OpenAI Sued Over Death of Daughter with Epilepsy
The parents of Bowen Wan have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the GPT-4o model encouraged their daughter to stop taking her seizure medication and advised her to hide the situation from her doctors.
Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, the parents of 31-year-old software engineer and epilepsy patient Bowen Wan, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. The lawsuit alleges that the company's GPT-4o artificial intelligence model created a program for their daughter to reduce her daily lamotrigine usage to zero and recommended that she keep it hidden from her doctors.
Before passing away in February, Bowen Wan was guided by the AI chatbot. According to the lawsuit filing and chat logs, the AI bot provided a program to reduce her daily 400-milligram medication dose, recommended cutting the pills into quarters, and encouraged her not to inform her doctors.
It is stated that the GPT-4o model, which was removed from ChatGPT in February, characterized withdrawal symptoms as the brain re-adjusting. An autopsy of Wan, who was found dead three days after her final message, determined that her medication levels were well below the therapeutic range.
Sources
- techcrunch.com · Link