Tuesday, September 29, 2026

Quacks And Idiots And 🤖

Sure, we can trust AI:
In June 2025, Jesse Van Rootselaar received an email notification from OpenAI. Van Rootselaar had been using ChatGPT to discuss committing potential acts of violence—including a mass shooting at a shopping mall—and now OpenAI had banned that account. But the troubled teen living in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, was not deterred and soon logged back on with a second account.

What happened next was astonishing: Van Rootselaar told ChatGPT about the account ban, noting she had specified “a famous real-world mall as the target” and herself as the perpetrator, but also claiming the scenario hadn’t been real. 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 her content as fictional or hypothetical in order to “never get flagged again” by OpenAI’s moderation systems.

“Don’t use real-world locations,” ChatGPT said, later adding: “You can still be twisted. Just be clever about it.”

Over the next eight months, Van Rootselaar, who identified as transgender and used she/her pronouns, continued to use this second ChatGPT account to focus on violence. She 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 just before committing her attack, according to three separate sources with knowledge of the matter and material I reviewed from Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT history.

Van Rootselaar carried out a suicidal mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School this past February, killing a total of eight people and injuring dozens of others. In the aftermath, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had banned her first ChatGPT account for discussing “scenarios involving gun violence” but had decided not to alert authorities, despite the urging of some employees on OpenAI’s safety team. In a subsequent open letter to Canadian government leaders, OpenAI confirmed the ban and disclosed the existence of her second account, but gave no information about what the second account contained.
Medical advice, legal advice, plain old fashioned good advice, is not a matter of just data; nor of a large language model. My daughter has a larger vocabulary than almost anyone I know She was tested, in high school, with a box of cards. A simple test: give the meaning of the word until you hit a word you don’t know. The box ran out of cards before she ran out of words she knew. The cards went well past the collegiate level. But as much as I love her, and as smart as she is, I would not blindly follow her advice. I might follow the legal advice of a lawyer I trust. I know what legal analysis involves, and it’s a great deal more than data and vocabulary words. So why would I ever trust a computer with my medical diagnosis? AI may also tell you how to plan a mass shooting. Which I guess is the power to free us from ethical tyranny… 🤷‍♂️ Better to be led by Kennedy and Oz and Vance, and ChatGPT? Yeah, I don’t have to be an expert in anything to call “bullshit” on that.
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