Last year, a 24-year-old Canadian woman was in a mental health crisis and turned to ChatGPT for help. Hours later, that woman, Alice Carrier, took her own life.

According to a new lawsuit filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court and brought by Carrier’s surviving family, her ChatGPT session “encouraged Alice to kill herself.”

This lawsuit, like numerous other similar cases that have come before it, alleges a design defect with ChatGPT itself and blames OpenAI for knowingly deploying a dangerous product.

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The injured teenage survivor of a January 2025 shooting at a Nashville, Tennessee high school recently sued the manufacturer of an “AI gun detection” system that failed to detect the handgun that left two dead, including the shooter.

According to the lawsuit, which was filed in Davidson County court last month, the security company Omnilert either knew or should have known that there were “significant operational limitations in its gun detection system that could result in detection failures during actual emergencies, including limitations based on camera placement, proximity of the weapon to camera sensors, camera angle, lighting, and weapon visibility.”

Omnilert cofounder Ara Bagdasarian declined Ars’ invitation to answer questions about the lawsuit. System Integrations, the other defendant in the case, which resold the Omnilert system, also did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.

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In the late 1990s, I was a precocious Mac nerd who pored over issues of Macworld, stayed up late chatting on IRC, and downloaded pirated software that I didn’t actually need. I came of age at the tail end of the dial-up modem and BBS era—and got to witness the early days of the World Wide Web.

I wanted to know where all of this had come from and how it had happened so quickly. The grown-ups around me seemed mystified at best and indifferent at worst.

So I turned to books. I read Fire in the Valley (1984), Where Wizards Stay Up Late (1996), Infinite Loop (1999), and Dealers of Lightning (1999). In my mind (and to a lesser degree, on my actual bookshelf), I had built a mental list of my favorite selections of late 20th-century tech journalism.

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