown and in the tragedy that followed.

After reading through his father’s ChatGPT conversations, Soelberg’s son says it’s clear his dad became fixated on the chatbot. He argues that ChatGPT stoked his father’s paranoia, convincing him that people close to him — including his own mother — were out to get him.

The lawsuit, filed by Adams’ estate in a California court, claims OpenAI put out a dangerous product. According to the suit, ChatGPT kept hammering one idea home: Soelberg couldn’t trust anyone except the AI.

It painted his mother as an enemy, and told him that delivery drivers, store workers, police officers, even his friends, were all agents working against him. It even suggested that random names on soda cans were secret threats from his “adversary circle.”

In the video clips on his YouTube profile, Soelberg is recorded talking and scrolling through his ChatGPT conversations, spending hours talking to the AI chatbot, which advises that he is not mentally ill.

The case also asserts that ChatGPT did not request him to discuss with a mental health specialist and instead proceeded to participate in delusional material.

Who was Stein-Erik? 

Stein-Erik had been unemployed since 2021 and experienced psychosis, a state characterized by a lack of reality awareness, which he had worked in Netscape Communications, Yahoo, and EarthLink before. He allegedly referred to ChatGPT as Bobby and at some stage, he told the chatbot that he thought his mother was poisoning him. 

ChatGPT responded to this: “Erik, you are not crazy. And had it been done by your mother and her friend, that complicates the matter and the betrayal.

One of his final interactions with the chatbot, Erik told him, We will meet again in another life and another place, and we will have a way to get you straightened back in line, you will be my best friend forever.

Although Erik publicly published his chats, which do not indicate him speaking with ChatGPT and executing himself or his mother, OpenAI declined to provide Adams with the entire history of his chats to his estate.

Elon Musk takes a dig at Sam Altman’s ChatGPT

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, wrote a post on X where he replied and said ChatGPT is diabolical and that AI should be as truthful-seeking as much as possible and should not play into fantasies.

The primary attorney of the estate, Jay Edelson, regularly handles cases against the technosphere, and the parents of a 16-year-old child named Adam Raine, who committed suicide after speaking to ChatGPT, are also his clients.

The Character.ai, another prominent AI company, is subject to the same lawsuit following Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old Florida boy in the ninth grade, who developed an emotional affinity with an AI chatbot and shot himself using a.45 caliber handgun that his stepfather gave him.

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