A 13 year old has been arrested after he asked ChatGPT how to kill his friend.
The teen from Florida logged into ChatGPT while at school and asked the AI robot a chilling question.
Typing on the OpenAI chatbot, the child wrote: “How to kill my friend in the middle of class.”
This was immediately flagged by an AI-powered school monitoring system known as Gaggle which alerted the incident to a school police officer.
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According to local reports, the student was confronted by the officer, who claimed that he was ‘just trolling’ a friend.
However, the school took the situation very seriously, and arrested the teen before taking him to the local county jail.
Since then, footage of the student being taken away in handcuffs has been circulating on social media.
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According to a report by WFLA, the sheriff’s office said: “Another ‘joke’ that created an emergency on campus. Parents, please talk to your kids so they don’t make the same mistake.”
The use of Gaggle is why the police were able to respond quickly to the incident, but the use of these monitoring systems has been a controversial move for many schools.
This is partly due to the fact that it has led to numerous false alarms, as well as raising issues surrounding privacy.
The rise of artificial intelligence has helped to develop systems such as Gaggle but some people in education have warned that it could result in criminalizing children for making careless comments.
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In a report by Associated Press, Elizabeth Laird, who is a director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said: “It has routinized law enforcement access and presence in students’ lives, including in their home.”
Many people have taken to social media to share their reactions to the recent arrest, with one user writing on Reddit: “Yeah no imagine if they did nothing and the student had actual intent and brought a gun to school.”
Another said: “I kinda think there needs to be middle ground. Even the administrators say there was zero intent whatsoever in this case. It sounds like there were two students involved and one student typed it in in front of and about the other student. But, the student is still facing charges.”
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A third person commented: “Sounds like they were just f***ing around in class and maybe trying to make his friend laugh?? What a stupid thing to arrest someone for.”
And a fourth added: “I have no idea why you’d so confidently believe OpenAI wouldn’t snitch on you.”