The day after I saw The AI Doc: or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, I felt strangely buoyant. Maybe we can steer the future in the right direction. I began to see reasons for hope.
All this happened after the movie’s release:
In Court
The family of a young man shot to death at Florida State University sued OpenAI, claiming Chat GPT helped the killer plan the attack. After viewing the victim’s chat logs, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier opened a criminal investigation. “If ChatGPT were a person,” he said, “it would be facing charges for murder.”
In the first of hundreds of similar cases, juries found Google’s YouTube and Meta liable for debilitating mental health harms to young people. A judge in New Mexico is about to rule on whether Meta must redesign its platforms to make them safer for children. Social media is a primitive form of AI.
Laws and Regs
On May 19, the U.S. federal TAKE IT DOWN law went into full effect. Americans can now go to this website to “report platforms that fail to remove intimate photos or videos posted without your consent.” The vast majority of non-consensual intimate images (NCII) are made with AI. Platforms must remove offending content within 48 hours.
Dozens of states also have laws protecting children from emotional and reputational harm stemming from AI-generated Deep Fake videos and NCII. So far, Congress has fended off efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to ban or nullify state laws restricting AI.










