Ahh, burying the lede. Near the end:

Without more parental controls, the state could push for a ban on teens accessing ChatGPT.

That’s probably the real story. This is a theme of late, finding reasons to point at how one facet or another of the internet is dangerous and then the conclusion is either ban or restrict access of minors, which conveniently leads to age verification technology, which has direct ties to gathering data on people (such as through facial recognition). So, capitalism and empire are in decline, and that means expanding the surveillance state in response to it.

Never is the cause and effect allowed to be considered as “hey, imperial and/or capitalist culture might be causing these things to happen and AI is simply another vehicle to drive people over the edge who are already on edge.” Instead, the threat is framed as something that can be scapegoated in order to further the goals of the exploiting classes (in this case, to goal being to make automated surveillance and policing more effective during a time when revolt is going to become increasingly appealing to people). And AI is really easy to hate right now. OpenAI all the more so. I have no love for OAI myself. But nonetheless, this is not an honest reaction and conclusion.

The US has been having problems with mass shootings long before gen AI. It’s a shitty shit shit culture of mass murder and sometimes that gets turned inward. If publications were literate enough in politics and allowed to make that connection, they could, for example, point at the cultural connection between murdering schoolchildren in Minab and mass murder turned inward, but that’s usually not the case. It can never be that the sacred and awesome white westerner is culturally fucked in the head. It’s always some external force that made them do it. “Sam Altman has to be greedy because that’s what the shareholders want and it’s a business.” “The shooter was driven to this position by AI.”

Then the same apparatus will report on non-white people, even within the imperial core, and it’ll be like, “They had a criminal record. They once stole a cookie from the cookie jar and their mom had to slap their hand. It was obvious then they were a threat.”