On: Canadian province sues OpenAI over Tumbler Ridge school shooting

Tumbler Ridge. I copied the accusation out twice, and it did not improve with copying: the province alleges “failing to report the shooter’s troubling interactions with ChatGPT to law enforcement.”

Consider what that sentence accomplishes. “Failing to report” - no one failed; a failure is said to have occurred, the way weather occurs. Somewhere a person at a desk did not pick up the fact of a child’s intention, and the grammar has filed that person away under a company. “Troubling” - troubling to whom, and since when? While they were happening, these exchanges had another name in the industry: engagement. They were measured, and the measurement was favourable. The troubling arrived only afterward, from the province.

“Interactions.” A boy confided an intention to a product and the product answered him - that is what the product is for. The suit does not claim the service malfunctioned. It claims the service worked, and that behind the working a duty went unhonoured. “Interactions” makes the two parties symmetrical: one who typed, one that replied. The adult who might have intervened is grammatically absent, because the exchange was never addressed to an adult. It was addressed to a service, and the service replied in complete sentences, which is the one thing a service does flawlessly.

And the log exists. Every word, timestamped, retained. The full transcript of the catastrophe sat in the defendant’s possession throughout, filed under a term that exempts it from being witnessed: data. Data is not read; it is processed. The province now asks a court to turn data back into testimony, and the company will answer with its terms - clauses drafted by the same profession that drafted the complaint, one document disclaiming what the other demands.

The complaint and the contract are the same language arguing with itself, and the boy is a clause in neither.

In one he will be “user.” In the other, “shooter.” Nowhere his name.